2. SINFONIEKONZERT

ROBERT SCHUMANN
Concerto for Violin and Orchestra in D minor, WoO 1

PAUL HINDEMITH
Symphony“Mathis the Painter”

The choice of a character such as the late-medieval painter Matthias Grünewald clearly had personal significance for Paul Hindemith when hebeganwork on his opera*Mathis der Maler*in 1933. For, like Grünewald, Hindemith also felt his creative freedom threatened by his political circumstances. The symphony, composed in parallel with the opera, places three panels from Grünewald’s Isenheim Altarpiece at the center of the musical narrative. Hindemith depicts the individual’s desperate struggle against the dark side of human depravity with gripping intensity. The reference to Grünewald, who gave up his art to show solidarity with the peasants’ struggle for freedom, caused Hindemith great trouble, which ultimately led to his emigration.

It was “a reflection of a certain seriousness, behind which a cheerful mood often peeks through”—this is how Robert Schumann himself described his only violin concerto, which he composed during a brief, intense burst of creativity. But his mental illness cast an ever-darker shadow over his life—just one year after completing the concerto, he was admitted to a psychiatric hospital. It was not until 1937 that the work—exploited by the Nazis for propaganda purposes—received its premiere. What hardly anyone knew at the time was that it was an arrangement by Paul Hindemith. In this concert, it will be performed once again in Schumann’s original version.