Pittsburgh Symphony

Since the discovery of the ‘New World’, America has always exerted a strong fascination on Europeans. In the 20th century, the crossing of the Atlantic Ocean became vitally important to many people: Like many refugees, among them numerous musicians and composers, Paul Hindemith too left National Socialist Germany and went to live in the USA until the early 1950s.

Several compositions contain musical references to America, his new home country. In the Pittsburgh Symphony composed in 1958, Hindemith quotes the folk tune Hab lumbedruwwel mit me lumbeschatz which the immigrants from the Rhine area brought to Pennsylvania about 300 years ago. In those days, the so-called ‘Pennsylvania Dutch’, followers of different Protestant persuasions, had to leave their home country to escape religious persecution. ‘Despite its light weight and grotesque high spirits’, Hindemith regarded the song as ‘centrepiece’ of the symphony, thus creating a musical monument to the German culture and language in Pennsylvania. The three-movement symphony, commissioned on the occasion of the bicentenary of the city of Pittsburgh, culminates in an exultant final passage which is based on a quotation from the song Pittsburgh is a great old town.