Paul Hindemith is known for his keen sense of an instrument's physical nature and for his exploitation of the boundary between the bodily actions involved in making sound and the expressive or emotive elements that those sounds conjure up. This quality is especially apparent in his numerous sonatas for solo instruments or instruments with piano, which deliberately cover the gamut of instruments found in the symphony orchestra. (Indeed, this concern for intimately idiomatic writing seems to have been a more widespread interest: Hindemith's French contemporary, Darius Milhaud, undertook a similar ongoing project during his career). While Hindemith's sonata output would eventually encompass a wide range of instruments, his initial forays into the genre focused on string instruments, especially his own "native" instruments: the violin and the viola (and even a sonata for the antiquated viola d'amore, which Hindemith composed in 1922). Between 1918 and 1924, Hindemith produced three sets of sonatas, Op. 11 (1918-1919), Op. 25 (1922), and Op. 31 (1924), all for strings. The first of these works, the Sonata in E flat for Violin and Piano No. 1, Op. 11, aptly demonstrates the young Hindemith's craftsman-like approach to composition, his studied attention to musical surfaces, and his skilled use of rhythmic tension as a dramatic device. No. 1, Op. 11, is cast in two parts, the first a casually conflicted juxtaposition of lively, rhythmically driving passages that bookend a more relaxed middle section. Most of the movement's musical materials spin out of the opening theme's bold dotted figures and double stops, which are introduced by the piano and taken up in the violin, and the relentless ascending scalar figurations in triplets that emerge as a foil to the opening gesture. Shifts of mood are sudden: the opening-section cadence is pompously in E flat, but is immediately followed by a delicate passage marked with pppp. The middle section's relative repose is occasionally disturbed by sudden dynamic outbursts, and the opening material returns in similar fashion, unexpectedly interrupting flowing triplets over a pianissimo pedal point. The harmonic language of the movement is characteristically highly chromatic and tonally ambiguous, the E flat tonic repeatedly emphasized at various points but subject to continual obfuscation. The second movement, according to Hindemith's score markings, is rendered as a "slow, solemn dance." A slow triple meter, occasionally offset with bars of duple, dominates the beginning and end. The piano part lends special weight to the second beat, giving the piece a continual iambic undertow. A slow, dynamic curve peaks at the piece's midpoint, corresponding with increased forward motion, harmonic tension, and metric unpredictability. The violin melody is both lyrical and angular, with a kind of gestural consistency that holds the work together above a sometimes turbulent harmonic flow. As the piece settles in toward its close, both piano and violin gravitate toward the tonic E flat, slowly abandoning their chromatic diversions and ending the piece on a sustained and unadorned unison.

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