It would be interesting to know more about what led to the impetus to respond to Bach, and to demonstrate his own harmonic theory, at this particular moment. Ludus tonalis was composed in America, in 1942, and it may have been a response partly to Stravinsky, and perhaps also to early works by Babbitt and others. I suspect that for Hindemith it meant an opportunity to occlude sentiment in the name of complexity of construction. I’m not interested in technical analyses of fugues, because I am not sure of the purpose of demonstrating permutations of the form in America in the mid-twentieth century. What matters more, I think, is Ludus tonalis’s broader relation to modernity, and what it meant at that time to look back to the WTC. Gabriela Vlahopol’s essay “Baroque Reflections in Ludus Tonalis by Paul Hindemith,” which is available on the internet, summarizes the technical points and proposes some (mainly unconvincing) parallels to specific pieces in the WTC. Most liner notes and newspaper reviews focus on Hindemith’s harmonic theory, which is embodied in the sequences of fugues, and on the piece’s technical accomplishments. There is at least one dissertation, Debra Torok’s “Paul Hindemith’s Ludus Tonalis: Harmonic fluctuation analysis and its performance implications.” Hindemith apparently said he doubted there were many people left who could appreciate this level of composition. ‘ fervent, committed, technically dazzling interpretation never has appeared on CD, and it deserves reissue.Ludus tonalis, which contains “interludes” and fugues in all 24 keys, is one of the twentieth century’s principal responses to Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier. (Another is Shostakovich’s Twenty-four Preludes and Fugues, which I also review on this site.) An article comparing the Bach and Hindemith pieces was written in 1959 (Hans Tischler, “Hindemith’s Ludus tonalis and Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier: A Comparison.” Music Review 20: 217-27), and an internet search turns up several master’s theses on the subject (some in Romania, for some reason). Pianists who can solve Hindemith’s formidable demands have always had a great deal of fun playing Ludus tonalis, and a really distinguished performance of it can provide much enjoyment for the listener.’ - High Fidelity, May 1966 ‘Its technical and scholarly attributes are happily partnered by humour, charm and a great deal of fertile imagination. However, she made comparatively few recordings: this account of Ludus tonalis is her major legacy, but it has never been made available on CD. Her television debut on the BBC had led to a series of programs back in Stockholm where she lived with her husband at the time, the film director Ingmar Bergman. Having studied with Edwin Fischer, Laretei had performed throughout Europe for the past two decades, becoming something of a celebrity. She recorded Ludus tonalis in a New York studio a few days after presenting it at Carnegie Hall, where she had won over the audience not only with her performance but also a question-and-answer session after the concert. Having been coached by the composer in the cycle a decade earlier, she incorporated his performance suggestions and amendments to the score into her performance. There is a unique authority to this recording made in October 1965 for the Philips label by the Estonian-Swedish pianist Kabi Laretei. It’s a monument of modern keyboard literature whose forbidding reputation is belied by the approachable and highly varied nature of Hindemith’s writing. The hour-long piano cycle itself finds refuge from conflict in the reassertion of the time-honoured value of counterpoint, comprising twelve fugues and interludes framed by a prelude and its mirror image as a postlude. Hindemith wrote Ludus tonalis in 1942 while staying the US as a refugee from Nazi Germany. $ Ī 20th-century counterpart to The Well-Tempered Clavier in a landmark recording, long unavailable, newly remastered and transferred to CD from the original tapes for the very first time.
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