The New York City Opera and its enterprising director and principal conductor, Christopher Keene, deserve our congratulations for temerariously opening the new season with Paul Hindemith’s Mathis der Maler. One understands Keene’s eagerness to present an opera he loves, and that, though finished in 1935, has not until this Hindemith centenary received a fully professional production in America. Yet to mount such a grand-scale, technically demanding work on the City Opera’s usual shoestring endangers the opera’s communicativeness, if not indeed its artistic merit.
Composed to a libretto by Hindemith himself—perhaps his first mistake—the piece is subtitled “Opera in Seven Tableaus,” with Bilder meaning both scenes and pictures, appropriate to the hero, the painter (Maler) Mathias Grünewald, whose work the opera evokes both visually and musically. About Grünewald, whose real name was Mathis Nithart or Gothart Nithart, little is known for certain. Though he died in 1528 in Halle, whither he had retired as a millwright, neither his birthplace nor his birth date is known, the latter being placed anywhere between 1460 and 1480. So Hindemith was free to invent his life story, which he turned into an examination of the artist’s place in society, just like the earlier Cardillac and the later Die Harmonie der Welt. Mathis is Hindemith in the world of rising Nazism projected into the Peasants’ War of the sixteenth century.
Mathis is court painter to Albrecht von Brandenburg, Cardinal of Mainz.
Mathis is court painter to Albrecht
