Paul Hindemith was born in Hanau, Germany on November 16, 1895. He began his musical education at the age of 11, studying violin and composition at the Hocast Conservatory in Frankfurt. His early talents on the violin allowed him to become the concert master of the orchestra at the Frankfurt Opera. His abilities on the violin brought him an intimate knowledge of chamber music of the great Classical and Romantic traditions. He played chamber music of all types in chamber groups of every conceivable instrumental combination. It was this interest which spurred his continual creation of new and exciting works for small ensembles.

His early life as a musician was similar to that of many instrumentalists today. He played wherever he could in order to earn a living -- in a movie orchestra, a café orchestra, a dance orchestra, for operettas, jazz bands, and military bands. There was perhaps no genre or type of music which Hindemith did not play or experience. Far from wearing down his creativity, this remarkable apprenticeship rather helped to crystallize the philosophy which would inspire his composing.

After 1934 Hindemith found himself on the wrong side of the Nazis. He left for the United States in 1939 to take up the post of Professor of Composition and Theory at Yale University. His experience and contribution to the education of American students is well known. Some of his most important works, both pedagogical and theoretical, were written during his tenure at Yale and are still in use today.

"It is to be regretted," Hindemith wrote early in 1927, a few years after the composition of his Op. 11 Viola Sonata, " that in general so little relationship exists today between the producers and the consumers of music. A composer should write today only if he knows for what purpose he is writing. The days of composing for the sake of composing are perhaps gone forever. On the other hand, the demand for music is so great that composer and consumer ought most emphatically to come at last to an understanding."

This manifesto was later to define his work as composer and philosopher as "Gebrauchsmusik" (Music for Use). This philosophy held that musical composition should address a need - so that the music would be used. This was not art music per se, but music for the common man which could servel many different purposes. This is not a new idea. Bach is perhaps the greatest example of this philosophy, for Bach wrote nothing that was not needed by and of use to the common of man.

The Sonata, Op. 11 for Viola and Piano, straddles the period which was still linked to Hindemith's past, its roots in the Romanticism of Richard Straus, French Impressionism, and Schoenbergian tonal lyricism. Hindemith was still defining his mature style and the elements of the past and its influence can still be heard and felt.

The Sonata was written in 1922, the year after his enormously successful debut as composer with the Second Quartet, which had been the highlight of the Donaueschingen Festival. As a work which straddles this transition in his output, the Sonata shows Hindemith's continual experiments with formal structures and use of non-traditional successions of movements. More importantly it is Hindemith's searching for a new form by reexamining the concept of "sonata" that enabled him to pursue this approach. The Sonata consists of a Fantasie followed by a Theme with seven unique Variations, although these variations are divided so that the last three develop so as to evolve into the Finale. The Fantasie is broadly lyrical, full of humor and graceful turns. The Theme and Variations are set to a kind of folk-song which allows for some remarkable developmental treatment. The finale, the last of the variations, is in keeping with the lyricism found of the first movement, exploiting the viola in a cadenza-like passage before its final close.