1962 LP text:
The outstanding German composer Paul Hindemith was not only a prolific composer who created hundreds of works in all genres of musical art, but also a good conductor, violist, theorist, teacher, and an interesting musical writer.
Hindemith's creative path is winding and not free from the contradictions inherent in contemporary bourgeois art. In his youth, he often succumbed to the allure of formal searches for "novelty"; alongside works marked by serious ideological and emotional content, he wrote pieces that were merely superficially original, artistically weak, and aimed at solving purely constructivist tasks. However, in his creative pursuits and theoretical works, Hindemith never abandoned the principle of tonal music and did not succumb to the dubious temptations of the "technical revolution" invented by Arnold Schoenberg (1874–1951), which allegedly refuted the "obsolete" aesthetic and technological laws associated with art.
The cycle of piano pieces "Ludus Tonalis" ("Tonal Game"), written in 1943 in the USA, where Hindemith emigrated after the Nazis came to power in Germany, was conceived by the composer as a kind of creative statement in defense of tonal music against the encroachments of the atonalists. Hindemith aimed in this composition to demonstrate the inexhaustible expressive and technical possibilities of musical language. Similar to J.S. Bach's famous cycle "The Well-Tempered Clavier," the pieces in the "Ludus Tonalis" cycle were initially conceived as a series of contrapuntal exercises in the tonalities of the chromatic scale. However, as practice has shown, this composition transcended the boundaries of "counterpoint exercises" and gained popularity.
"Ludus Tonalis" includes 12 three-voice fugues in twelve tonalities.
The cycle opens with a prelude and concludes with a postlude. Between the fugues, there are interludes modulating from the tonality of the previous fugue to the tonality of the next. These are small pieces, written in song or dance forms, often genre-colored: rondo, march, waltz, aria. They bring some liveliness and stylistic variety to the strict contrapuntal texture of the main numbers of the cycle. Unlike Bach, who arranged the preludes and fugues of "The Well-Tempered Clavier" according to the steps of the chromatic scale, Hindemith structured his cycle based on the theory of "related tones" he developed, in the order of their gradual weakening. Thus, starting the first fugue in the key of C, Hindemith presents the second fugue in the key of G (i.e., at the interval of a perfect fifth). The third fugue is in the key of F (relative to the initial tonality of C, a perfect fourth). Then follows a fugue in the key of A (a major sixth from C), followed by a fifth fugue in the key of E (a major third from C), then a fugue in the key of E-flat (a minor third), a fugue in A-flat (a minor sixth), a fugue in D (a major seventh), and a fugue in F-sharp (a tritone).
While affirming the principle of tonal music, Hindemith nevertheless fills the fugues with abundant chromaticism and tonal deviations. He avoids thirds in the final cadences, thereby somewhat removing the perception of major and minor.
Grigory Schneersohn
