About the work
Hin und zurück is a twelve-minute comic one-act opera by Paul Hindemith to a libretto by Marcellus Schiffer, composed in May 1927 for the Baden-Baden chamber music festival. It premiered on 17 July 1927 at the Kurhaus. Its small ensemble, including saxophone and two pianos, gives the piece a light-entertainment sound.
Plot
A domestic drama escalates into jealousy, murder and suicide — until a wise man appears as a deus ex machina and declares that such a trifling matter must not end in catastrophe, whereupon the action runs backward scene by scene. By the end, the couple is back, unharmed, at the very start of their story.
Cultural significance
The literal reversal of the plot — and, in places, of the music itself — makes the piece one of the most striking formal experiments of 1920s Zeitoper.