Symphonie "Die Harmonie der Welt"

Paul 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 ‘Die Harmonie der Welt’, the title of which refers to Kepler’s work ‘Harmonice mundi’ published in 1619, was premièred in Basel in 1952, the opera of the same title 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.