Hindemith travelled to Europe a number of times after the Second World War, in order to get an idea of the situation in post-war Europe and see old friends. During these visits he discovered that his services as a conductor were more in demand there than in the USA. In addition, he received an offer from the University of Zürich to become Professor of Musicology, which he accepted in 1951. He alternately fulfilled his teaching obligations at Yale University and in Zürich before teaching exclusively in Zürich and definitively leaving America – to the regret of his American friends and colleagues.

After their return from the USA, the Hindemiths found a new home in the small village of Blonay with its idyllic setting above Lake Geneva. The village had a strategically favourable location at the heart of Europe, whence the Hindemiths could comfortably reach the European metropolises and other stations on extensive concert tours. Hindemith also found the peace and quiet in Blonay necessary for relaxation from lively concert life and for dedicating himself to his compositional activities. His last compositions were written in Blonay, in which he came to terms with contemporary twelve-tone compositions or intensively studied early music – preferably vocal compositions – reflecting these in his own works. He also occupied himself with these subjects as a musicologist in his last three lecture cycles at the University of Zurich during the winter semester of1957/58 – he had already been an emeritus since 1955. One lecture dealt with Gesualdo’s madrigals, another analytically orientated lecture dealt with the string quartets of Arnold Schönberg and the third treated fundamental principles of music theory.

His musical language became harmonically more complex and marked by thick polyphonic sound. In his Pittsburgh Symphony of 1958, he quoted from the Symphony, Op. 21 of Anton Webern; in his Organ Concerto of 1962 he integrated the 15th century popular chanson "L'homme armé" and based the final movement on the melody of the Gregorian Pentecost hymn "Veni creator spiritus" without stylistically weakening the musical texture. In his last completed composition, an a cappella Mass, he integrated compositional models of various music-historical epochs, placing them at the service of his complex harmonic ideas. The possibility of integrating historically different compositional forms of the time-honoured genre of the Mass into a new work was for Hindemith proof of the timeless natural fact of the tonal system. For him, genres such as Mass, motet and madrigal, thanks to their tradition, presented timeless ideals of a community of composer, performers and listeners no longer existing in his own time.

He regarded the development of music after the Second World War with a critical eye; in particular, he regarded the increasing splitting-up of music into specialised compartments as a great danger for the whole of music. Representative of the New Music accused him of a conservative attitude towards composition and sharply criticised his musical views. From the mid-1950s he spoke out extremely polemically in lectures and essays on contemporary musical developments and its representatives who decidedly devoted themselves to the avant-garde and, and in his opinion, were not sufficiently concerned with the anchoring of music in social life. This sceptical attitude increasingly made him an outsider and pushed him onto the margin of modern musical life.

Despite this outsider’s situation, Hindemith’s compositions, especially his sonatas, are an indispensable part of the repertoire of all orchestral musicians. No other composer of the 20th century can claim such an extensive and multi-layered oeuvre.