Paul Hindemith (1895-1963) lived at the same time as both Grainger and Rachmaninov, and like them, he went very much his own way as a composer. Hindemith greatly admired the old masters like Palestrina, Bach, Haydn and Mozart. He found compositional ideas like Schoenberg's twelve-tone system completely illogical, and he rejected them entirely. He worked to create a system for composing that he felt grew directly from techniques of the past, and he was deeply grieved when the overwhelming majority of 20th-century composers ignored his approach completely.

Hindemith was a phenomenally talented musician. He was a professional violinist and violist, but he could pick up virtually any instrument in the orchestra and play it well. He was recognized as the finest German composer of his time by the 1920s, but soon he was being reviled by the Nazis. In 1938 his works were included in a backhanded exhibit in Dusseldorf called Entartete Musik ("Degenerate Music"). Hindemith wasn't Jewish, but his work was included with prominent Jews for vilification by the Nazis, who gave the exhibit the motto "Who eats with Jews, dies of it." Hindemith fled Germany later that year, and he eventually became a professor of music at Yale University.

The Symphonic Metamorphosis was composed during World War 11, in the summer of 1943. It was first performed on January 20, 1944, in New York. The themes that Hindemith selected were not particularly noteworthy examples of Weber's music. 'ney originated in several piano duets and the overture to Weber's Turandot. Perhaps this allowed Hindemith even greater freedom in his metamorphosis (literally "striking alteration in appearance [and] character").

The piece started as a ballet that Hindemith was to write for the impresario Leonide Massine. The two had a falling out when Hindemith discovered that Massine intended to use costumes and a set by Salvador Dali, an artist he despised. Massine, for his part, found Hindemith's first drafts of the music "too personal." Hindemith saved the music he had written and later reshaped it into the Symphonic Metamorphosis, which has endured as one of his most popular works.