The Music of Joseph Joachim by Katharina Uhde

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Music of Joseph Joachim by Katharina Uhde Robert W. Eshbach The Music of Joseph Joachim. By Katharina Uhde. Woodbridge: Boydell, 2018. [xxv, 506 p. ISBN 9781783272846 (hardcover), $99.00.] Music examples, illustrations, appendix, bibliography, index. In early middle age, Joseph Joachim abandoned his creative life as a composer. He never made explicit his reasons for doing so, but for him to have given up such an essential part of his artistic identity they must have been acute and compelling. "Only he is a genuine artist," he wrote to Bettina von Arnim, "for whom art is not a pendant that he can put on or remove at will" (p. 59, my trans.; original in Ver -steigerung 155, am 5 Juli 1929; I. [End Page 268] Autographen aus verschiedenen Gebieten; II. Handschriftlicher Nachlaß der Bettine von Arnim; Dritter und letzter Teil [Berlin: Karl Ernst Henrici, 1929], 59). What could have caused him to renounce such a deeply felt vocation—one which held such promise of success? Donald Tovey hints at various explanations for Joachim's decision, among them the momentous personal and aesthetic rift that occurred midcentury between the advocates of a gradually evolving musical art rooted in "timeless" canonic texts and principles, and the radical "progressive" party that gathered around Franz Liszt in the 1850s. This "War of the Romantics" was the first great questioning of the meaning and utility of the classical canon, founded upon the works of Ludwig van Beethoven and Johann Sebastian Bach, and expanded both backward and forward in time. It is likely that this increasingly acrimonious and partisan dispute played a substantial role in Joachim's decision. Tovey suggests this, citing Joachim's lasting distaste for "musical metaphysics, what with Wagner and Liszt and the eternal jabber of their disciples" (Mary Grierson, Donald Francis Tovey: A Biography Based on Letters [London: Oxford University Press, 1952], 104). Like Feliz Mendelssohn-Bartholdy and Johannes Brahms, Joachim preferred to speak through his tones; he avoided musical diatribe, and he never engaged in journalism. Therein lies much of the interest and significance of Katharina Uhde's The Music of Joseph Joachim: the first and only comprehensive exploration of the evolution of Joseph Joachim's musical thought. In the pages of Uhde's monograph we experience the maturation of one of the greatest minds of the long nineteenth century as represented in his music. Though Joachim's compositions never enduringly entered the repertoire, much less the canon, with Uhde's guidance they offer a fascinating in sight into their creator's musical, personal, intellectual, and spiritual journey, while illuminating the milieux in which his early life unfolded. Uhde is perhaps uniquely qualified to take on a task of such magnitude and intellectual challenge. The scope of her researches is astonishing: there seems to be no archive she has not visited and no scrap of paper she has not examined, interpreted, and contextualized. Her command of the secondary literature is similarly comprehensive, encompassing aspects of history, biography, literary criticism, psychology, music analysis, and performance practice. A performing violinist of significant attainments, an engaging writer, and an erudite as well as indefatigable scholar, Uhde leads us confidently on an excursion of potentially bewildering complexity. From the beginning, Joachim was a reluctant composer, lacking in selfconfidence. As a youth, he was admonished by his uncle Wilhelm Frigdor for his fecklessness: "When he is older, if he stands there merely as a violin player, then he is nothing" (family correspondence, Vienna, 2 December 1844, bequest of Agnes Keep, British Library, Music Collections, Add. MS 42718). Yet it was in his compositions that he worked out his deepest concerns: his obsessive infatuation with Gisela von Arnim; his identity as a Hungarian, a Jew, a German, and a Victorian Englishman; his dual musical life as a virtuoso and a composer; his scholarly and literary interests; and his conflicting allegiances to mentors and friends. There was never a composer for whom the struggle to find a style was so fraught with personal consequences. The poor public reception of his profoundly serious works may have played a part in steering Joachim away from a composing career. "You know what little sympathy my music has met with...