for piano played by Mewton-Wood
The ingenuity of this work of the foremost modern German composer, written in America during the war and first played in England last year by Noel Mewton-Wood, has evoked comparisons with Bach's "Forty-Eight". It displays the same contrapuntal command as Bach's masterpiece, though Hindemith's writing, in a modern keyboard style, is consistently in three parts. The work bears the explicit sub-title "Studies in Counterpoint, Tonal organisation and Piano-playing". Twelve 'strict' fugues, following a novel tonal relationship, are linked by interludes and framed by a prelude and a postlude. The virtuoso feats in counterpoint present an almost mathematical complexity, among them the device whereby the postlude is an exact 'mirrored' inversion of the prelude. The work, however, is not merely an exercise in technique, for Hindemith brings to the solution of such astonishing technical problems a sense of primitive grace and a strength of design peculiar to himself.