Lustige Sinfonietta / Rag Time

In his early years, Hindemith confides that he adores Christian Morgenstern’s poems, “perhaps because he is as crazy as I am, or vice versa.” In his “Lustige Sinfonietta” Hindemith refers more to the atmosphere of Morgenstern, and in no case does he trace the single poems literally in music. Grotesque musical results arise from an intended discrepancy between the sovereignly mastered musical devices and the expressive content of the music.
„Rag Time (well-tempered)“ is the first work in which a stylized piece of „popular“ modern dance music was directly related to the music of Bach. Bach was here rediscovered as a composer of “functional” music, and Hindemith was only too aware of this rediscovery: “Do you think Bach is turning in his grave? He wouldn’t think of it! If Bach were alive today, perhaps he would invent the shimmy or at least take it over into respectable music. Perhaps he might even also take a theme from the ‘Well-tempered Klavier’ by a composer who might be to him what Bach is to us.”

First Recording