Work of the Week - Paul Hindemith: Symphony "The Harmony of the World"

At the opening of the International Year of Astronomy the Jena Philharmonic under the direction of Anthony Hermus gives a concert on 7 January which is themed ‘Astronomy & Harmony’. A ‘galactic connection of the centuries’, so to speak, runs from Thomas Tallis to Paul Hindemith’s Symphony ‘The Harmony of the World’, says the director of the Jena Philharmonic, Bruno Scharnberg. ‘In his Kepler symphony The Harmony of the World Paul Hindemith tries to set the cosmic order to music. The titles of the movements have been taken from medieval music theory and stand for the realms of the profane, emotional and spiritual.’

Hindemith’s plans to write an opera about the life and work of the astronomer and mathematician Johannes Kepler (1571-1630) go back to the 1930s but were not taken up again until in 1949 when Paul Sacher asked him to compose a new work for the 25th anniversary of the Basel Chamber Orchestra. The Symphony ‘The Harmony of the World’, the title of which refers to Kepler’s work ‘Harmonice mundi’ published in 1619, was premièred in Basel in 1952, the opera not until 1957 in Munich. The opera portrays the most important stages of Kepler’s life, with Hindemith emphasizing particularly the contradiction between Kepler’s exploration of the cosmic harmony and the violent events of the Thirty Years’ War.

• Paul Hindemith - Profile
• Website of the Jena Philharmonic
• "Space Music" - focus theme in schott aktuell - the journal, issue 1/2009