Many people know Hindemith as a composer – but he was also a consummate doodler, producing over 350 bizarre and often humorous freehand drawings over his lifetime. They were mostly small pictures on various media including napkins and tablecloths, envelopes or memo notes, and sometimes entire walls.
As the story goes, his drawings developed after he was introduced to the surrealist parlour game “cadavre exquis” (“exquisite corpse”), whereby one-by-one participants added to a drawing in sequence, passing it around the room. The results are hilariously unpredictable, and often resulted in strange creatures made out of human, animal, and machine parts.
Hindemith also liked to make his own Christmas cards, and drew them for close friends and family every year, for over 20 years. One interesting feature of his drawings is that he liked to include lion figures, which were symbolic of his wife, Gertrud Hindemith and her Zodiacal Leo birth sign. They appear in many of his scores as well.
In the spirit of these drawings, I leave you with one of his three expressionist influenced one-act operas, Das Nusch-Nuschi (Subtitled: A Play for Burmese Marionettes), which includes many musical illusions and quotations.
Michael Vincent
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