Apparebit repentina dies: Hindemith’s musical panorama of Judgment Day

• Authors: Siglind Bruhn
• Languages of publication: PL

Abstracts

PL

In 1947, while teaching at Yale University, the German composer Paul Hindemith (1895-1963) wrote a composition for mixed chorus and brass ensemble based on an anonymous Latin hymn believed to date from the 8th century or before. This text, which he had discovered in The Oxford Book of Medieval Latin Verse, tells in a poetic rewording of New T estament passages of the events to be expected on Judgment Day. Below a deceptively simple surface with regular trochaic tetrameters organized in 23 couplets that are launched by the consecutive letters of the alphabet, the hymn hides various dramatic perspectives. These include a narrator announcing what is to come and later describing what he witnesses in a vision, direct-speech dialogues between Christ as the Judge of the World and the two groups of the chosen and the damned, and a concluding moral admonishment addressed by the pious author to his contemporary listeners or latter-day readers. As the analysis of the musical structure and texture, meter and rhythm, thematic material and tonal organization shows, Hindemith achieves a semiotic rendering of these aspects and many finer nuances. Just as the medieval text ostensibly uses only one mode throughout without depriving the message of any of its colorful expressiveness, so Hindemith’s music uses only one constellation of sound colors - choral singing against or in alternation with ten brass instruments - to bring the multifaceted scene to life. This music is both text setting and scenic painting, replete with refined allusions as well as onomatopoeic depiction, weaving a web of signification with which the composer at once heightens and deepens the early poet’s message.

Keywords

PL

Paul Hindemith; The Last Judgment; 20th-century choral music; musical hermeneutics; musical parameters interpreting text

• Publisher: Uniwersytet im. Adama Mickiewicza w Poznaniu
• Journal: Interdisciplinary Studies in Musicology
• Year: 2015
• Issue: 14
• Pages: 34-47

Dates

published

2018-10-17

Contributors

author

Siglind Bruhn

• bom in Hamburg, Germany and with a Ph.D. from the University of Vienna, Austria, is a musicologist, concert pianist, and interdisciplinary scholar. A fulltime researcher, she has been affiliated with the University of Michigan’s Institute for the Humanities since 1993 while also collaborating with research units in Strasbourg, Copenhagen, and Helsinki. She is the author of more than twenty book-length monographs, primarily in the field of 20th-century music and its relationship to literature, art, and religion. Her most recent publications in English include a book trilogy on Olivier Messiaen’s musico-symbolic language and a study of the Swiss composer Frank Martin’s musical reflection on Death. In 2001 she was elected to the European Academy of Arts and Sciences; in 2008 she was awarded an honorary doctorate from Linnaeus University, Sweden.

Identifiers

DOI

10.14746/ism.2014.14.2