Joseph Joachim and Bach's Chaconne

And they will long to have heard Joachim's violin-playing as we long to have heard Bach at his organ: not from curiosity to verify an old record of technical prowess, but from the desire to recover the unrecorded manifestations of a creative mind.

Donald Francis Tovey¹

Introduction

At the close of his long and storied career, Joseph Joachim was occasionally criticized for his devotion to a small number of canonized ‘masterpieces’. This criticism, which persists, seemingly overlooks Joachim's seminal role in helping define for his era the concept and purpose of musical canonicity, and his criteria for elevating certain new or neglected works to a status that can legitimately be called canonical. This essay will examine some of those criteria and their origins in Joachim's biography and artistic identity, focusing on his involvement with the cultural legacy of Johann Sebastian Bach, and his self-representation through repeated and evolving interpretations of Bach's Chaconne in D minor for violin solo.

It is scarcely an exaggeration to say that Joachim's performance repertoire became the core canon for violinists and that, due to his eminence and far-flung influence, his criteria for selecting repertoire came to inform our notions of canonicity today. The Beethoven concerto and the Bach sonatas and partitas (including the Chaconne) were hardly played before Joachim made them a cause. The same is true of Mozart's violin concerti – particularly the fifth in A Major, which Joachim rediscovered in manuscript and was the first to play in modern times. Joachim popularized Bach's Concerto in A minor, and often played the ‘Double’ with his students, or with colleagues such as Wilma Norman-Neruda.² He was the second person to play the Mendelssohn Concerto, which he studied under the composer's guidance. As a violist, he was one of the first interpreters of Berlioz’ Harold in Italy. Joachim frequently performed Spohr's Concerto no. 8 in modo di scena cantante, drawing praise from its creator. The Brahms Violin Concerto and many of Brahms's chamber works were written for him (as was the Dvořák Concerto, which, curiously, he never performed). Robert and Clara Schumann both dedicated works to him. Joachim's own Concerto in the Hungarian Manner, op. 11 is an important link between the works of Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Schumann and Spohr and the symphonic concerti of Bruch, Brahms, Tchaikovsky and others. Virtually the entire classical string quartet repertoire as a public concert experience owes its viability to Joachim's advocacy. Even the sonatas of Corelli were made known to Joachim's contemporaries through the Joachim/Chrysander edition.

Joachim's closest rival in this regard was Sarasate; but Sarasate's performances were never geared towards establishing canonicity, as Joachim's clearly were. If one were to take away the (naturally pre-twentieth-century) violin pieces that Joachim introduced or championed, one would be left mostly with virtuoso pieces by Paganini, Ernst, Wieniawski, Vieuxtemps, Sarasate and others – core repertoire, but (Lalo, Saint-Saëns and Tchaikovsky notwithstanding) not core ‘canon’. In the creation of the violinist's canon, Joachim stands preeminent.

To say that Johann Sebastian Bach's Chaconne for solo violin is canonical is to make a statement as unexceptionable as it is unexceptional. More has been written about this 15-minute set of variations than about virtually any other piece of music. The Chaconne is at the centre of every advanced violinist's repertoire, and grappling with its challenges has long been considered an essential station along the player's path to technical and musical maturity.

It was not always so. For some three-quarters of a century after its composition the Chaconne slept in relative obscurity, a piece shared in manuscript amongst a small cohort of virtuosi and performed in private as an exercise or a connoisseur's delight. Bringing it to the public was an act of revival – an act of resuscitation, really – that initially required the artificial life-support of an added piano accompaniment. The first public performance of the Chaconne was by Joachim's mentor Ferdinand David. It is nevertheless the case that it was Joachim's renowned interpretation and sustained advocacy for the Chaconne as an independent masterpiece that established its modern reputation and importance.

Joachim was noted for his varied and nuanced interpretations, achieved through a subtle use of rubato and accentuation.³ His repeated ‘exegetical’ performances of a tightly circumscribed repertoire suggest ritual, and contributed to the impression that the works he espoused were timeless, transcendent and inexhaustible – defining characteristics of canonicity.

Works are not created as canonical. While they may initially be compositions of extraordinary attractiveness and coherence, it is the accretion of meaning that accompanies their performance history that determines their importance to the musical public and to history. Here, ‘meaning’ is used in the etymological sense of the German Sinn – ‘to take a direction; to seek a trail’.⁴ Indeed, the meanings ascribed to a composition, which accrete to it over time, are factors intimately entangled with its journey through the musical world.

Those meanings begin with the personal significance a work holds for a performer, and that pathway depends upon the performer's authority. Accordingly, this essay concerns itself first with Joachim's preoccupation with the music of Johann Sebastian Bach as a historical and cultural phenomenon, and continues with specific reference to the performance history of the Chaconne.

First Encounters With Bach

In 1843, 12-year-old Joseph Joachim left Vienna to live with his cousin Fanny Wittgenstein, her husband Hermann, and their three children, in a large house on Leipzig's central marketplace, Am Markt 14, just two blocks from the historic Thomaskirche. ⁵ Considered one of the city's most elegant residences, the century-old building would have been well-known to Thomaskantor Bach.⁶ There, the young prodigy awoke each morning like a pearl in an oyster, with all of Old Leipzig – its markets, churches, concert halls, restaurants, shops and schools – lying within a 600-yard radius of his front door.

The Wittgenstein residence faced east across the market square toward the sixteenth-century German Renaissance Rathaus, within sight of the portal to Auerbach's Keller, the famous tavern immortalized in Goethe's Faust. It was a 500-yard ramble across the square and through narrow streets to the Gewandhaus and the newly founded Conservatorium that Joseph hoped to attend. Hermann's older brother Richard, with whom he was doing business as M. M. Wittgenstein und Sohn, resided just around the corner in the Thomaskirchhof, hard by the church and the school where J.S. Bach had once lived and worked. A short walk away, along the banks of the Pleisse river, stood Eduard Bendemann's Bach monument, recently commissioned (1842) ‘for the magnificent old fellow’ by Felix Mendelssohn.⁷

Young as he was, Joseph was already recognized as a virtuoso of uncommon musical and spiritual gifts. Having been invited to perform for an evening musicale at Mendelssohn's home, young ‘Pepi’ Joachim is said to have played so charmingly that Mendelssohn kissed him, saying, ‘I was once like this child’.⁸ From that point on, Mendelssohn's friendship and support would prove decisive for Joachim's development: he guided the boy's education in loco parentis, and their rapport was such that Joachim's later career can at least in part ‘be understood in terms of a mission to promote Mendelssohn's work’.⁹ Taking on the role of musical mentor, Mendelssohn arranged for Joachim to play regularly for Ferdinand David and to continue his theoretical studies under Moritz Hauptmann.¹⁰

Hauptmann, in his second year as Thomaskantor, had been Mendelssohn's choice to teach music theory at the new Conservatorium. An eminent intellectual and contrapuntist, he would become a founding member and editor of the Bach Gesellschaft, whose complete works edition monumentalized Bach's compositions into quasi-sacred texts. As Hauptmann's private student, Joachim most probably had his theory and composition lessons in the cantor's residence in the Thomasschule – Bach's erstwhile apartment.¹¹ Thus, at age 12, Joseph Joachim entered into what remained of Johann Sebastian Bach's physical and cultural milieu, guided by three of the principal figures of the ongoing Bach revival. He would remain in Leipzig for seven crucial, formative years.

Bildung: ‘An inclination towards the true and serious’

Though a Hungarian Jew, Joachim was brought up with a strong German cultural identity, which would become more significant to him as his leadership role in the German musical establishment grew.¹² This identity was strongly fostered by Mendelssohn, who nevertheless teased him about being a ‘Hungarian boy’ (an allusion to Balfe's opera The Bohemian Girl).¹³ Cultural education (Bildung) was of course central to the notion of enlightened Deutschtum, and crucial for enabling nineteenth-century Jews to assimilate into German life. As Marjorie Perloff has written, citing Paul Mendes-Flohr:

Before 1870, proponents of a unified German identity were obliged to appeal either to ethnic or to cultural criteria. The former gave us what was called the Volksnation – the concept of ‘a given people, which, ontologically prior to the state, is bound … by a common relation of its members to some combination of historical memory, geography, kinship, tradition, mores, religion, and language’. To be German, in this scheme of things, was a question of shared myth, ethnicity, and history. The alternative to this construction of nationality was the Kulturnation of German Enlightenment culture – the liberal cosmopolitan ethos of Bildung that had its roots in the classical Greek notion of paideia. Bildung was more than ‘civilization’, since, as Wilhelm von Humboldt pointed out … it was conceived as having a distinct spiritual dimension. Thus the cult of Kultur was gradually transformed into a kind of religion. The German (and Austrian) Jews obviously chose the second alternative. Even if they had wanted to, they could hardly have been assimilated into the Volksnation, whose ethnicity, history, and foundational myths they did not share.¹⁴

The critical importance of music in the creation of the German national identity is well established,¹⁵ and, beginning with the publication of J.N. Forkel's overtly nationalistic Bach biography in 1802,¹⁶ the recovery and re-evaluation of Bach's music was understood to be a project of national significance.¹⁷ The elevation and canonization of Bach's music functioned, to use Eric Hobsbawm's term, as an ‘invented tradition’.¹⁸ Like other invented traditions, it arose as a response to an outside threat – in this case, the perceived superficiality, immorality and materialistic character of the French influence during the Napoleonic hegemony and immediately thereafter, exemplified in music by virtuosity and its related opera culture.¹⁹ The canonization of Bach's music gave the ‘sanction of precedent’ to music of a significant, enduring character, valorizing a distinguished cultural history in the absence of a united political one and imparting a symbolic, ritual function to its performance. As Perloff's observation makes clear, this ‘sanction of precedent’, at least as regarded Bach's instrumental music, was also of critical value to Jews as a potential point of commonality with German culture and society.

Forkel was explicit in noting the timeless, sublime qualities of Bach's ‘fiery genius’, as well as his modesty and supposed indifference to public acclaim. Long before Schweitzer, Forkel portrays Bach as a tone-poet, whose ‘serious temperament led him admirably to the cultivation of a serious and lofty style in music’.²⁰ ‘This man’, he wrote at the conclusion of his study, ‘the greatest musical poet and the greatest musical orator who has ever been and that in all likelihood will ever be – was a German. Be proud of him, Fatherland; be proud of him, but also be worthy of him!’²¹

We encounter a similar appeal to gravitas and to Leipzig's Pietistic mores in Felix Mendelssohn's programming as music director of the city's Grosses Concert (1835–1847), where Seneca's maxim, res severa est verum gaudium ('true joy is a serious thing’ – or perhaps ‘a serious thing is a true joy’), stood prominently emblazoned on the Gewandhaus proscenium.²² For Mendelssohn, of course, the music of Bach was not an invented tradition, but a living tradition deeply rooted in his family's history.²³ Mendelssohn family traditions – the Haskalah (Jewish Enlightenment), the Bach legacy, salons and concert life, and the founding of the Leipzig Conservatorium – all stressed Bildung (edification) as a medium and model for civic engagement and social integration as well as for personal growth.

Mendelssohn adduced the local res severa and spoke of the importance of music in the general notion of Bildung in a 9 April 1840 letter to Leipzig Kreisdirector Johann Paul von Falkenstein,²⁴ inquiring whether a 20,000 Thaler legacy from Dr Heinrich Blümner might be used to create a music school in Leipzig:

For a long time, music has flourished in this country, and precisely that disposition in music which lies closest to every thinking and feeling art lover's heart, an inclination towards the true and serious, has from time immemorial taken firm root here. Such widespread interest has certainly been neither accidental, nor without important consequences for Bildung in general, and through it, music has become an important force – not simply for immediate pleasure, but for serving higher spiritual needs. …

But with the currently prevailing technical-material trend, the preservation and propagation of genuine artistic sense becomes a doubly important, but also doubly difficult task. … By means of a good music school which could encompass all the various branches of art and teach them from a single viewpoint as a means to a higher end – which would lead all its students as much as possible to this goal – this practical-material trend, which unfortunately counts many and influential adherents among artists, could be guarded against.²⁵

Here, in the years just prior to his mentorship of Joachim, Mendelssohn articulates an ambitious agenda, locating the proposed institution within greater Germany's Humboldtian Bildungsideal, and making it a first line of defence against the trivializing trends of mechanical virtuosity – trends in music that he associated with Paris and its Conservatoire.

In the work that emerged from this understanding, Mendelssohn had the able assistance of his friend and concertmaster Ferdinand David – the man whom he chose to guide Joachim's violin studies. While David cannot be called Joachim's violin teacher in the customary sense (Joachim continued to be described publicly as ‘pupil of Herrn [Joseph] Böhm in Vienna’), his influence on the young violinist, particularly as regards choice of repertoire, was nevertheless strong. Thus, for example, Joachim became the second violinist to perform Mendelssohn's violin concerto, which he learned simultaneously with David, the concerto's dedicatee and first performer.²⁶ On occasion, Joachim performed some of David's own compositions, and under David's guidance he soon began to study the solo works of Bach, with which David was preoccupied at the time.

Encouraged by Mendelssohn, David had begun performing Bach's Chaconne (Bach called it Ciaccona) in 1840, his first performance taking place at the Gewandhaus on 8 February.²⁷ Apparently uncomfortable with performing the work solo, David was accompanied by Mendelssohn, who improvised a supporting piano part ‘with all manner of voices, so that it was a pleasure to hear’ (Robert Schumann).²⁸ The critical reception of this, reputedly first public performance of the Chaconne,²⁹ already makes clear that the work impressed as a virtuoso showpiece with potentially popular appeal – yet one with serious artistic qualities:

A Chaconne in D minor for violin solo by Sebastian Bach, beautifully performed by concertmaster David, aroused the greatest interest of the evening. The piece is interesting in ways that one no longer looks for or finds in such solo things. Certainly only a few listeners may have known or noticed that this chaconne consists of about thirty directly interrelated variations on a short theme, which are so ingenious, showing such a labor of invention and art, and at the same time so tastefully worked, that similar things of more recent times appear as mere trifles in comparison. … Indeed, we maintain that to give a consummate performance of such pieces as this chaconne requires a far greater mastery of playing, and a far more proficient artistry in general, than are required for the execution of many, indeed the majority of the most celebrated new virtuoso pieces. … Those pieces for which mere correct and polished playing is not sufficient necessarily require a master who rises above technique and who additionally is able to recognize and bring to life other, deeper art, which he may often encounter. But played by such an artist, they are of indescribable effect not only for connoisseurs of fine art, but also for the larger public, provided, of course, that these do not lack all artistic sense and taste.³⁰

Ingenious, tasteful, and deep: Bach's Chaconne, clearly, was a doughty German Schlachtross to ride to battle against any French virtuoso cheval de bataille.

David's second public performance of the Chaconne (also with Mendelssohn accompanying), took place in a ‘historical concert’ at the Gewandhaus on 21 January 1841, and was similarly well-received by audience and critic alike.³¹ Two years later, on 8 January 1843, David performed the Chaconne for a third time, in a Sunday concert in the Gewandhaus given by Robert and Clara Schumann. The Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung's review of this concert does not mention a piano accompaniment, and seems to imply that David played solo: ‘Concertmaster David performed Bach's Chaconne, such a splendid composition despite its limited means, with as beautifully intellectual a conception as consummate technical execution, and received the liveliest applause’.³² If that is indeed the case, David gave the first known unaccompanied public performance of the work about half a year before he and Joachim first met.

At the time that Joachim arrived in Leipzig, Kistner had just published David's edition of Bach's complete Sonatas and Partitas for solo violin – only the second edition in existence, and the first to be edited for practical use.³³ The first edition of Bach's six sonatas and partitas had been brought out by Simrock in 1802 (the same year as Forkel's Bach biography) as Studio o sia Tre Sonate per il Violino solo senza Basso del Seb. Bach.³⁴ Despite its title, this edition contained all six sonatas and partitas, each sonata and its following partita being paired together under the title ‘sonata’.³⁵ David's 1843 edition was presumably the source text of Joachim's first acquaintance with those works.³⁶ Neither the 1802 edition nor David's was based upon the currently accepted autograph, which came to light only at the turn of the twentieth century.³⁷ Joachim's edition, completed by Andreas Moser and published posthumously (1908) by Bote & Bock, was the first to be based upon that manuscript (currently in the Staatsbibliothek Preußischer Kulturbesitz Berlin, Mus. Ms. Bach P 967).

David used the Bach sonatas and partitas in his teaching curriculum, and assigned them to his advanced pupils as etudes.³⁸ His edition was published the year of the Leipzig Conservatorium's founding, and the title bears the inscription: ‘For the use of the Conservatorium of Music in Leipzig, provided with fingerings, bowings and other markings by Ferd. David’.³⁹ David was, and is, notorious for his idiosyncratic and highly embellished editions.⁴⁰ Nevertheless, his careful inclusion of what then passed for Bach's original text, on a second staff below the edited part, was one measure of his reverence for Bach. This method would later serve as a model for the Joachim–Moser edition.

‘… on the path of the worthy, dignified and poetic in art’

As is customary today, young Joseph appears to have begun his solo Bach studies with the Sonata in G minor, BWV 1001, which is somewhat more technically accessible than the others. On 15 October 1844, the 13-year-old wrote to his teacher in Vienna, Joseph Böhm, ‘I am now practicing a Quatour brillant in B minor (opus 61) of Spohr, which I like a lot. I also play Paganini pretty often, as well as old Bach, whose Adagio and Fugue for violin solo I played publicly in London’.⁴¹ The 1844 London season was Joachim's first – the visit at which he gave his legendary Philharmonic debut, playing Beethoven's Violin Concerto. London's The Era lauded his performance of solo Bach at a chamber concert given under the auspices of G.A. Macfarren and J.W. Davison in the Princess’ Concert Room on 7 June:

The second point d'appui of the instrumental portion, was the solo of the boy Joachim. With a confidence, the bright result of unerring genius, he selected J. Sebastian Bach's ‘Dagio and Fugue in G Minor’,⁴² which he performed with passionate beauty. Schools and difficulties are understood and achieved with a largeness of grasp and fulness of feeling as rare as beautiful. Joachim is a musical miracle – long years and everlasting practice were equally vain to attain his knowledge and execution.⁴³

For Joachim, the year 1846 began with a concert trip to Vienna and Pest – his first homecoming since his departure three years earlier. On Sunday, 11 January, he gave a well-attended noonday concert in Vienna's 700-seat hall of the Musikverein, Unter den Tuchlauben, performing Beethoven's Concerto and David's Variations on a Russian Theme, and giving, unaccompanied, his first-ever public performance of the Chaconne.⁴⁴ His reception reflected both the earnestness of his artistic aspirations and the high esteem in which he was still held in Viennese musical circles: ‘Approximately three or four years ago’, wrote Moritz Saphir's Der Humorist,

the chubby-cheeked boy Joachim, a pupil of our excellent Böhm, drew unusual attention to himself with a few public appearances. In the meantime, he has undertaken serious and systematic studies, such as one can make under the auspices of a Mendelssohn-Bartholdy. That boy, now returned, is not yet grown to a youth, but has shot up into an artist.⁴⁵

The substantial nature of the programme, typical for Leipzig, but unusual for a Viennese virtuoso matinée, drew immediate notice from Frankl's Sonntagsblätter: ‘This Joachim must be a genuine artistic talent – otherwise he would not begin his concertizing here with Beethoven and Bach; other concert-givers do not customarily angle for audiences with such compositions’. Quoting Horace's dictum: ‘Vos exemplaria graeca manu versate diurna, versate nocturna!’ (‘Pore over your Greek models day and night!’), the reviewer praised the programme as an antidote to the insipid nature of the customary virtuoso fare:

With the great levelling of contemporary concert music, it is most advisable to take a step backward in order to move forward. Returning to Bach and those of like mind might somewhat cleanse the tainted blood of our concert-music composers, and improve what has come to be our inane taste.⁴⁶

Saphir's Der Humorist, reacted similarly:

It is so satisfying, in this difficult, needy age of bravoura, to see a talent emerge, that has been led on the path of the worthy, dignified and poetic in art; that feels at home there, and promises to remain. … We can already see from the programme of the concert he gave in the hall of the Verein on the 11th that Joachim is a violin player who does not pursue the same path as the others. His main offerings consisted of the concerto of Beethoven, the most precious gem that the violin repertoire possesses, and a ‘Ciaconna’ by Joh. Seb. Bach. – A violin piece by Bach? Has the concert-going public ever heard one here – have they heard one played by a concert giver? Most people must have thought to themselves: ‘that looks curious!’ Oh, rococo! Classical, but not brilliant; we won't find guitar plucking on the violin, and flute blowing with the bow, in that – no pizzicatos and no harmonics. – Certainly nothing of that, but although Classical, and truly Classical, this ‘Ciaconna’ is nevertheless as brilliant as any solo piece that has been written for the violin; and not only are there few such magnificent, wonderfully constructed violin pieces as this fugue [sic], but there are also few players who can perform them with such roundedness, such spirit, such power and stamina, in short, in such an excellent manner as our young artist, who, alone through the magnificent performance of this piece stands in the first rank of contemporary violinists.

The reviewer continued, praising Joseph's ‘beautiful, pithy, masculine tone’, which demonstrated

not only the singing, but also the strongly intellectual-spiritual element. His left hand easily encompasses the most difficult configurations with power and dexterity, and the fullness and beauty of his trills is remarkable. To this is added … a noble, adroit and firm bow arm, which demonstrates proficiency and security in all bowing styles.⁴⁷

Joachim repeated the Chaconne in a second Musikverein concert on 28 February and debuted it in Pest's Redoutensaal on 8 March.

Early Performances of the Chaconne

David's 1843 edition of the Sei Solo undoubtedly played a critical role in the dissemination of the Chaconne; nevertheless, Mendelssohn's subsequent arrangement for violin with piano accompaniment, published in London (Ewer) in the year of his death, in 1848 by Cranz (Hamburg), in 1849 by Breitkopf & Härtel (Leipzig), and after 1850 by Richault (Paris), had an even greater influence on its initial performance history.⁴⁸ Other early accompanied editions prepared by F.W. Ressel (Berlin: Schlesinger, 1845) and Robert Schumann (Leipzig: Breitkopf & Härtel, 1854), had little or no public life.

While David was the first to play the Chaconne in concert, the impetus for many of its initial presentations can plausibly be traced to the publication of Mendelssohn's edition and to Joachim's exemplary performances of it. Joachim gave the first London hearings in spring or early summer 1847, at a time when he was in frequent contact with Henri Vieuxtemps, Henry Blagrove, and Bernhard Molique, who would become three of the work's earliest advocates. It is possible that Mendelssohn accompanied him on one or more of those occasions, both public and private, using the edition that was just then going to press. It further seems plausible that, while there, they would have auditioned the arrangement for Mendelssohn's English publisher.

In May 1847, Joachim and Henri Vieuxtemps joined in a London performance of Mendelssohn's Octet in the composer's presence.⁴⁹ Returning to St Petersburg later that year, Vieuxtemps performed the Chaconne from Mendelssohn's edition, and during the following summer he gave multiple performances there. The St Petersburg correspondent for the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung, citing the local lack of ‘good’ German music while deploring the local preference for ‘treacly Italian music’ and ‘banal little virtuoso pieces’, praised Vieuxtemps's chamber concerts as ‘the only public undertaking [here] through which serious music is represented in a dignified way’. Vieuxtemps, he wrote, ‘played Seb. Bach's wonderful Ciaccona (with Mendelssohn's added piano accompaniment) with powerful energy and virtuosity’.⁵⁰ Vieuxtemps carried the work back to London in June 1852 and May 1853.

In 1849, Joachim's friend (and fellow-pupil of David and Hauptmann) Otto von Königslöw (1824–1898) gave a performance in Leipzig, accompanied by Mendelssohn-pupil Otto Goldschmidt. Mendelssohn's edition seems to have had its greatest influence in England, however, where Henry Blagrove (London, 1848) and Bernhard Molique (London, 1850, and Leeds, 1852) each gave accompanied performances. Molique, one of the most dedicated early performers of the work, probably gave both accompanied and solo performances, as did Joachim (it is often unclear from reviews and notices how the piece was played).

In arranging the Chaconne, Mendelssohn kept the violin part unchanged from David's edited version; however, as John Michael Cooper points out, his setting gives the piece the character of a Konzertstück or concerto movement that brings forward and emphasizes the latent virtuosity of the violin part, at times allowing the violin to sound alone, and at times altering the bass line or obscuring the regularity of its variation form to create a more ductile, romantic impression. Cooper speaks of the ‘Tonmacht’ of the piece that was heightened by Mendelssohn's accompaniment, ‘especially in its sonorous and often unexpected extensions of harmony and the structuring of particularly affect-rich passages’.⁵¹ Drawing this musical inference, Molique went so far as to orchestrate Mendelssohn's accompaniment, though it is unclear whether he ever performed it in that way.⁵² In July 1854, Karl Wilhelm Uhlrich performed Eduard Stein's orchestration in Sondershausen.⁵³

One of the most significant early performers of the Chaconne was Joachim's successor as concertmaster in Weimar, Ferdinand Laub. Joachim expressed unqualified admiration for Laub's playing in a letter to his brother Heinrich: ‘it is astounding what brilliant technique the man has; there is absolutely no difficulty for him, and for this he will certainly attract attention’.⁵⁴ Joachim advocated for Laub and was careful to support him during Laub's Weimar years (1853–55).⁵⁵ Laub left his position in Weimar after little more than two years (as Joachim had done), ‘because of too-restricted circumstances’.⁵⁶ He began touring shortly thereafter, with repertoire clearly influenced Joachim's example: concerti by Beethoven (with Joachim's cadenzas) and Mendelssohn, and Bach's Chaconne. For a time, Joachim and Laub pursued parallel paths, as virtuosi and as artists. Laub later became one of the most distinguished performers of Joachim's Concerto No. 2 in D minor, op. 11 ‘in the Hungarian manner’, completed in 1857 and published in 1861.

Taken together, David, Joachim, Molique, Vieuxtemps, and Laub account for 41 of at least 56 presentations of the Chaconne during the first 15 years of its public performance history. Joachim accounts for a third of the total (19); Molique, who usually played with Mendelssohn's accompaniment, was the second most frequent performer with about a sixth (9) (see Table 1).

Table 1 Early Performances (1840–55)⁵⁷

A Musical Calling Card: Joachim in Paris and Weimar

Joachim was present at Mendelssohn's death, on 4 November 1847. For the 16-year-old, the loss of his mentor and friend was a traumatic event that left him untethered, personally and musically.⁵⁹ He briefly considered returning to his family in Pest, but eventually judged Leipzig, even without Mendelssohn, to be the best place to further his education and professional goals. His friends created several positions for him there: vice-concertmaster of the Gewandhaus Orchestra, and teaching assistant to David at the Conservatorium, where Clara Schumann's half-brother, Woldemar Bargiel, was among his few students.

From January through April 1850, Joachim made his first concert appearances in Paris, performing with, among others, Louis Moreau Gottschalk, and Gewandhaus principal cellist Bernhard Cossmann, and playing Ernst's Op. 11 ‘Othello Fantasy’ in the premiere concert of Hector Berlioz's Grande Société Philharmonique de Paris (19 February 1850).⁶⁰ As with his Viennese visit four years earlier, he took with him solo Bach as a musical calling card. While there, he performed the Chaconne ‘with infinite skill’⁶¹ in Erard's salon, in a concert given by Louise Farrenc. ⁶² He also played it on other, perhaps private, occasions, clearly with great acclaim, such that Richault subsequently brought out a French edition of the Bach/Mendelssohn Chaconne bearing the annotation: ‘executée à Paris dans plusieurs concerts, / PAR / JOACHIM / Membre du Concervatoire de Leipsic’.⁶³ As previously, Joachim's programming of the Chaconne enabled him to present himself to a new public as a virtuoso of uncommon musical and personal depth. The Paris reviewer for the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik expressed what was in those days a universal opinion of Joachim:

He must be heard, and, where possible, known. Where such integrity and seriousness of disposition are united, in such young years, with such mastery, such unpretentiousness, such talent, so much simplicity and such amiability of mind, one is aware that one is observing something rare; but one does not know what one loves or values the most – the artist or the person. Joachim is among those called, but he is also one of the chosen. ⁶⁴

Following his return to Leipzig in late April, Joachim made a short trip to Weimar to visit Franz Liszt, and to report on his Paris trip. During that visit, Liszt convinced him to take part in an at-home soirée. Joachim played a Bach fugue on that occasion.⁶⁵ Those were, he wrote to Cossmann, ‘some unforgettable days’. ‘I really enjoyed it there’, he continued. ‘It's a friendly little town, and you can certainly live quite well with the people there‘.⁶⁶

Joachim returned in August for Weimar's Goethe and Herder Festival, at which Liszt conducted the premiere of Wagner's Lohengrin. He was overwhelmed by the opera and its performance,⁶⁷ and for a time he became an enthusiastic Wagnerianer. Liszt pressed the 18-year-old virtuoso to accept the position of Concertmaster of the Weimar Hofkapelle, and sent Joachim Raff twice to Leipzig to persuade him to accept. After making the journey himself to discuss the matter with Ferdinand David, however, Liszt still had to address the fraught issue of Joachim's Jewishness.⁶⁸ In the end, Joachim was hired, becoming the first person to hold the title of Concertmeister in Weimar since J. S. Bach.

Joachim's Weimar service began in October 1850. Despite unpropitious circumstances, he held out for a little more than two years. ⁶⁹ In November 1852, Liszt helped him to obtain a position as Konzertmeister to King George V of Hanover – a position he would take up in the new year.⁷⁰

Frei aber Einsam – Free but Lonely

The year 1853, an eventful year in European music,⁷¹ was a decisive year for Joachim's personal and artistic development. It was the year he left Liszt and Weimar and struck out on his own as Konzertmeister in Hanover. It was the year he fell in love with Gisela von Arnim and came under the sway of her mother, Bettina.⁷² It was the year he drew close to the Schumanns. It was the year he met Brahms and Wagner. Above all, it was a year of intense loneliness and soul-searching during which he rethought personal loyalties and artistic values. ‘He was the concert director’, wrote Julius Rodenberg, ‘and though favoured by the court and admired by the public, he lived a quiet, solitary life. We regarded him with considerable awe, as one who had a mission. He spoke little in those days; “Music is his language”‘.⁷³ After two months in Hanover (8 March), Joachim wrote to Cossmann, referring to his Weimar quartet partners, ‘I long indescribably for Wagnerian sounds – for our Quartet!!! O Cossmann, o Stör, o Walbrül! Here I completely lack congenial musical company; I live almost like a hermit!’.⁷⁴

In his self-imposed solitude, Joachim turned once again to solo Bach – to the Chaconne, which he had performed only once (in London) since his Paris debut three years earlier. The Chaconne had been one of the last pieces Joachim played with Mendelssohn, and it was to Mendelssohn's edition that he returned, performing it on 10 February in Bremen, and two weeks later in Hanover.

At the conclusion of his time in Weimar, Joachim had begun work on an overture, in D minor, on the subject of Hamlet, the manuscript of which he sent to Liszt on 21 March 1853 with the message:

I hope that the work will tell you that which I hope you have not doubted: that you, my Master, have been constantly present in my mind. The parting words that you called out to me on one of the last evenings in Weimar remain in my ears. They echo inside me as music that can never die away. I was at leisure here to listen to this ‘voix interne’: I was very much alone. … I turned to Hamlet. ⁷⁵

Katharina Uhde has observed how the subject of Hamlet, considered ‘unmusical’ at the time, was widely associated with the irresolute condition of Germany in the post-Napoleonic era.⁷⁶ As Joachim professed to Liszt, the subject was also a reflection of his own inner disposition in this period of seclusion. The overture begins hesitantly, mysteriously, in a slow triple metre. In contrast, the daily iteration of Bach's majestic variations in the same key and triple metre may have proved a bracing tonic for Joachim's Hamlet meditations.

That year, Joachim introduced himself with the Chaconne at two important German music festivals: one in Düsseldorf and the other to the Southwest in Karlsruhe. On 17 May 1853 he played the Beethoven concerto, with the Chaconne as an encore, in what would prove to be a defining event in his career. The occasion was the 31st Lower Rhine Music Festival, held in Düsseldorf from May 15–17, under the direction of Robert Schumann. Since their founding in 1818, the Lower Rhine Music Festivals had been a vital feature of German cultural life – an outgrowth of the prodigious passion for music amongst the Rhine Province's socially vibrant and increasingly affluent middle class. What had begun as an amateur festival under municipal sponsorship had gradually taken on a more professional aspect under the direction of such conductors as Felix Mendelssohn (who conducted seven times between 1833 and 1846), Louis Spohr, and Gaspare Spontini. The 1853 Musikfest was, in a way, a rebirth of the festival; due to the mid-century political troubles, it had occurred only once (1851) since 1847. As municipal music director in Düsseldorf, Robert Schumann, was chosen to lead the event.⁷⁷

At 22, Joseph was no longer a child prodigy, and the expectations that he had to satisfy were daunting. Writing in 1897, Wilhelm von Wasielewski recalled:

He already enjoyed a widespread reputation in the musical world commensurate with his high artistic standing. It is therefore understandable that the musicians of the Rhineland, who had not yet had an opportunity to hear him, were extraordinarily curious about his accomplishments, but not in a wholly impartial way. Namely, it was supposed that his reputation was in part artificially created through partisanship, and to some extent exaggerated. His first appearance in the Rhineland was therefore awaited with a certain prejudice, seemingly as an opportunity for sizing him up in the most hypercritical way.⁷⁸

Joachim's performances that day were a triumph. According to Wasielewski,

A storm of applause lasting many minutes with elemental force broke out after the finale. The audience could not be quieted, and let it be known, through sustained applause, that Joachim should give them something more … and so, despite his overheated and wearied state, Joachim had in the end to comfort them with an encore, which was nothing less than Bach's Ciaccona for violin solo. It was, under the circumstances, an astonishing achievement.⁷⁹

Clara Schumann accompanied the Bach. This may have been the first performance of Robert Schumann's piano accompaniment, which had been completed just months prior to the festival.

The concerts in Karlsruhe likewise provided an opportunity for the young violinist to establish his reputation in new regions of Germany. The Karlsruher Musikfest brought together musicians from the theatres of Darmstadt, Mannheim, and Karlsruhe for two days of concerts, with a day in between for outdoor carnival festivities, all under the direction of Franz Liszt. It was the second major outing of the ‘Musicians of the Future’ as the members of the Weimar School were then known,⁸⁰ and the concerts were conceived in part as a practical demonstration of the principles of the ‘newest German art’, ⁸¹ both compositional and performative, as they were developing under Liszt's guidance. Joachim was prominently featured in this festival, performing the final revision of his Violin Concerto, Op. 3,⁸² as well as Bach's Chaconne, unaccompanied. Though Joachim was by then living in Hanover, Liszt programmed his violin concerto as a representative product of the Weimar school, and the one-movement concerto was heard as an example of ‘modern’ traits and tendencies. Innovative in form, it demonstrates the influence of Liszt, as well as Joachim's preoccupation with enlisting extreme virtuosity in the service of greater musical expressivity.⁸³

The Chaconne, which Joachim performed on the second concert day (5 October), was a programmed item, not an encore as in Düsseldorf. It was an unusual choice, perhaps, since the festival was otherwise mostly dedicated to contemporary compositions and arrangements; the ‘Musicians of the Future’ had come to view much of the traditional repertory as representing an ‘überwundenen Standpunkt’ – a ‘superseded standpoint’. In programming the Chaconne, however, Joachim seems to imply that the piece was Janus-faced: in uniting extreme technical demands with dignified musical content, this revivified ‘historical work’ by Germany's ‘greatest musical poet’ became a model for the future – not merely a relic of the past. Vos exemplaria graeca manu versate diurna, versate nocturna! For Joachim, Mendelssohn's pupil, raised in the Leipzigerian res severa, the music of Bach was also beginning to take on a greater personal significance. As in Vienna, Pest, London, Paris, and Düsseldorf, he here used the Chaconne to introduce himself to new audiences as an important artist, and to demonstrate his connection to, and mastery of, German musical traditions.

Virtuosity and Werktreue

Bach's Chaconne was perceived by nineteenth-century critics as an antidote to the ubiquitous ‘empty’ virtuosity that they viewed as a contemporary malady.⁸⁴ By combining dramatic technical demands with powerful musical substance, Bach seemed to exemplify a new and better way of writing for the violin. For Joachim, a Hungarian Jew of serious artistic aspirations in the world of German music, this notion may well have held a more personal significance. In his article ‘Juden als Virtuosen’, Daniel Jütte asserts that nineteenth-century Germans frequently associated virtuosity with Jewish musicians. ⁸⁵ Jütte claims that in the first half of the nineteenth century ‘the virtuoso profession had a specific attractiveness for Jews’⁸⁶ – indeed, that ‘there had been, for the early German-Jewish bourgeoisie, a genuine ideal of virtuosity’⁸⁷ not simply as a means of earning a living, but arising out of an older cultural tradition that intimately entangled the practices of Bildung with the notion of ‘virtuosity as a symbol of selfless perfection’.⁸⁸ We find echoes of this view in a passage that Joachim wrote in Brahms's commonplace book, Des jungen Kreislers Schatzkästlein, sometime in 1853 or 1854: ‘There is a degree of technique that becomes spirit, because it results in perfection’.⁸⁹

Jütte maintains, however, that as the century wore on and virtuosity came to be associated with the impersonality of industrial mass production and commerce, the notion of virtuosity became identified with Jews in a negative way, as mere mechanism: a bag of tricks flogged by Musikunternehmer – ‘music-entrepreneurs’ – for vanity and monetary gain. Thus, virtuosity reinforced anti-Judaic tropes in two ways: by portraying Jews as a clever imitators of a culture that they did not truly comprehend or share, and at the same time holding them responsible for the increasing debasement and commodification of a ‘pure’, ‘spiritual’ (read: German) art. It only made matters worse that, in post-Napoleonic Germany, the imbricated notions of virtuosity and Jewish empowerment were both associated with the French.

Joachim once wrote to his wife Amalie, ‘I feel myself to be German. Righteousness and belief in the German mission to disseminate its culture sustain me’. ⁹⁰ Though he was by birth a Hungarian Jew, his connection to canonic German music – particularly that of Beethoven and Bach – was deeper and more authentic than that of virtually any other nineteenth-century musician, having been passed on to him by eminent mentors from living traditions. For Joachim in particular, the nexus of anti-Judaic perceptions attached to virtuosity was therefore not merely offensive but personally and professionally problematic, casting him in the role of an outsider in a culture and society that he fully embraced, and to which he by rights belonged.

Musically, Joachim was to the manor born, and the greatest musicians of his time, including Bülow and Brahms, considered him a paragon and role-model. Despite his heritage, he found no inconsistency in his sense of Deutschtum, writing to his nephew of the ‘german gift to assimilate’.⁹¹ That ‘gift’ was conditional, however, and could not be taken for granted. Acceptance was, for Jewish virtuosi, dependent upon a demonstration of deep connection to the ‘spiritual’ values, however defined, of a nation that perceived itself as a land of ‘Dichter und Denker’, poets and thinkers, whose signal contribution to intellectual life was a sense of history, ritually enacted through invented traditions.⁹²

In this context, we may judge the critical importance of the Chaconne to Joachim's self-representation, as well as to that of other Jews. As Daniel Jütte claims:

To the extent that they were known at all, Bach's sonatas and partitas were understood by contemporaries to be difficult to perform and difficult to convey to a broad audience. But it is precisely this allegedly anachronistic character of the works, which does not aim at [superficial] effect, that may also have contributed to their popularity amongst those leading Jewish interpreters who wanted to anticipate or escape a one-sided categorization as virtuosi.⁹³

‘Fame’, Susan Bernstein has pointed out, ‘is constitutive of the virtuoso’, and Joachim certainly had great success with his performance of virtuoso showpieces.⁹⁴ Nevertheless, at the time when he was establishing his adult career, he seemed less concerned with fame than with striking roots deep in the soil of German culture. His letters to family and friends during this time bear eloquent testimony to his desire to ‘place artistic before commercial considerations’.⁹⁵ The Chaconne, a historically and culturally significant German work, recognized to be both virtuosic and profound, ideally enabled Joachim to place his sovereign skills at the service of his musical, spiritual, and social aspirations.

Discussion of virtuosity inevitably raises the issue of the relationship of performance to the musical text. In Carl Dahlhaus's famous formulation, the nineteenth century experienced a schism between ‘work-based’ and ‘performance-based’ approaches. Dahlhaus associates these approaches with Beethoven and Rossini, respectively.⁹⁶ The extent to which these intertwined notions can be distinguished from one another has been a matter of considerable discussion in recent decades.⁹⁷ Suffice it to say, as virtuosity gradually yielded to the ideal of work-based interpretation in Joachim's aesthetic, musical texts gradually took on greater significance for him, to the point of reverence. Comparison with the exegesis of religious scripture would not be inconsistent with his well-known desire to present himself as a ‘priest of the public’.⁹⁸

Joachim was always careful to consult the most authoritative texts for his performances, and he was known for his ‘wide and deep musical scholarship in its highest form’.⁹⁹ On 28 November 1869, for example, he wrote to an unnamed recipient, requesting that a copy be made

of the Ciacona of Vitali [in G minor], that David has published in the ‘High School’, after the existing copy in the King's library.¹⁰⁰ The piece is truly magnificent, and I should like very much to play it publicly next week in Frau Schumann's concert;¹⁰¹ unfortunately, my conscience does not permit me (this most kindly between us, no?!) to use David's arrangement, in which many things will have to be needlessly altered. One can't fully enjoy the many treasures in the ‘High School’ because of the exaggerated, arbitrary markings, about which we will later speak verbally, I hope. Meanwhile, you can in any case be sure that I don't contemplate a rival edition.¹⁰²

In 1900, The Musical Gazette published a series of articles relating to Joachim by Donald Francis Tovey, entitled ‘Performance and Personality’, and signed with Tovey's nom de plume ‘Tamino’. In a subsequent edition, the Gazette printed a mischievous letter to the editor overtly signed with Tovey's name:

Dear Sir, – Much as I agree with your contributor, ‘Tamino’, I cannot say that he has been very lucky in his anecdotes of Dr. Joachim's ‘musical scholarship’. I venture to send you the subjoined specimen as an addition to ‘Tamino's’ article, as I believe it may convey to some musical students that definite impression that ‘Tamino's’ anecdotes seem to me to lack.

In Bach's A minor sonata for unaccompanied violin there is a difference of reading as to the second note (Fig. 1).

Some authorities read G-sharp,¹⁰³ which at first sight seems obviously right. But G-natural really makes a much better sense as a step in a downward scale (A–G–F–E–D), the descend being disturbed into the upper octave by the limited downward compass of the violin.

I happened a few years ago to mention to Dr. Joachim that I had been looking at an arrangement by Bach himself of this sonata for Clavier, transposed to D minor, a little-known though interesting piece of work, then recently published or reprinted, and only known to me by the merest accident.¹⁰⁴ I hardly had time to mention it before Dr. Joachim said, ‘And was the second note in the bass natural?’ and then explained to me why he asked the question.

It may be said that this was a violin composition constantly on his repertoire; but how many actors are there, or how many have there ever been, who could show such an absolutely ready familiarity with varied readings in, say, ‘Hamlet’? It is the scholarly attitude of mind that is so significant in this case; and it would seem still more significant to one who could have observed the startling promptness of Dr. Joachim's question. –

Yours truly, D.F. Tovey.¹⁰⁵

Fig. 1

In 1879, the pianist, editor, and critic Alfred Dörffel (1821–1905) wrote to Joachim for his assistance with the preparation of an envisioned performing edition of the Chaconne (Dörffel's edition for the Bach Gesellschaft of the Sonatas and Partitas appeared in December of the same year).¹⁰⁶ Joachim's response, reproduced here in full, provides an invaluable insight into the freedom, as well as the fidelity, with which he performed Bach's text:

3. Beethovenstrasse, N. W. Thiergarten

[Berlin, 6 May 1879.]¹⁰⁷

Dear Mr. Dörffel!

Your son has sent me your request concerning the Chaconne. Above all, I must express my warm thanks to you for the cordially complimentary way in which you tell me that you enjoyed my rendition of Bach's things.

If only to return your kindness, I should like to fulfil your request to ‘mark’ the Chaconne in my way and, in particular, to write out the arpeggios.

But when I think about it, I have to conclude that precisely this has something unworkable about it: for what you may have liked about my rendition is probably that it sounded free and did not carry the stamp of the reflective, such that I did not play with exactly the same nuances from one time to another.

For me, for example, the effect of the arpeggios comes from producing a broadly conceived crescendo in such a way that, with the increase in tone strength, 5 and then 6 notes develop from the four demisemiquavers, until the six notes gain the upper hand, and the bass then also emerges more markedly.

I really don't know myself when I start with the 5 or 6 notes: it will vary, depending on whether I crescendo sooner or later – which again depends on momentary matters, such as less or more aroused mood, better or worse bow hair which speaks more easily in the piano or in the forte, thinner or thicker strings, oh, I don't know what unforeseen eventualities! But, in my opinion, it cannot be written down. If one were to do it in one or the other manner, Bach's text would be too subjectively coloured. – And here, unfortunately, we have reached a sore point which concerns most of the editors of our time (I may frankly admit to you at this point), for example, even David's works, which are in many respects highly commendable, but that annoy me to a degree that I always try to play from copies other than his.

Nowadays, people mark, people arrange really far too much on other people's things – (on one's own things, one's markings should be as meticulously detailed as possible!).

He who does not have a sufficiently general musical education as a player, a sufficiently warm feeling for the composer, such that the technical as well as the spiritual emerges from his own understanding, should refrain from playing for others.

For a schoolmaster, which I am now, that is hardly pedagogical?! ¹⁰⁸ Perhaps – in the same way, the teacher's task does not seem to me to be to train, but to add to the above-desired degree of understanding, whereby certainly some of the editions by David, who was a fine head and a skilled artist, can still have their stimulating benefit.

But, all in all, our modern practice of arranging ‘for practical use’ for conservatories leads to mannerism.

For the same reason that some often-justified quietly spoken aside in a lecture can be well-nigh ruined by writing it down – one may regard an engraved cresc: mf, f, ff crudely, and it sounds even harder and more intrusive translated into tone! – But now I have not only not fulfilled your flattering wish, but also given a kind of boring lecture, and I have nothing more to say in my defence than that at least you would be unjust toward my disposition if you were to say: qui s'excuse s'accuse.

I would gladly have consented!

Respectfully yours,

Joseph Joachim

Joachim did, eventually, reconsider the idea of making an edition of the Bach Sonatas and Partitas. The well-known Joachim–Moser edition (1908) was published after his death by Bote & Bock, and served generations of violinists as authoritative.¹⁰⁹ The Joachim–Moser edition was the first to make use of the now-accepted autograph, which it retains for comparison on a lower staff, in the manner of the earlier David edition.¹¹⁰ The circumstances under which it was made, explained in Andreas Moser's preface, have raised objections as to whether it can be considered a ‘valid legacy’.¹¹¹ Trusting Moser's comments, and mindful of Joachim's remarks to Dörffel, the posthumous edition can at best be considered a genuine, if provisional, ‘recorded manifestation’ of Joachim's creative mind. As his letter to Dörffel indicates, Joachim played the solos variously, seldom twice the same, and may never have played them exactly as indicated in the Joachim–Moser text. He would not have wished, or expected, for the edition to be used in too literal or prescriptive a manner, nor to be considered the last word on his interpretive ideas.¹¹² In any case, his inclusion of the Urtext below the edited part carries its own implications. Sola scriptura does not rule out a multitude of exegeses.

Envoi

In 1829, Franz Schubert's friend Eduard von Bauernfeld wrote, ‘Truly the best impression a work of art can engender is – another work of art!’.¹¹³ Johannes Brahms heard Joachim play the Chaconne often, and on at least one occasion played it with him.¹¹⁴ His response to the experience was to create his own left-hand piano arrangement of the Chaconne for which he insisted the title should read ‘von Bach’ (by Bach), and not ‘nach Bach’ (after Bach).¹¹⁵ In a letter to Clara Schumann, Brahms writes:

the piece entices me to engage with it in every way. One does not always want to hear music merely in the air, and Joachim is not often here, so one tries it this way and that. However I do it – with orchestra or piano – the pleasure is always lost. I find only one way to create for myself a very diminished, yet approximate and completely pure enjoyment of the work: if I play it with my left hand alone! It makes me think of the story of Columbus and the egg!¹¹⁶ The similar level of difficulty, the kinds of techniques, the arpeggiations, everything comes together to make me – feel like a violinist!¹¹⁷

Brahms speaks here of ‘the work’, and writes that it cannot be fully apprehended without physical engagement – without acknowledging and reproducing its difficulty. That is to say, for Brahms, the ‘work’ was not fully present in the score, and it was not sufficient to simply ‘let the music sound in one's mind’ – ‘in the air’. There is no satisfaction in a frictionless rendition. He had to play it, so to speak with one hand tied behind his back, to capture the tactile experience of Joachim's performance – to feel like a violinist.

Joachim established Bach's Chaconne at the centre of the canon and of the violinist's repertoire. Though written 300 years ago, the Chaconne is not merely an artefact. For the violinist, it is a sublime challenge, spiritual, mental, and physical, which stands like Everest, to which one brings all of one's powers – one's whole self – in performance. It belongs, not to the ‘Imaginary Museum’, but to the Wunderkammer of Musical Works – the cabinet of musical wonders in which, as in the Wunderkammern of old, it is expected that one should ‘pick up and handle the objects … feel their textures, their weights, their particular strangeness’.¹¹⁸ It is a work to be used – a work in which difficulty challenges virtuosity as an essential element of expression – a work, the performance of which can serve as a tool of personal growth or a display of identity. As a series of developing variations, it is also, in a sense, a Wunderkammer in nuce: an object which replicates in form its own use and purpose.

From early youth, Joachim returned time and again to the Sei solo of Bach to convey his deepest thoughts and most powerful feelings, to refresh and challenge his technique, to ground himself in what he considered the profundity of German culture, and to establish his place in the history of the musical art. At the fiftieth anniversary jubilee of his performing debut, held at the Berlin Hochschule on 1 March 1889, Joachim's Hamlet and Henry IV overtures and ‘Hungarian’ concerto were performed – the latter by three of his former pupils, Hugo Olk, Johann Kruse, and Henri Petri each taking a movement. Andreas Moser relates, ‘When the ovations would not cease, Joachim took Olk's violin out of his hand as a sign that he wanted to perform something himself to express his thanks. With the words: ‘Let us return to Bach!’ he put the violin to his chin and played the Bach Chaconne with such perfection as had hardly ever been heard from him in earlier years’.¹¹⁹