Paul Hindemith was enthusiastic about literature and art already in his early years. The comic poetry of Christian Morgenstern particularly fascinated him. Hindemith often expressed himself in a witty, humorous tone on current events or the behaviour of contemporaries. Here is a sample of his irony: “The triangle-player attracted my attention. Probably a man of bourgeois importance with a wife and child awaiting him in a debt-free house. Perhaps owner of a stamp collection famous in professional circles, parish councilman and honorary member of noted associations…This personality counted … rests, and here and there elicited from his triangular bread-basket a ting-a-ling that required about as much mental expenditure as tying a shoelace, but behind which were several years of conservatory, diplomas, auditions and victory over fellow competitors.”

Hindemith explained his concept of the nature of texts to be set to the poet Eduard Reinacher: “If I am to make a Lied out of a text, it must have some loose spots which have been left out by the poet to a certain extent, left free for the composer in such a way that the music is needed here.”

After long hesitation and consideration, Hindemith decided in the summer of 1933 to take up the life of the late-medieval painter Mathis Gothart Nithart, called Grünewald (about 1480-1528) as the subject of his next opera. Because of his early experience with text authors, he designed the dramaturgical structure of the opera himself and also wrote the actual text. The complicated history of the composition of the opera shows the troubles and difficulties which confronted Hindemith in the development of the libretto. In the programme booklet at the world premiere on 28 May 1938 at the Zürich State Theatre, he wrote about the selection of the subject and its presentation. "One will not require a work from the musician and dramatist which meets the demands of an art historian, but one will surely concede to him what has always been allowed to a painter since time immemorial as regards historical persons and events: to show what history has taught him and the meaning that he recognises in the course of history. If I have attempted to depict in dramatic form what I read from the slight information we have of the life of Mathis Gothart Nithart and the connection to his works that they allowed me to sense, this is because I can imagine no livelier, more problematical, more human and more artistically moving figure – a dramatic figure in the best sense – than the creator of the Isenheimer Altar, the Karlsruhe Crucifixion and the Stuppach Madonna."

He reported to his wife Gertrud regularly and in great detail of his three concert tours in the USA in 1937-39. These letters, which he called a “log book,” provide a sampling of Hindemith’s narrative art which vividly combined “the great and the general with the clarity of detail” (Walter Jens). One of his letters, already in 1939, hints at musical-philosophical concepts which he first formulated in 1949/50 in the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures at Harvard University and published in expanded form in 1952 as "A Composer's World." He depicts a visit to the Mount Wilson Observatory in California with the following words: “Music sounded in one of the domes that we entered; a photographer sitting behind the second-largest telescope and taking pictures of some star, was playing the Mozart E-flat major Symphony on the radio or a record-player for his enjoyment in the darkness and cold. It was very strange to hear this music in this starry environment, for one also imagines something like icy silence in the infinite distances in association with the occupation with such objects. And yet, after the initial surprise, this music truly came together with this infinity to form an organism of a dimension and sound in which no error or clouding had a disturbing effect. I don’t think any other music besides Bach or Mozart would have withstood such a confrontation!"