Other notable compositions include his song cycle Das Marienleben (1923), Der Schwanendreher for viola and orchestra (1935), the opera Mathis der Maler (1938), the Symphonic Metamorphosis of Themes by Carl Maria von Weber (1943), and the oratorio When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd (1946), a requiem based on Walt Whitman's poem.

Hindemith and his wife emigrated to Switzerland and the United States ahead of World War II, after worsening difficulties with the Nazi German regime.

Most of Hindemith's compositions are anchored by a foundational tone, and use musical forms and counterpoint and cadences typical of the Baroque and Classical traditions.

His harmonic language is more modern, freely using all 12 notes of the chromatic scale within his tonal framework, as detailed in his three-volume treatise, The Craft of Musical Composition.

He entered Frankfurt's Dr. Hoch's Konservatorium, where he studied violin with Adolf Rebner, as well as conducting and composition with Arnold Mendelssohn and Bernhard Sekles.

After his father's 1915 death in World War I, Hindemith was conscripted into the Imperial German Army in September 1917 and sent to a regiment in Alsace in January 1918.

In May 1918 he was deployed to the front in Flanders, where he served as a sentry; his diary has him "surviving grenade attacks only by good luck", according to New Grove Dictionary.

[3] In 1921, Hindemith founded the Amar Quartet, playing viola, and extensively toured Europe with an emphasis on contemporary music.

[7] In 1929, Hindemith played the solo part in the premiere of William Walton's viola concerto, after Lionel Tertis, for whom it was written, turned it down.

In December 1934, during a speech at the Berlin Sports Palace, Germany's Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels publicly denounced Hindemith as an "atonal noisemaker".

He accepted an invitation from the Turkish government to oversee the creation of a music school in Ankara in 1935, after Goebbels had pressured him to request an indefinite leave of absence from the Berlin Academy.

He did not stay in Turkey as long as many other émigrés, but he greatly influenced Turkish musical life; the Ankara State Conservatory owes much to his efforts.

[12] At the same time that he was codifying his musical language, Hindemith's teaching and compositions began to be affected by his theories, according to critics such as Ernest Ansermet.

[15] He had such notable students as Lukas Foss, Graham George, Andrew Hill, Norman Dello Joio, Mel Powell, Yehudi Wyner, Harold Shapero, Hans Otte, Ruth Schönthal, Samuel Adler, Leonard Sarason, Fenno Heath, Mitch Leigh, and George Roy Hill.

[18] Also among Hindemith's students were the future rocket scientist Wernher von Braun[19] and the composers Franz Reizenstein, Harald Genzmer, Oskar Sala, Arnold Cooke,[20] Robert Strassburg,[21] and dozens of other notables.

This style has been described as neoclassical,[25] but is quite different from the works by Igor Stravinsky labeled with that term, owing more to the contrapuntal language of Johann Sebastian Bach and Max Reger than the Classical clarity of Mozart.

As a preliminary stage to the composing of this opera, Hindemith wrote a purely instrumental symphony also called Mathis der Maler, which is one of his most frequently performed works.

It takes melodies from various works by Carl Maria von Weber, mainly piano duets, but also one from the overture to his incidental music for Turandot (Op.

The piece is representative of Hindemith's late works, exhibiting strong contrapuntal lines throughout, and is a cornerstone of the band repertoire.

[30] In the late 1930s Hindemith wrote an instructional treatise in three volumes, The Craft of Musical Composition, which lays out this system in great detail.

In the final chapter of Book 1, Hindemith seeks to illustrate the wide-ranging relevance and applicability of his system, analyzing musical examples from the medieval to the contemporary.

[31] Hindemith's 1942 piano work Ludus Tonalis contains twelve fugues, in the manner of Johann Sebastian Bach, using traditional devices like inversion, diminution, augmentation, retrogradation, stretto, etc.

A complete collection of Hindemith's orchestral music was recorded by German and Australian orchestras, all conducted by Werner Andreas Albert and released on the CPO label.