Duration: 3 minutes

Description: Paul Hindemith (1895–1963) composed Dance of the Wooden Dolls (Tanz der Holzpuppen) in October, 1922 as part of the incidental music for Tuttifäntchen, a Christmas fairy tale in three scenes by Hedwig Michel and Franziska Becker; the whimsical story, loosely reminiscent of Pinocchio, concerns the woodcarver Tuttifant, whose newly carved wooden puppet comes magically to life and embarks on an adventure with his daughter Trudel before ultimately returning to the fir tree from which it was made. Hindemith’s score belongs to a particularly experimental period in his career, yet Tuttifäntchen deliberately adopts a more accessible idiom appropriate to its young audiences, incorporating Christmas melodies and contemporary popular styles; Dance of the Wooden Dolls, marked Allegretto and cast as a foxtrot, is perhaps its most immediately memorable number and reflects Hindemith’s early fascination with the dance music and jazz-inflected rhythms circulating in Germany during the Weimar era. Tuttifäntchen received its premiere on December 13, 1922, at the Hessisches Landestheater in Darmstadt, conducted by Walther Beck and staged by Friedrich Schramm, and the popularity of the dance led Hindemith himself to prepare the independent piano arrangement, issued in 1922. Although the complete Tuttifäntchen is now a comparative rarity (an eleven-movement orchestral suite was not published until 1969) Dance of the Wooden Dolls achieved an independent life and remains one of the more approachable examples of Hindemith’s early piano music, encountered particularly by students and in collections and recordings exploring the lighter, popular-music-influenced side of twentieth-century repertoire. Reprint edition.

• M281391 / 36-M281391 DANCE WOODEN DOLLS SOLO $3.95Buy Now