Hindemith, Paul

German composer and teacher. His operas Cardillac (1926, revised 1952) and Mathis der Maler/Mathis the Painter (1933–35) are theatrically astute and politically aware; as a teacher in Berlin 1927–33 he encouraged the development of a functional modern repertoire (‘Gebrauchsmusik’/‘utility music’) for home and school.

In 1939 he emigrated to the USA, where he taught at Yale University and was influential in promoting a measured neoclassical idiom of self-evident contrapuntal mastery but matter-of-fact tone, exemplified in Ludus tonalis for piano (1942) and the Symphonic Metamorphosis of Themes by Carl Maria von Weber (1943). In later life he revised many of his earlier compositions to conform with a personal theory of tonality.