11 - Performers as Authors of Music History: Joseph and Amalie Joachim
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 October 2022
Summary
Who creates the history of music? Composers, of course, but also interpreters. Certainly, nineteenth-century performers such as Joseph Joachim and his wife Amalie Joachim saw themselves in this role: he in the domain of chamber music for strings, and she in the domain of song. The differing effects of their artistic work after their death can hardly be separated from questions of genre and gender, and the possibility of linking individual cultural activity with an institution.
Joseph Joachim's Authority
The photograph in Figure 11-1 shows Joseph Joachim in his capacity as director of the Akademische Musikschule für ausübende Tonkunst, in the full vestment and chain of office of the Preußische Akademie der Künste founded in 1696 and representing not only Prussia, but also the German “cultural nation.” He belonged to a group consisting exclusively of men: the Department of Music of the Akademie der Künste (Figure 11-2).
Joseph Joachim was not merely a brilliant violinist, an interesting composer, and the founder and head of the first state Musikhochschule in Germany; he was also one of the most influential figures in the German music world. For him, to be a German was not simply a question of birth, language, or nationality; it also brought with it an aspiration toward the universal.
How strongly the idea of nationalism shaped his contemporaries’ assessment of Joachim's artistic work is well demonstrated in a 1918 summary of the history of virtuosity by Adolph Weissmann:
An ideal alliance of spiritual depth and an innately musical nature accomplished the wonder. The foreign had to penetrate the German and approach the senses through the allure of performance. In the end, one thing in Germany counters virtuosity: the spirit of polyphony, the expression of which is ensemble playing. Compliant objectivity is its essence, and every emergence of the individual seems vain and threatening. Thus, [in ensemble playing] one sees the Italian forms etherealizing, deepening, broadening. Only in Germany can the ensemble grow to the integrated diversity of the orchestra. But nowhere does one have such slight regard for the audience's senses as here. The German spirit of the ensemble has now passed from the orchestra to chamber music.
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- The Creative Worlds of Joseph Joachim , pp. 176 - 190Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2021