13 - Reconsidering the Young Composer-Performer Joseph Joachim, 1841–53

Summary

With a purer taste than Paganini—with more feeling than Spohr—with more earnestness … [than] de Bériot—with more certainty than Ernst, Herr Joachim presents a combination of the highest intellectual, poetical, and technical qualities. In the rendering of music he is without peer.

—Charles Dickens, “A Freak on the Violin,” 1866

Charles Dickens's assessment is striking. It names various older violinist-composers who were among the greatest living virtuosi in the 1830s. Joachim performed their compositions regularly and passionately in the 1840s but then, shifting his taste, came to reject violinistic showpieces. There are two principal reasons for Joachim's radical change of programming from about 1853 onward. First, at the end of the Golden Age of virtuosity—around 1848 according to Dahlhaus—the phenomenon of the virtuoso violinist-composer gradually went out of fashion. Second, in 1853, Joachim became part of an intimate circle with Brahms, the Schumanns, and the von Arnims, which altered his views on virtuosity, programming, program music, and aesthetics. As Joachim the performer transformed himself, so did Joachim the composer. This chapter investigates not Joachim's mature violin compositions of the 1850s, many of which he found worthy enough of publication and occasional performance, but rather Joachim's youthful sins: the virtuoso pieces by himself and others that he performed in the 1840s. Amalie Joachim (1839–99) said in 1891 that in his later life Joachim performed virtuoso pieces only in his “study …—because he wished to present himself in public exclusively as priest of the highest and most beautiful.” Accordingly, he probably would have preferred those early programs and pieces to pass into oblivion.

Joachim's reputation as an interpreting Geigerkönig or high priest rests on several ideological assumptions, including the role of the performer (versus the composer), and the superiority of “serious” genres. As the revered performer representing “dignity and sincerity in his art,” Joachim defended for several decades “fundamentally a moral position,” together with Clara Schumann and Johannes Brahms. James Hepokoski describes their stance using the first-person plural as follows: “We are the pure remnant, the last of the real artists, struggling against a musical age lapsing into cheap, tawdry decline.”