Framing the whole is a Praeludium and a Postludium in keeping with the playful suggestion of the title, the latter is a retrograde inversion of the former. While the fugues are entirely contrapuntal - often ingeniously so, as when Hindemith creates the effect of three-part polyphony with just two voices - the interludes are homophonic, taking harmony and variety of expression as their major concerns.
The interludes also serve as a means of thematic modulation each propagates thematic "cells" that anticipate the material of the succeeding fugue. Ludus tonalis ("Tonal Games") is ingeniously arranged, its 12 fugues connected by interludes that modulate from the key of one fugue to that of the next. While a complete performance requires nearly an hour, none of individual parts is longer than four minutes. It is in effect, a veritable catalogue of the composer's mature style, expressed in lively, imaginative, compact vignettes. But Ludus tonalis ranges well beyond the stated intent of its heading, exploring matters of technique, theory, inspiration, and communication. Hindemith's subtitle for the work, "Studies in Counterpoint, Tonal Organization and Piano Playing," perhaps carries a deceptive connotation of dryness or academicism.
LUDUS TONALIS. PROFESSIONAL
In Ludus tonalis (1942) for solo piano, Hindemith wove together the varied strands of his professional and artistic life up to that point. Hindemith demonstrated his beliefs regarding the politico-ethical responsibilities of the composer when he chose to leave Nazi Germany at the end of the 1930s, eventually settling in the United States as a professor of music at Yale University. Hindemith's "Gebrauchsmusik" ("utility music," a term the composer disliked), written to fill a need for high-quality music that could be performed by talented amateurs, was one manifestation of his concerns another was his interest in the teaching of music, as evidenced in his efforts toward the organization of music education in Turkey, at the behest of that country's government, in 1937. The role of the composer in modern society had been a concern for Hindemith even before he explored it dramatically in the operas Cardillac (1926) and Mathis der Maler (1938).
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