17 - Tovey’s View of Joachim’s Hungarian Violin Concerto

Summary

It is of particular interest whenever composers in earlier eras enjoyed significant personal interactions with other prominent musicians. As “eyewitnesses” and collaborators these contemporaries are able to imbue their writings with authoritative perspectives and insights—both musical and biographical—that are otherwise inaccessible today. Thus the close professional relationship and friendship between the British scholar, pianist, conductor, and composer Donald Frances Tovey (1875– 1940) and Joseph Joachim (1831–1907) warrants our attention. In Tovey's wellknown series of books devoted to concise analyses of standard repertoire from the eighteenth to the early twentieth centuries, he was a perceptive critic and champion of Joachim's compositions, especially the Violin Concerto in D Minor, Op. 11 (in the Hungarian Manner). After a brief overview of their long association and extensive experience performing together, I will mine several provocative, but not fully explored, statements from Tovey's essay on the Hungarian Concerto, and employ them as points of entry into various aspects of the work, including its relationship to concertos by Beethoven and Brahms; adherence to traditional forms; Hungarian character; treatment of virtuosity; historical importance; great length; ornamentation (i.e., the soloist's passagework); and unusual accompanied cadenza.

Tovey was only seven years old when he first met Joachim. Their meeting took place during Joachim's annual concert tour in England, and, in the course of subsequent tours, Joachim had frequent opportunities to follow the boy's astoundingly precocious development as pianist and composer. In 1888 Tovey presented Joachim with a birthday card containing a three-part canon to the words “Herzlichen Glückwunsch zu Ihrem Geburtstag,” and later that year he composed a sonata for violin and piano and played it with Uncle Jo, his childhood name for the great violinist. In his correspondence Tovey, even as an adult, continued to use this moniker for him. Their mature musical collaboration and personal friendship dates from their first joint concert, which took place at the Albert Institute in Windsor in 1894. The program was eminently characteristic of Joachim's predilections: Bach (Chaconne from the Partita in D Minor), Beethoven (Piano Sonata in E Major, Op. 109, and Sonata for Violin and Piano in A Major, Op. 47, “Kreutzer”), and Brahms (Sonata for Violin and Piano in G Major, Op. 78).