KAREN
LEISTRA-
Improvisational Idyll: Joachim’s “Presence”
and Brahms’s Violin Concerto, op. 77
KAREN LEISTRA-JONES
Reflecting in 1905 on Joseph Joachim’s involve-
ment with Brahms’s Violin Concerto, op. 77, J.
A. Fuller Maitland emphasized that, “for some
years [Joachim] was the only interpreter. What
part he bore in the actual making of the work
itself will never be known; but the accepted
cadenza is owned as his; and, without his play-
ing, the work must have fallen dead as far as
practical music is concerned, since no one else
would have been able to show the public all
that it contained of beauty and depth.”1 His
account reflected commonly held views on
Joachim’s singular importance to this work.
Brahms had conceived the concerto with
Joachim in mind as the soloist, and from the
I would like to thank James Hepokoski, Margaret Notley,
and Matthew Butterfield for their insightful comments on
various drafts of this article.
1
J. A. Fuller Maitland, Joseph Joachim (London: J. Lane,
1905), 39–40.
19th-Century Music, vol. 38, no. 3, pp. 243–271 ISSN: 0148-2076, electronic ISSN 1533-8606. © 2015 by the Regents of
the University of California. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article
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reprintInfo.asp. DOI: 10.1525/ncm.2015.38.3.243.
JONES
Joachim’s
“Presence”
very beginning Joachim had been actively in-
volved in shaping it. In August 1878, Brahms
had begun to send passages from the new con-
certo to his friend, asking for comments and
suggestions about the violin writing. Joachim
had happily obliged, contributing numerous
suggestions on the solo violin part, many of
which Brahms incorporated into the final ver-
sion.
As Fuller Maitland noted, Joachim also
played an important role in disseminating and
interpreting the concerto in its early years. Be-
ginning with its premiere in Leipzig on 1 Janu-
ary 1879, he performed the concerto in cities
across Europe, and until the concerto was pub-
lished ten months after the premiere, he was
the only soloist with access to the work. In-
deed, as far as the musical public was con-
cerned, during these months Brahms’s new con-
certo “existed” only through Joachim’s offi-
cially sanctioned performances, and he seems
to have achieved a kind of symbolic ownership
243
 19 TH of this work. So strong was its identification
CENTURY
MUSIC with his persona and playing style that other
violinists were reportedly reluctant to incorpo-
rate it into their repertoire, even after it be-
came available in published form. It was not
until later, in the 1880s and 1890s, that such
violinists as Adolph Brodsky, Marie Soldat, and
Branislaw Huberman took up the concerto.2
Joachim’s presence in Brahms’s Violin Con-
certo continues to be felt today. Hardly any
program note fails to mention his importance
to the concerto, and his cadenza has achieved
near textual status as by far the most widely
performed option in the concert hall.3 Boris
Schwarz articulated a common perception when
he wrote in 1983 that the concerto was not just
for Joachim; instead, it represented an “intan-
gible interplay between the art of Brahms and
that of Joseph Joachim.”4
But what does it mean for a performer to be
“in” a musical work, so closely associated with
it that his or her personality seems integral to
its identity? Thanks to Schwarz and two recent
critical editions of the Violin Concerto,
Joachim’s compositional contributions are rela-
tively well understood.5 His role as a performer,
however, has received little attention. Aside
from more technically oriented studies of per-
formance practice, critical discussions have
tended to highlight the importance of Joachim’s
performances only in vague terms.6 They typi-
2
Boris Schwarz, “Joseph Joachim and the Genesis of
Brahms’s Violin Concerto,” Musical Quarterly 69/4 (1983):
525.
3
This is reflected in critical editions of the concerto; the
Brahms Neue Ausgabe sämtliche Werke includes various
versions of Joachim’s cadenza in an appendix in the vol-
ume devoted to this work. In Joachim’s own edition of the
concerto’s solo part, published as part of his Violinschule
(1902–05), the cadenza is merged seamlessly into the text
of the solo part. See Johannes Brahms: Violinkonzert D-
Dur opus 77, ed. Linda Correll Roesner and Michael Struck
(Munich: G. Henle, 2004); and Joseph Joachim and Andreas
Moser, Violinschule, 3 vols. (Berlin: Simrock, 1905), III,
27–48.
4
Schwarz, “Joseph Joachim,” 503.
5
Ibid., 503–26; Roesner and Struck, critical commentary to
Johannes Brahms: Violinkonzert, xi–xxiii; and Clive Brown,
critical commentary to Brahms: Concerto in D Major for
Violin and Orchestra, op. 77 (New York: Bärenreiter, 2006),
iii–xviii.
6
Examples of performance practice studies include Brown,
critical commentary, Concerto in D Major, xiii–xvii and
idem, “Joachim’s Violin Playing and the Performance of
244
cally remind us that the concerto was com-
posed for Joachim, with his performance style
in mind, and describe the Hungarian-style fi-
nale as an homage to Joachim’s Hungarian na-
tionality and to his Hungarian Concerto—but
they stop there. 7 A full understanding of
Joachim’s role in this concerto must account
for the role played by his carefully crafted per-
sona as a performer and the cultural meanings
that this persona activated.
As one of the most celebrated performers of
his age, Joachim cultivated a characteristic pub-
lic image through his performances. The cor-
nerstone of this image was his attitude of un-
compromising seriousness, which informed his
approach to performance (often praised for its
self-restraint and fidelity to composers’ pre-
sumed intentions) and his selection of reper-
toire drawn from an emerging canon of clas-
sics.8 But while such a Werktreue approach has
often been equated with the deliberate nega-
tion of the performer’s agency and presence, an
examination of contemporary Joachim recep-
tion shows that in his performances, this was
not usually perceived to be the case.9 In fact, a
recurring trope in Joachim reception associated
him with an ideal of improvisation-like perfor-
mance that, as Mary Hunter has shown, played
an important role in Romantic performance
aesthetics, yet it has often been overlooked in
Brahms’s String Music,” in Performing Brahms: Early Evi-
dence of Performing Style, ed. Michael Musgrave and Ber-
nard D. Sherman (New York: Cambridge University Press,
2003), 48–98.
7
Schwarz’s article is typical in this respect; he writes,
“Brahms seems to have projected his concerto through
Joachim’s image of ‘modest, unadorned greatness [a quota-
tion from Hanslick’s famous review of Joachim from 1862].’
Certainly the Hungarian-style Finale is an homage to
Joachim who had dedicated his Hungarian Concerto to
Brahms.” Schwarz, “Joseph Joachim,” 506.
8
See Beatrix Borchard, Stimme und Geige: Amalie und
Joseph Joachim, ein Beitrag zur Künstlersozial- und
Interpretationsgeschichte des 19. Jahrhunderts (Vienna:
Böhlau, 2005), and Karen Leistra-Jones, “Staging Authen-
ticity: Joachim, Brahms, and the Politics of Werktreue Per-
formance,” Journal of the American Musicological Soci-
ety 66/2 (2013): 397–436.
9
For a consideration of this form of Werktreue, see Lydia
Goehr’s discussion of “the perfect performance of music”
in The Quest for Voice: On Music, Politics, and the Lim-
its of Philosophy (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1998), 142–45.
modern scholarship.10 In an extended essay on
the subject, the critic Paul Bekker defined this
ideal as follows: “the spirit of the improvisa-
tion ideal (Improvisationsideal) is to allow the
musical work to emerge as though in the mo-
ment of sounding through the intimate, cre-
ative fusion of composer and performer, and in
this way, to bring it into accord with the origi-
nal creative impulse.”11 Musical performance,
Bekker continued, is “according to its origins
and essence, an art of improvisation. It creates
from the inspiration of the moment—even
more, it is the immediate registering of a mo-
ment that has been heightened to the most
intense aliveness possible. Music is indeed only
to be thought of as arising in the moment of
sounding.”12 Writing in 1921, Bekker was
troubled by what he saw as the ascendancy of
the ideal of “reproduction,” or strict fidelity to
composers’ texts at the expense of the per-
former, and he rather surprisingly cast Joachim,
along with the pianist Hans von Bülow, as the
last great representative of the contrasting im-
provisation ideal. While Bekker’s essay might
be dismissed as a nostalgic idealization of a lost
“golden age” of performance, his comments
echoed descriptions of Joachim’s playing by
many of the violinist’s contemporaries, which
often remarked on his almost uncanny ability
to present composed musical works as though
they were being improvised, created on the spot
through a mysterious fusion of Joachim him-
self with the mind or spirit of the composer.
10
Mary Hunter, “‘To Play as if from the Soul of the Com-
poser’: The Idea of the Performer in Early Romantic Aes-
thetics,” Journal of the American Musicological Society
58/2 (2005): 357–98.
11
“Dieses Improvisationsideal geht dem Sinn nach darauf
aus, das Musikstück durch innige, schöpferische Ver-
schmelzung von Komponist und Darsteller als im
Augenblick des Erklingens entstehend erscheinen zu lassen
und dadurch mit dem ursprünglichen Schaffenswillen in
Einklang zu bringen.” Paul Bekker, “Improvisation und
Reproduktion,” in Klang und Eros (Berlin: Deutsche
Verlags-Anstalt, 1922), II, 302.
12
“Die ausübende musikalische Kunst ist ihrem Ursprung
und Wesen nach eine Kunst der Improvisation. Sie schafft
aus der Eingebung des Augenblickes, mehr noch, sie ist
überhaupt unmittelbare Erfassung eines zu intensivstem
Lebensgefühl gesteigerten Augenblickes. Musik ist
eigentlich nicht anders als im Augenblick des Erklingens
erst entstehend zu denken.” Bekker, “Improvisation und
Reproduktion,” 300.
The idea of an improvisatory fusion between KAREN
LEISTRA-
performer and composer was important to JONES
Brahms’s Violin Concerto not only because the Joachim’s
“Presence”
concerto was known to be the result of close
collaboration between Joachim and Brahms. The
ideal of improvisation was also inscribed with
cultural meanings, especially when situated
within broader developments in nineteenth-cen-
tury attitudes toward performance and creativ-
ity. Joachim’s identification with this ideal pro-
vides an opening through which to examine
the intersections that can exist between a par-
ticular performer, the meanings ascribed to per-
formance, and specific formal and expressive
features of a musical work. In this article, I
outline how Joachim was able to create the
impression of “improvised” musical works,
what these performances meant to some of his
nineteenth-century listeners, and what impro-
visation and spontaneity could symbolize in
Brahmsian compositional aesthetics and in Ro-
mantic concepts of authorship. These questions
lead to a reading of the Violin Concerto that
moves beyond the traditional concept of the
musical work as an entity that, while it may
have been influenced by a performer, is ulti-
mately located in the composer’s text. Instead,
this reading conceives of the Violin Concerto
as a “script,” and Joachim’s performances as
acts that worked in conjunction with that script
in an unfolding process of signification.13 This
offers a new way of conceptualizing Joachim’s
“presence” in that work, one that emphasizes
the tensions that it activated between improvi-
sation and composition, doing and thinking,
and performing and composing. The larger goal
of this reading is to recover some of the histori-
cal meanings that resided in not only the
concerto’s notated score but also its status as a
performed event.
Improvising Musical Works
Accounts of Joachim’s playing often described
him as an exceptionally improvisatory or spon-
taneous-sounding performer, despite his cel-
13
See Nicholas Cook, “Between Process and Product: Mu-
sic and/as Performance,” Music Theory Online 7/2 (April
2001).
245
 19 TH ebrated fidelity to composers’ texts. As early as
CENTURY
MUSIC 1844, a review of the young Joachim’s perfor-
mance of Beethoven’s Violin Concerto in Lon-
don described a strong impression of extempo-
rization: “[it] seems more like extemporaneous
performance and admits a greater degree of en-
thusiasm on the part of the instrumentalist.”14
This reviewer attributed this impression to
Joachim’s practice—still unusual at that time—
of playing musical works from memory. But
similar observations would occur regularly over
the course of his long career. In 1898, for ex-
ample, Andreas Moser would make a similar
claim: one of the main charms of Joachim’s
playing was that he obeyed “the inspiration of
the moment . . . [the work is] always created
anew.”15 These comments do not merely de-
scribe a spontaneous or engaging performance
style; instead, they describe a performance situ-
ation in which an existing musical work is
presented as though “extemporized” or “cre-
ated anew” before the audience’s eyes.
At first glance, these descriptions of an im-
provisatory style seem to be at odds with
Joachim’s well-established reputation as an un-
compromising Werktreue performer who was
respectful of composers’ presumed “intentions”
almost to the point of self-effacement. An im-
provisatory performance aesthetic allows for
the illusion of authorial agency on the per-
former’s part. The performer, in other words,
can appear as the creator or originator of the
musical material being presented, which may
appear to be a challenge to the reverence for
the figure of the composer that is a definitive
feature of the Werktreue tradition. But instead,
14
“Philharmonic Concerts,” Illustrated London News (1
June 1844): 354.
15
“Seine Vorträge wirken hauptsächlich darum so
hinreissend, weil sie, von den Eingebungen des Augenblicks
beeinflusst, niemals stereotypisch sind. Vielmehr muss der
aufmerksam Lauschende den Eindruck davontragen, dass
er auch bei der Wiedergabe eines hundertmal gespielten
Stückes immer noch nachschöpferisch thätig ist und dem
Kunstwerk neue Seiten abzugewinnen weiss.” Moser, Jo-
seph Joachim, 273. Joachim himself worked with Moser
on this biography; it documents not only Moser’s impres-
sions, but also how Joachim himself wanted to be per-
ceived. In her biography of Amalie and Joseph Joachim,
Beatrix Borchard acknowledges Joachim’s contribution to
this text by referring to the authors as Moser/Joachim, a
coauthor team. Borchard, Stimme und Geige, 26.
246
in many of Joachim’s performances, the illu-
sion of improvisation seemed to open up a space
in which the here and now of performance
merged with the idea of the musical work as
the expression of the thoughts and feelings of
an absent composer; to many observers, Joachim
seemed to fuse with, channel, or even become
the composer of the work he was presenting.
To Fuller Maitland, Joachim had “the power of
making music seem like the natural spontane-
ous utterance of his inmost feelings, as well as
a faithful reproduction of the thoughts of what-
ever master he may be interpreting.”16 Von
Bülow went even further and experienced
Joachim playing as Beethoven; he quipped, “Yes-
terday Joachim did not play Beethoven and Bach;
Beethoven played himself.”17 Brahms himself
reminisced about a time in his life when, still
“wandering in chaotic enthusiasm,” he heard
Joachim play Beethoven’s Violin Concerto and
understood Joachim to have been the composer
of the concerto. Describing the occasion to
Joachim several years later, in 1855, he wrote,
“I was your most enthusiastic listener. . . . It
wasn’t at all important to me to take you for
Beethoven. I have always considered his con-
certo to be your own.”18 Brahms was compli-
menting his friend; rather than implying that
Joachim had allowed his own personality to
eclipse that of Beethoven, Brahms described
his impression that Joachim, having identified
16
Alexander Fuller Maitland, Joseph Joachim, 26. As Fuller
Maitland’s observation shows, such descriptions also ap-
peared sometimes in response to other members of the
Brahms circle. Walter Hübbe, for example, famously de-
scribed Brahms’s performance style in similar terms: “He
does not play like a consummately trained, highly intelli-
gent musician making other people’s works his own . . .
but rather like one who is himself creating, who interprets
the works of the masters as an equal, not merely reproduc-
ing them, but rendering them as if they gushed forth di-
rectly and powerfully from his own heart.” Quoted in
Michael Musgrave, A Brahms Reader (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 2000), 122.
17
“Nicht Joachim hat gestern Beethoven und Bach gespielt,
Beethoven hat selbst gespielt.” Quoted in Borchard, Stimme
und Geige, 511.
18
“Du spieltest es in Hamburg, es muss viele Jahre her
sein, ich war gewiss Dein begeistertster Zuhörer. Es war
eine Zeit, in der ich noch recht chaotisch schwärmte und
es mir gar nicht darauf ankam, Dich für Beethoven zu
halten. Das Konzert hielt ich so immer für Dein eigenes.”
Letter to Joachim, 22 February 1855, in Johannes Brahms
im Briefwechsel mit Joseph Joachim, I, 91–92.
himself so completely with the concerto, was
able to present it as though it were “his own,”
as though he himself was the work’s creator.
At times the impression that Joachim was
embodying or perhaps being possessed by a de-
ceased composer such as Beethoven seems to
have bordered on the mysterious or uncanny.
Otto Gumprecht, for example, gave the follow-
ing account in a review of one of Joachim’s
performances of the Beethoven Violin Concerto
that appeared in Berlin’s National Zeitung in
1852:
. . . with the first tones of his violin I forgot
everything else—the concert room, the public, even
Herr Joachim. . . . During the Adagio I first looked
towards the platform, but I could no longer perceive
the figure of the player, for it was to me completely
obliterated by another. I clearly recognized it, that
thickset, carelessly-clad figure, with wild hair all
standing on end, and high forehead upon which the
loftiest thoughts had left their illuminating traces,
deep-sunk eyes, from which beamed the boldest spirit
and the warmest love for humanity, and lips on
which pain had drawn its sharpest lines and creases—
the same features as those in the picture which
hangs above my piano, and which so often looked
down on me and appeared to smile sympathetically
when my fingers falteringly played the Sonata in F
minor, or that in B
major, or the Fantasia Op. 77. It
was he himself, the creator of the Ninth Symphony,
whom I imagined I saw face to face. As the subject of
the Finale rang forth, his face assumed an expression
of jaunty humor looking on indulgently at the fool’s
play of life. With every figure his expression changed,
reflecting a world of feeling, until, with the last
stroke of the bow, the vision vanished. Before me
there stood again Herr Joachim, who had played the
whole concerto by heart, and who departed amidst
such a storm of applause as had never been heard in
this hall before.19
19
“Aber bei den ersten Klängen seiner Geige vergass ich alles
andre, den Konzertsaal, das Publikum, sogar Herrn Joachim.
. . . Erst im Adagio blickte ich wieder hin, aber von der
Gestalt des Geigers konnte ich nichts mehr bemerken; sie
war mir durch eine andere ganz und gar verdeckt. Ich
erkannte sie wohl, diese gedrungene, nachlässig gekleidete
Gestalt mit ihren wirren, emporstehenden Haaren, der hohen
Stirn, auf der die erhabensten Gedanken ihre leuchtenden
Spuren hinterlassen, mit ihren tiefliegenden Augen, aus
denen der kühnste Geist und die wärmste Menschenliebe
hervorschauten, mit den Lippen, um der Schmerz seine
schärfsten Linien und Falten gezogen. Dieselben Züge hatten
In Gumprecht’s account, Joachim’s playing lit- KAREN
LEISTRA-
erally seemed to conjure Beethoven as a physi- JONES
cal and visual presence, a creator who experi- Joachim’s
“Presence”
enced, felt, and lived the music as it arose in
real time.
Such ideas about a subjective merger between
performer and composer were not entirely new
in Joachim’s time. A longstanding tradition has
valued the qualities of spontaneity, extempori-
zation, and immediacy even within the con-
fines of the Werktreue ideal, and celebrated
performers for their ability to create the illu-
sion that even the most carefully thought-
through performances of works are in fact be-
ing created “in the moment.”20 As Hunter has
shown, this tradition was important in early-
Romantic performance aesthetics. Numerous
aesthetic treatises and performance manuals
from the early nineteenth century described an
ideal of performance as “spontaneous cre-
ja so oft von dem Bilde, das über meinem Klavier hängt, auf
mich herabgesehen und mitleidig zu lächeln geschienen,
wenn meine Finger die Sonate in F-Moll, die grosse in B-Dur
oder die Phantasie op. 77 stammelten. Er war es selbst, der
Schöpfer der ,neunten Symphonie’, den ich von Angesicht
zu Angesicht zu schauen wähnte. Als das Thema des Finale
erklang, nahm sein Antlitz den Ausdruck des übermütigen
Humors an, der mit Behagen dem Narrenspiel des Lebens
zusieht. Bei jeder neuen Tonfigur veränderten sich die
Mienen, die eine ganze Welt der Empfindungen abspiegelten,
bis die Vision mit dem letzten Bogenstriche plötzlich
verschwand. Vor mir stand wieder Herr Joachim, der das
ganze Konzert auswendig gespielt hatte und mit einem
Beifallsturm, wie ihn dieser Saal wohl noch nie gehört,
entlassen wurde.“ Otto Gumprecht, Berliner National
Zeitung (13 Dec. 1852). Quoted in Andreas Moser, Joseph
Joachim: Ein Lebensbild (Berlin: Verlag der Deutschen
Brahms-Gesellschaft, 1908), I, 128–29.
20
In In Search of Opera, for example, Carolyn Abbate de-
scribed memorable performances that “conveyed the im-
pression that a work was being created at that moment,
‘before one’s eyes,’ never seeming to invite comparison
between what was being heard and some lurking double,
some transcendent work to which they had to measure
up.” Carolyn Abbate, In Search of Opera (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 2001), xiv. Similarly, Elliott
Carter described “the impression of improvisation of the
most rewarding kind when good performers take the trouble
to play music that is carefully written out as if they were
‘thinking it up’ themselves while they played it—that is,
when with much thought and practice they come to feel
the carefully written-out piece as part of themselves and
of their own experience, which they are communicating
to others directly from themselves at the moment of the
performance, in an alive way.” Allen Edwards, Flawed
Words and Stubborn Sounds: A Conversation with Elliott
Carter (New York: Norton, 1971), 78.
247
 19 TH ation.”21 According to this ideal, the performer,
CENTURY
MUSIC in real time and through intense identification
with the composer, would essentially appear
“as” the creator of the work or as an embodi-
ment of the composer’s spirit, “improvising”
the work in real time. This, in Hunter’s words,
was “one of the most powerful ways perfor-
mance discourse figured the act of performance
as both transparent to the work and fully
present.”22
But as Hunter notes, the practice of perfor-
mance in the early-Romantic era was generally
freer and less work-centered than theoretical
prescriptions about it.23 During the time of the
treatises described in her study there was rela-
tively little practical concern with the problem
of absolute fidelity to composers’ intentions in
musical performance, and the improvisation
ideal does not seem consistently to have in-
formed responses to performers in the early
part of the nineteenth century.24 Performance
culture in the first half of the nineteenth cen-
tury tended not only to view concerts as per-
former-centered rather than work-centered oc-
casions; it also favored the model of the com-
poser-virtuoso who played his or her own works,
rather than the performer-as-interpreter dedi-
cated to the works of others.25 But by the begin-
21
Hunter, “To Play as if from the Soul,” 367. The sources
Hunter cites include Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel,
Vorlesung über die Ästhetik (1818–29), Jean-Jacques
Rousseau’s entry “Exécution” in his Dictionnaire de
musique (1768), Christian Friedrich Daniel Schubart, Ideen
zu einer Ästhetik der Tonkunst (written 1784/85, pub-
lished 1806), J. A. P. Schulz’s entry “Vortrag” in Sulzer’s
Allgemeine Theorie der schönen Künste (1792), Pierre
Baillot, Méthode de violon (1803, with Pierre Rode and
Rodolphe Kreutzer) and L’art du violon (1835), and Johann
Nepomuk Hummel, Ausführliche theoretisch-practische
Anweisung zum Pianoforte-Spiel (1828).
22
Hunter, “To Play as if from the Soul,” 373.
23
Ibid., 361.
24
There were, of course, exceptions. Hunter cites a review
celebrating Baillot for being able to “[strip] away his ego to
become, by turn, Haydn, Boccherini, Mozart, and
Beethoven.” Ibid., 370.
25
See Carl Dahlhaus, Nineteenth-Century Music, trans. J.
Bradford Robinson (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1989), 134–42; William Weber, The Great Transformation
of Musical Taste: Concert Programming from Haydn to
Brahms (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008),
237–38; and Jim Samson, Virtuosity and the Musical Work:
The Transcendental Studies of Liszt (New York: Cam-
bridge University Press, 2003), 23–25.
248
ning of Joachim’s mature career in the 1850s
and 1860s, performance values had begun to
change, and a new group of performers, with
Joachim as one of its foremost representatives,
had made it its mission to replace popular and
flamboyant styles of virtuosity with a more
responsible, text-oriented approach appropriate
to music’s new position within a “museum
culture.”26 In this context, it was not unusual
to encounter descriptions of performers that
celebrated their ability to make well-known
works seem newly created in performance—
especially when those performers were thought
to be particularly identified with the canonic
tradition.27 But even within this newly work-
oriented performance culture, Joachim’s impro-
visatory style and his apparent ability to merge
with the absent figure of the composer were
seen as unique. To Carl Flesch, reminiscing
from a twentieth-century vantage point, this
quality set Joachim apart from his fellow musi-
cians: it was the “internal animation . . . and
imaginative freedom of the rendition, for all its
faithfulness to the text,” more than anything
else, that “left [Joachim] on so lonely a high
throne.”28
26
See Richard Taruskin’s discussion of the work-based “mu-
seum culture” that had come to dominate concert life by
Brahms’s time in The Oxford History of Western Music
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), III, 676–82;
and Lydia Goehr, The Imaginary Museum of Musical
Works: An Essay in the Philosophy of Music (New York:
Oxford University Press, 2002), esp. 243–86.
27
For example, a review of Clara Schumann in the Leipzig
Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung in 1871 described her
rendition of Beethoven’s C-Minor Piano Concerto as fol-
lows: “This concerto appeared to be newly created under
her hands, through this simple, clear, and yet still spirited
performance by Frau Schumann, and it made the impres-
sion of something immediately given forth” (So erschien
dasselbe durch den einfachen, klaren, und dennoch
begeisterten Vortrag der Frau Schumann wie eben unter
ihren Händen neu geschaffen und machte den Eindruck
des unmittelbar Gegebenen). Anonymous, Leipziger
allgemeine musikalische Zeitung 6/48 (1871): 764.
28
“Es war nicht die Vollkommenheit seiner geigerischen
Mittel, die ihn auf so einsamer Höhe thronen liess; es war
nicht der schöne Klang ‘an sich,’ der sein Quartettspiel
zum Erlebnis werden liess; es war die innere Beseeltheit,
der Adel der Gesinnung und die bei aller Texttreue
phantasievolle Freiheit der Wiedergabe, die seinem Spiel
jenen undefinierbaren Reiz gaben, dem jeder feinfühlige
Musiker erliegen musste.” Carl Flesch, Erinnerungen eines
Geigers (Freiburg: Atlantis Verlag, 1960), 32.
 Creating the Improvisation Illusion
How, then, was Joachim able to create these
impressions and inspire these kinds of responses
in his audience? Two of Joachim’s English sup-
porters, Fuller Maitland and Donald Francis
Tovey, attempted to answer these questions by
providing technical explanations for the mys-
terious “internal animation” of his perfor-
mances. Fuller Maitland pointed to the
violinist’s frequent subtle modifications to the
metronomic value of individual notes within a
phrase, claiming that it was this “elasticity”
that separated Joachim from the so-called clas-
sical players.29 Similarly, in a series of three
essays entitled “Performance and Personality,”
Tovey (writing under the pseudonym “Tami-
no”) used the example of Joachim to challenge
the popular notion that a performance must be
either subjective, individual, and personal or
“faithful, conscientious, clear,” and focused on
bringing out “the intentions of the composer.”30
In Tovey’s essay, Joachim, after a lifetime of
study during which his “personality grew in
the process of understanding and reproducing
the thoughts of the great composers,” was able
to combine fidelity with subjectivity through a
highly developed ability to “sympathize” with
these composers.31 An important aspect of his
playing that allowed this merger to happen was
his approach to rhythm, which Tovey called
“true” rather than “strict.” According to Tovey,
Joachim’s “true” rhythm was able to maintain
a sense of expansiveness from beat to beat, all
while keeping relatively steady time. This ex-
pansiveness, Tovey argued, freed up space for
Joachim to employ “agogic” accents and a free
approach to rhythm, even while keeping a rela-
tively steady tempo.32
These kinds of observations are certainly cor-
roborated by Joachim’s recordings with the
Gramophone & Typewriter Ltd. in 1903, in
which he often made dramatic adjustments to
rhythm, sometimes going so far as to alter the
29
Fuller Maitland, Joseph Joachim, 26.
30
Donald Francis Tovey (“Tamino”), “Performance and Per-
sonality,” part I, Musical Gazette (Dec. 1899): 1.
31
Ibid., 3–4.
32
Donald Francis Tovey (“Tamino”), “Performance and Per-
sonality,” Part III, Musical Gazette (July 1900): 33–35.
notated values significantly.33 This flexibility KAREN
LEISTRA-
was entirely in keeping with his written views JONES
on the matter; Joachim’s introduction to Joachim’s
“Presence”
Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto in his
Violinschule praised that composer’s perfect
understanding of “the elastic management of
time as a subtle means of expression.”34 When
describing these aspects of the Joachim record-
ings, commentators have typically emphasized
the “structural” or analytical reasons for
Joachim’s deviations from strictly notated mu-
sical time, but it is equally important to note
that to some of Joachim’s contemporaries such
as Tovey this aspect of his playing provided a
necessary bridge between the “here and now”
of performance and the thoughts and feelings
of the absent composer; as such, it could con-
tribute to a fantasy of real-time creation.35
But Joachim’s flexible and spontaneous ap-
proach to rhythm only partially accounts for
the impression of improvisational freedom;
these technical and stylistic features of his play-
ing were meaningful only in the context of his
broader image as a performer. This context in-
volved his reputation, physical comportment
during performances, social connections, and
practices both within and outside the concert
hall. Many of these aspects of his performing
persona were designed to encourage a wide-
spread belief that Joachim was somehow spe-
cially equipped to bring forth the mind, spirit,
and ideas of great composers. With the other
33
Joachim recorded five pieces; his own Romance in C, his
arrangement of Brahms’s Hungarian Dances Nos. 1 and 2,
and two Bach movements for solo violin (the Prelude from
Sonata No. 1 and the Bourrée from Partita No. 1).
34
Joachim and Moser, Violinschule, III, 228. Elsewhere in
this violin method Moser described rhythmic freedom as
“inwardly assimilated conformity with the law” that must
be used with restraint and caution (III, 16). For a detailed
discussion of these recordings and Joachim’s approach to
rubato, see Brown, “Joachim’s Violin Playing,” 87–90.
35
David Milsom, for example, has suggested that “rhyth-
mic fluctuation was used as a means of outlining the main
‘events’” of a composition. Similarly, Daniel Leech-
Wilkinson proposes that Joachim intended to emphasize
notes of “structural importance” by so lengthening them.
David Milsom, Theory and Practice in Late Nineteenth-
Century Violin Performance: An Examination of Style in
Performance, 1850–1900 (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2003),
165; and Daniel Leech-Wilkinson, The Changing Sound of
Music: Approaches to Studying Recorded Musical Perfor-
mance (London: CHARM, 2009), chap. 5, paragraph 2, http:/
/www.charm.rhul.ac.uk/studies/chapters/chap5.html.
249
 19 TH members of the Joachim Quartet, for example,
CENTURY
MUSIC he once performed the Cavatina from Beetho-
ven’s op. 130 in the room in which Beethoven
was thought to have been born, on instruments
associated with the deceased composer,36 an
event that must have evoked a spiritual or even
quasi-occult atmosphere of closeness to Beetho-
ven. Joachim also used biographical and per-
sonal connections with past and present com-
posers (such as Schumann, Mendelssohn, and
Brahms) to help create an image of himself as
someone unusually intimate with the creative
figures whose works he interpreted. In the case
of Beethoven, in which a direct biographical
connection was impossible to establish, Joachim
emphasized his closeness to the composer
through a few degrees of separation, noting in
his biography with Moser that those in noble
circles in Pest who had championed Joachim at
a young age had been the very same friends and
supporters of Beethoven: “One can almost find
a certain omen in the fact that he who later
became the greatest interpreter of Beethoven
was, already in his earliest childhood, connected
with people who, while they uttered the name
‘Beethoven’ with sacred awe and reverence, had
also been personally and spiritually close with
the great genius.”37
Joachim’s relationship to his late-nineteenth-
century audiences and the fantasies and desires
surrounding live performance that his perfor-
mances activated in his listeners were also im-
portant in constructing an illusion of improvi-
sation. The accounts by Brahms, Bülow,
Gumprecht, and others cited above attest not
only to a performer who was highly skilled at
making his performances seem like “spontane-
ous creations” but also to a community of lis-
teners eager to think of a Joachim concert as an
occasion on which great composers could be-
36
Borchard describes this event in Stimme und Geige, 513.
37
“Es liegt nahe, darin eine gewisse Vorbedeutung zu finden,
dass der nachmalige grösste Interpret Beethovenscher
Musik schon in frühester Kindheit mit Personen in Verkehr
trat, die zwar den Namen Beethoven mit einer gewisser-
massen heiligen Scheu und Ehrfurcht aussprachen, die aber
andererseits doch wieder dem grossen Genius menschlich
und seelisch nahe gestanden haben.” Moser, Joseph
Joachim, 8. For more on these circles, see Robert Eshbach,
“Joachim’s Youth—Joachim’s Jewishness,” Musical Quar-
terly 94/4 (2011): 548–92.
250
come “present,” or, as a sonnet to Joachim by
Robert Bridges phrased it, “the soul of great
Sebastian [Bach]” might be “brought near” or
“Beethoven’s inmost passion” might “speak.”38
To some extent, the desire to experience per-
formances as improvised speaks to tensions
within the Werktreue tradition itself. As Hunter
notes, in the nineteenth century the act of per-
formance was often conceived in dialectical
terms, as a site in which oppositional dualities
(including “the I and not-I of performer and
music; materiality of technique vs. ineffability
of expression; emptiness of virtuosity vs. moral
high ground of true music-making”) might be
resolved.39 One of the most important of these
dualities concerned the opposed concepts of
fidelity, on the one hand, and expressive imme-
diacy and subjectivity, on the other. Within
Werktreue discourse, fidelity to the composer’s
text was often articulated in such a way that a
performer’s “transparency” and self-abnegation
in the service of the composer’s ends became
moral exigencies. At the same time, there was
a concern that such disinterested fidelity could
lead to mechanical, disengaged, or inauthentic
performances of musical masterworks. In other
words, late-nineteenth-century audiences, in
addition to demanding respect for musical
works, wanted the assurance that performers
were fully present and engaged with the music,
and that they possessed an authentic relation-
ship to the subjectivity assumed to reside within
that music.40 A large part of a performer’s task
was to establish that he or she possessed a
“true” relationship to and experience of great
works in performance.
The improvisation illusion provided a space
in which some of these competing demands
38
“Belov’d of all to whom that Muse is dear / Who hid her
spirit of rapture from the Greek, / Whereby our art excelleth
the antique / Perfecting formal beauty to the ear; Thou that
hast been in England many a year / The interpreter who left
us nought to seek / Making Beethoven’s inmost passion
speak, / Bringing the soul of great Sebastian near; Their
music liveth ever, and ‘tis just / That thou, good Joachim—
so high thy skill— / Rank, as thou shalt upon the heavenly
hill / Laurel’d with them; for thy ennobling trust /
Remember’d when thy loving hand is still / And ev’ry ear
that heard thee stopt with dust.” Quoted in Fuller Maitland,
Joseph Joachim, 23.
39
Hunter, “To Play as if from the Soul,” 371.
40
See Leistra-Jones, “Staging Authenticity.”
could be reconciled. In accounts such as
Gumprecht’s (in which Joachim “became”
Beethoven while on stage), Bridges’s (in which
Beethoven “spoke” through Joachim), and
Moser’s (in which Joachim’s performances were
spontaneous creations), creator and performer
are imagined as one; both music and perfor-
mance can be experienced as immediate, spon-
taneous, and uninhibited subjective outpour-
ing.41 To hear Joachim as Beethoven, playing a
work by Beethoven, in other words, allowed for
an experience of music as unmediated self-ex-
pression. In this context, it is significant that
enthusiasm about Joachim’s performances as
spontaneous “creations” arose at a time when
actual improvisation was increasingly excluded
from concerts that focused on the performance
of canonic works. That is, they arose at a time
when composers themselves were becoming
less present in concert halls as interpreters of
their own music, as concerts were based in-
creasingly on music by past (and often deceased)
composers, and the occupational division be-
tween creation (composition) and interpreta-
tion (performance) in music was becoming more
pronounced. Accounts of listeners receiving
musical works “as though improvised” suggest
that there may have been some sense of loss
associated with these developments in concert
life. They show that for some listeners
Joachim’s performances involved a combina-
tion of Werktreue principles with the memory
of (and perhaps nostalgia for) the excitement
and spontaneity of a culture of improvisation, a
culture in which composer-performers regularly
played, embellished, and even “thought up”
their own music in real time before an audi-
ence.42 This experience may have been other-
41
As Laudan Nooshin has shown, improvisation has been
an “icon of musical difference” within the Western classi-
cal tradition, especially beginning in the nineteenth cen-
tury when an exclusively notated “art music” tradition
became a symbol of European musical superiority. As
Nooshin writes, qualities such as immediacy, spontane-
ity, and subjectivity could be understood variously as marks
of inferiority, or romanticized as qualities that were being
lost in modern Western societies. See Laudan Nooshin,
“Improvisation as ‘Other’: Creativity, Knowledge and
Power: The Case of Iranian Classical Music,” Journal of
the Royal Musical Association 128/2 (2003): 242–96.
42
For a discussion of this culture of improvisation, as well
as the ways in which improvisational practices such as
wise difficult to access as performers turned KAREN
LEISTRA-
their energy toward the responsible interpreta- JONES
tion of works by deceased composers, whose Joachim’s
“Presence”
lives and worlds were slipping into a past that
was no longer fully accessible to a modernizing
world.
Improvisation and Composition
The connection of improvisation with subjec-
tive immediacy and emotional spontaneity car-
ried its implications beyond musical perfor-
mance toward more basic ideas about self-ex-
pression and artistic creation, ideas that also
played a significant role in compositional aes-
thetics. Fantasies about Joachim’s “improvisa-
tions” involved not only a virtuoso in the act
or simulation of improvisation; they also in-
volved a musical work being unfolded or “im-
provised” in real time, as though by the com-
poser. But what does it mean for a musical
work to sound improvised? And what were the
implications of this ideal for Brahms’s music,
in particular?
In a recent study, literary historian Angela
Esterhammer has explored the widespread phe-
nomenon of improvised poetic performances in
the Romantic era.43 This genre of performance
was most associated with Italian performers
known as improvvisatori and improvvisatrici,
but it became an object of fascination for north-
ern European authors, critics, and audiences,
exerting a powerful influence on nineteenth-
century literary culture more generally. As
Esterhammer shows, improvisation and impro-
visers became the locus for a number of potent
cultural meanings during this time. Among
these was the concept of the improviser as the
embodiment of inspired poetic genius, a figure
preluding survived into the age of the work-oriented piano
recital, see Valerie Woodring Goertzen, “By Way of Intro-
duction: Preluding by 18th- and Early 19th-Century Pia-
nists,” Journal of Musicology 14/3 (1996): 299–337; and
Kenneth Hamilton, After the Golden Age: Romantic
Pianism and Modern Performance (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2008).
43
Angela Esterhammer, Romanticism and Improvisation,
1750–1850 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008).
Also see Melina Esse, “Encountering the improvvisatrice
in Italian Opera,” Journal of the American Musicological
Society 66/3 (2013): 709–70.
251
 19 TH who was able to put the workings of creative
CENTURY
MUSIC inspiration on display for an audience. The
improviser’s creativity was often understood
according to a particular Romantic poetic ideal:
that of the “natural genius,” whose effusions
were spontaneous, sudden, and seemingly un-
tutored.44 For the “natural genius,” the poem
or composition springs to completion sponta-
neously, without conscious deliberation or in-
tervention on the part of the poet, and without
the arduous process of revising, reconsidering,
and fine-tuning that normally attends poetic
invention.45 This involved the concept of im-
provisation in one of the enduring preoccupa-
tions of Romantic aesthetics: the contrast and
interplay between natural, spontaneous creativ-
ity and its learned, self-reflective counterpart,
or, in Friedrich von Schiller’s famous terms,
between naïve and sentimental poetry.46
But the valuation of improvisation and spon-
taneous creativity changed over the course of
the nineteenth century. In an era increasingly
dominated by writing and print culture, many
(including some of the improvvisatori them-
selves) harbored doubts as to whether improvi-
sations could count as “serious” artistic state-
ments. It is possible to trace a similar ambiva-
lence about improvisation in nineteenth-cen-
tury music, as Dana Gooley has done in a re-
cent article on Robert Schumann. Over the
course of his career, Schumann gradually reined
in the improvisational play that had furnished
the material for many of his early composi-
tions in favor of a more “mental” approach in
which he rigorously worked through musical
44
Esterhammer, Romanticism and Improvisation, 47.
45
M. H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic
Theory and the Critical Tradition (New York: Oxford Uni-
versity Press, 1953), 189.
46
Significantly, Schiller’s language in On Naïve and Senti-
mental Poetry often implied a connection between naïve
poetry, nature, and some of the qualities associated with
improvisation such as spontaneity and live presence. The
naïve artist, for example, was able to “touch us by nature,
by sensual truth, by the living present” (Jene rühren uns
durch Natur, durch sinnliche Wahrheit, durch lebendige
Gegenwart). Friedrich von Schiller, “Über naive und
sentimentalische Dichtung,” in Schillers sämtliche Werke
(Stuttgart: Verlag der Gotta’schen Buchhandlung, 1894),
XV, 29.
252
ideas in his head before writing them down.47
As Schumann grew increasingly committed to
this approach, musical materials that bore the
trace of an improvisational origin (such as re-
petitive figurative passages, variations on simple
harmonic progressions, and rhetorical hesita-
tions and discontinuities) were gradually ex-
punged from his compositions. Schumann’s ef-
forts at self-regulation show that in music con-
cerns about improvisation were not solely due
to its association with the spontaneous, the
ephemeral, and the unwritten; they also in-
volved its grounding in the physicality of a
performer’s relationship to an instrument. By
the midcentury, these qualities were increas-
ingly cast in opposition to the concept of “au-
tonomous” musical works and the attendant
aesthetic values of formal coherence, logic, and
development.48
Brahms, of course, inherited many of Schu-
mann’s aesthetic positions, and his place in a
musical culture predicated on written works
enduring for posterity has been well estab-
lished.49 Indeed, at first glance Brahms’s music,
with its well-known emphasis on logic, com-
plexity, and rigorous principles of construction,
can seem antithetical to the direct outpouring
associated with improvisation. Stanley Cavell,
for instance, in a reflection on improvisation in
music, described his practice of listening to a
great deal of music as though it were impro-
vised: “One can hear, in the music in question,
how the composition is related to, or could
grow in familiar ways, from a process of impro-
visation, as though the parts meted out by the
composer were re-enactments, or dramatiza-
47
Dana Gooley, “Schumann and Agencies of Improvisa-
tion,” in Rethinking Schumann, ed. Roe-Min Kok and
Laura Tunbridge (New York: Oxford University Press,
2011), 129–56.
48
Gooley also locates an important social factor in the
increasing devaluation of improvisation in the growing
ubiquity of the Bildungsideal (with its attendant values of
work, self-discipline, and self-cultivation) among the Ger-
man bourgeoisie: “The moral economy of the German bour-
geoisie promoted freedom and creative play, but at the
same time insisted it must be disciplined, channeled to-
ward productive and lasting ends—whether those prod-
ucts came in the form of scores and compositions or in the
form of children, respectability, and household income.”
Ibid., 149.
49
J. Peter Burkholder, “Brahms and Twentieth-Century
Classical Music,” this journal 8 (1984): 75–83.
tions, of successes his improvisations had dis-
covered—given the finish and permanence the
occasion deserves and the public demands, but
containing essentially only such discoveries.”50
And yet for Cavell not all music was amenable
to such a listening practice: he went on to rank
Brahms’s symphonies among the types of mu-
sic in which an impression of improvisation
“ceases to be imaginable.”51
Brahms’s best-known account of his compo-
sitional process certainly seems to reinforce
the impression of his music’s distance from
improvisation-like spontaneous inspiration. In
George Henschel’s account of an 1876 conver-
sation, Brahms opined:
There is no real creating without hard work. That
which you call invention, that is to say, a thought,
an idea, is simply an inspiration from above, for
which I am not responsible, which is no merit of
mine. Yea, it is a present, a gift, which I ought even
to despise until I have made it my own by right of
hard work. And there need be no hurry about that,
either. It is as with the seed-corn; it germinates
unconsciously and in spite of ourselves. When I, for
instance, have found the first phrase of a song. . . . I
50
Stanley Cavell, “Music Discomposed,” in Must We Mean
What We Say? A Book of Essays (New York: Scribner’s,
1969), 200–01. A more analytical exploration of this pro-
cess can be found in David Trippett’s exploration of the
boundary between actual improvisation and composition
in Liszt’s “Dante” Sonata, which isolates passages that
“suggest a physical relation to the instrument,” concludes
that Liszt’s music “continually challenges the aesthetic
boundaries of composition, improvisation, and perfor-
mance.” Trippett, “Après une Lecture de Liszt: Virtuosity
and Werktreue in the ‘Dante’ Sonata,” this journal 32
(2008): 77, 54.
51
Cavell, “Music Discomposed,” Must We Mean What We
Say?, 200–01. Cavell writes: “Somewhere in the develop-
ment of Beethoven [the impression of improvisation] ceases
to be imaginable. (I do not include all music after
Beethoven. Chopin and Liszt clearly seem improvisatory,
in the sense intended; so do Brahms Intermezzi, but not
Brahms Symphonies; early Stravinsky, perhaps, but not
recent Stravinsky.)” Similarly, in an essay exploring the
reasons for the devaluing of improvisation in Western art
music, Bruno Nettl, like Cavell, used Brahms’s sympho-
nies to represent a notated tradition that is resistant to
practices and analytical methods associated with improvi-
sation. Brahms’s music might even be seen as participat-
ing in what Nettl has described as a widespread devaluing
of improvisation in Western art music. Bruno Nettl, “In-
troduction: An Art Neglected in Scholarship,” in In the
Course of Performance: Studies in the World of Musical
Improvisation, ed. Bruno Nettl and Melinda Russell (Chi-
cago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 4.
might shut the book there and go for a walk, do KAREN
some other work, and perhaps not think of it again LEISTRA-
JONES
for months. Nothing, however, is lost. If afterward I Joachim’s
approach the subject again, it is sure to have taken “Presence”
shape: I can now begin to really work at it.52
Here, the initial “idea” for a work (implic-
itly thematic or melodic, given Henschel’s ci-
tation of the first phrase of Die Mainacht) comes
as an immediate inspiration. The composer’s
next task, however, is to achieve distance from
the immediacy of its first impression, first, by
taking time (during which the idea uncon-
sciously “germinates”) and second, by “really
working on it” (employing, presumably, such
logical techniques as counterpoint and the-
matic-motivic development).53 The need to
achieve distance in order to reflect on one’s
first inspiration is further emphasized in the
less well-known continuation of Henschel’s
account, in which Brahms castigated compos-
ers “who sit at the piano with a poem before
them, putting music to it from A to Z until it is
done. They write themselves into a state of
enthusiasm which makes them see something
finished, something important, in every bar.”54
Here the distance from one’s initial enthusi-
asm is to be achieved explicitly by removing
oneself from the physical instrument.
Nevertheless, some of the expressive ideals
associated with improvisation do play an im-
portant (if ambiguous) role in many of Brahms’s
compositions. There has been a longstanding
tradition, dating back to Brahms’s own time, of
hearing a tension between those expressive ele-
ments, on the one hand, and opposing values
52
George Henschel, Personal Recollections of Johannes
Brahms; Some of His Letters to and Pages from a Journal
Kept by George Henschel (Boston: Richard G. Badger, 1907),
22–23.
53
This assessment of melodic inspiration vs. logical elabo-
ration also carried political overtones in Brahms’s late-
nineteenth-century Viennese milieu, as Margaret Notley
has shown. Emotion, instinct, and immediacy were often
associated with composers like Wagner and Bruckner and
the anti-Liberal ideologies they came to represent. Logic,
intellect, and self-control, on the other hand, were hall-
marks of the Liberal values and identity to which Brahms,
Joachim, and many of their supporters subscribed. Marga-
ret Notley, Lateness and Brahms: Music and Culture in
the Twilight of Viennese Liberalism (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2007), esp. 15–35.
54
Henschel, Personal Recollections, 23.
253
 19 TH such as reserve, logic, irony, and ambiguity in
CENTURY
MUSIC Brahms’s music.55 More recently, Reinhold
Brinkmann interpreted this typically Brahmsian
expressive tension according to the concept of
historical lateness, as a yearning for an unme-
diated and direct mode of expression, or nostal-
gia for an artistic consciousness free from the
burdens of history, self-consciousness, skepti-
cism, and irony. Brinkmann heard this tension
as the expressive foundation of Brahms’s Sec-
ond Symphony, in which an initial pastoral
idyll symbolizing a more “natural” state is com-
promised by internal darkening and distur-
bances.56 The ideal of natural immediacy, then,
is not simply expunged from all of Brahms’s
music, but when present it is often “bound up
with the awareness of a historical loss. . . .
Brahms’s idyllicizing expresses that melancholy
which is the product of ‘mourning’ for a ‘lost
possession.’”57
A tension between immediacy and learned
reflection, the naïve and the sentimental, is
also one of the animating expressive features of
Brahms’s Violin Concerto, op. 77. The Violin
Concerto was composed only a year after the
Second Symphony and also underwent its main
compositional germination while Brahms was
at his summer residence in the town of
Pörtschach, where he described the Wörther
See area as “virgin soil” where the air was so
full of melodies that “one had to be careful not
to step on them.”58 It shares significant affini-
ties with that symphony, most notably the pres-
55
This tension has been explained in various terms, as
“emotion” versus “logic,” as an imperfectly subdued “early
self” (the “young Kreisler”) coming through in Brahms’s
older, more “mature” compositions, and so forth. Walter
Niemann, for example, relates this to Brahms’s inherently
North German nature, which displayed “both sides of the
Nordic nature: on the one hand, that of the meditative
Holsteiner, inclined to imaginings, now of a fantastic
daemonic order, now romantically idyllic; and, on the other
hand, that of the robust, materialistic, reserved Ham-
burger.” Walter Niemann, Brahms, trans. Catherine Alison
Phillips (New York: Knopf, 1930), 320 and 217.
56
Reinhold Brinkmann, Late Idyll: The Second Symphony
of Johannes Brahms (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1997).
57
Ibid., 200.
58
“Der Wörther See ist ein jungfräulicher Boden, da fliegen
die Melodien, dass man [sich] hüten muss, keine zu treten.”
Letter to Hanslick, quoted in Max Kalbeck, Johannes
Brahms, vol. 3 (Tutzing: Hans Schneider, 1976), 175.
254
ence in its first movement of an initial pastoral
idyll subjected to darkening and ambiguity as
it is incorporated into a symphonic sonata pro-
cess.59 Over the years, several listeners and crit-
ics have attributed this tension to the contrast
between tuneful lyricism and symphonic writ-
ing. For example, Hubert Foss wrote in 1952
that “of all of Brahms’s major works, [the Vio-
lin Concerto] is the one which shows in the
highest degree of perfection the reconciling of
the two opposite sides of his creative mind—
the lyrical and the constructive: Brahms the
song writer and Brahms the symphonist. For
this concerto is a song for the violin on a sym-
phonic scale—a lyrical outpouring which nev-
ertheless exercises to the full his great powers
of inventive development.”60
Other commentators, however, have sug-
gested that the concerto’s main fault line lies
between improvisatory writing and symphonic
composition. Tovey, for example, wrote of the
Violin Concerto: “No composer has ever sur-
passed Brahms in the art of making a closely-
woven passage seem as if it were extemporized
whereas it really carries the communicating
threads of a vast organization.”61 Similarly,
Malcolm MacDonald wrote that the Violin Con-
certo represents “a sustained effect of spontane-
ous improvisation, even though every phrase
plays its role in a consummately planned sym-
phonic scheme.”62 Brahms was certainly appre-
ciative of improvisatory rhetoric in composi-
tions, noting of one of his favorite violin concer-
tos, Viotti’s Concerto No. 22 in A Minor: “It is
a remarkable work showing great facility of
59
Walter Niemann, for example, heard in this work the
“virile struggle of this so-called ‘harsh’ composer against
his tender North German emotional nature, his conflict
with self, [which] follows almost the same course as in the
first movement of the Second Symphony.” See Niemann,
Brahms, 320. Significant affinities include the shared key
of D major and a leisurely triple meter in the first move-
ment of each work. Brinkmann provides an overview of
the tradition of hearing the Second Symphony and the
Violin Concerto as linked, in Late Idyll, 57.
60
Hubert Foss, “Johannes Brahms” in The Concerto, ed.
Ralph Hill (New York: Penguin Books, 1952), 187.
61
Donald Francis Tovey, Essays in Musical Analysis, vol.
III: Concertos (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981),
164.
62
Malcolm MacDonald, “‘Veiled Symphonies?’ The Con-
certos,” in The Cambridge Companion to Brahms (New
York: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 165.
invention. It sounds as if he were improvising
and the whole thing is conceived and carried out
in such a masterly fashion.”63 Brahms wrote this
letter as he began work on his own violin con-
certo, and improvisation was clearly something
that he also tried to evoke, especially in the solo
part.
These elements take on a new layer of mean-
ing when we consider Brahms and Joachim’s
creative collaboration in more detail. While
some of Joachim’s compositional input into
the concerto is traceable through the available
documentary sources, a significant part of his
contribution remains nonrecoverable. This is
because in addition to their correspondence re-
garding the concerto, Brahms and Joachim met
several times to work together on the concerto.
The first of these meetings occurred in
Pörtschach in early September 1878. Another
took place in Berlin in April 1879, at a point
when Joachim had performed the concerto sev-
eral times but a final version had yet to be
established. Brahms and Joachim were also to-
gether for piano rehearsals on 29 and 30 De-
cember 1878 (days before the Leipzig premiere),
continued to work on the concerto in the days
surrounding the Vienna premiere on 14 Janu-
ary 1879, and met for a final prepublication
proofreading in August 1879. As Schwarz notes,
perhaps the most important of these meetings
was the one in Pörtschach in September 1878.
During this time, Brahms’s ideas were still in
flux, and Joachim was likely able to experi-
ment with new material directly on his violin,
coming up with alternative suggestions through
a semi-improvisatory process of trial and er-
ror.64
The likelihood that Joachim could contrib-
ute to the composition through unpracticed
performance on the spot is significant given
63
Johannes Brahms and Clara Schumann, Letters of Clara
Schumann and Johannes Brahms, 1853–1896, ed. Berthold
Litzmann (New York: Longmans, Green and Co., 1927),
34. The Viotti concerto was clearly on Brahms’s mind as
he worked on his own concerto. Not only was the quoted
letter written as Brahms began work on his Violin Con-
certo; Joachim confessed to hearing certain passages as
“unconscious echoes” of similar passages in the Viotti
when he published the solo part to the Brahms concerto in
his Violinschule. See Joachim, Violinschule, III, 27.
64
Schwarz, “Joseph Joachim,” 524.
that Brahms was so uncharacteristically con- KAREN
LEISTRA-
cerned with achieving an idiomatic, violinistic JONES
solo part in this concerto. In his first letter to Joachim’s
“Presence”
Joachim regarding the concerto, Brahms asked
Joachim to forbid clumsy and uncomfortable
passages, and in his response, Joachim prom-
ised to get back to Brahms as to whether the
concerto would be enjoyable to play—even in a
hot concert hall.65 The concern with idiomati-
cally natural violin writing in the Violin Con-
certo is often explained as the result of Brahms’s
uncertainty and corresponding conscientious-
ness when dealing with the violin.66 But it is
also significant when we consider that much of
the violin part for this concerto is written in a
markedly spontaneous, rhapsodic way, that it
was written for a soloist, Joachim, who was
particularly adept at creating an illusion of im-
provisation (with its connotations of emotional
immediacy) in his performances, and that it
was written through an engagement with
Joachim’s real-time process of trying out musi-
cal ideas on his instrument. The emphasis on
idiomatic writing in this violin part not only
65
Brahms wrote: “Nun bin ich zufrieden, wenn Du ein
Wort sagst, und vielleicht einige hineinschreibst: schwer,
unbequem, unmöglich, usw. Die ganze Geschichte hat vier
Sätze; vom letzten schrieb ich den Anfang—damit mir
gleich die ungeschickten Figuren verboten werden!” Let-
ter to Joachim, 22 August 1878. Joachim’s response was as
follows: “Ich habe sofort durchgesehen, was Du schicktest,
und Du findest hie und da eine Note und Bemerkung zur
Änderung—freilich ohne Partitur lässt sich nicht geniessen
herauszukriegen ist das meiste, manches sogar recht
originell violinmässig—aber ob man’s mit Behagen alles
im heissen Saal spielen wird, möchte ich nicht bejahen,
bevor ich’s im Fluss mir vorgeführt.” Letter to Brahms, 24
August 1878. Both letters are in Johannes Brahms in
Briefwechsel mit Joseph Joachim, II, 126–27. This is a
marked departure from Brahms’s attitude to soloistic vir-
tuosity in other compositions, most notably in his two
piano concertos. As numerous performers and critics have
pointed out, those two concertos featured an almost an-
tagonistic attitude to the soloist and her physical comfort,
and made technical demands that not only departed from
standard idiomatic figurations, but seemed almost calcu-
lated to be clumsy, painful, and even ineffective as virtuosic
writing.
66
As Brahms would write to Joachim about the Double
Concerto, “Oh, how much more agreeable and sensible it
is to write for an instrument one knows through and
through—as I presume to know the piano!” (Ach, wieviel
angenehmer und gescheiter ist es, für ein Instrument
schreiben, das man durch und durch kennt—wie ich meine
das Klavier zu kennen!) Letter to Joachim, early October
1887, in Johannes Brahms in Briefwechsel mit Joseph
Joachim, II, 226.
255
 19 TH heightens its impression of improvisation
CENTURY
MUSIC (through the longstanding association of im-
provisation with idiomatic figures and tech-
niques). It also underscores a longstanding sym-
bolic association of improvisation with a more
natural or simple (rather than belabored and
complex) mode of artistic expression.
Improvisational Idyll
In what follows, I present a reading of the first
movement of Brahms’s Violin Concerto that
focuses on the connection it makes between
improvisation and musical material that is
coded as “natural” or “immediate,” including
pastoral and simply lyrical themes. These quali-
ties are explicitly associated with the soloist,
Joachim, who is often staged as a rhapsodic
improviser. Throughout the movement, how-
ever, lyrical, pastoral, and improvisatory pas-
sages are presented in tension with a larger
symphonic process. This latter process mani-
fests itself in a number of ways. The Violin
Concerto, like Brahms’s other works in the
genre, used a deliberately backward-looking
classical concerto form, with an opening or-
chestral ritornello preceding the onset of the
solo exposition. As such, it was in dialogue
with a concerto-sonata form that had been es-
tablished by Mozart and Beethoven nearly a
century earlier.67 Furthermore, in this work
Brahms intentionally evoked the ideal of the
“symphonic” concerto, an epithet often approv-
ingly applied to nineteenth-century concertos
in recognition of their uncommon complexity,
seriousness of purpose, and emphasis on “sym-
phonic” processes of motivic working-out and
development.68 The tension between these con-
67
On Brahms’s decision to use classical concerto form for
his concertos—already a backward-looking decision when
he composed his First Piano Concerto in the 1850s, see
James Hepokoski, “Monumentality and Formal Processes
in the First Movement of Brahms’s Piano Concerto No. 1
in D Minor, Op. 15,” in Expressive Intersections in Brahms:
Essays in Analysis and Meaning, ed. Heather Platt and
Peter H. Smith (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
2012), 217–51.
68
For a discussion of “symphonic” elements in nineteenth-
century concertos, and the concomitant prestige attached
to such features, see Juan Martin Koch, Das Klavierkonzert
des 19. Jahrhunderts und die Kategorie des Symphonischen:
Zur Kompositions- und Rezeptionsgeschichte der Gattung
von Mozart bis Brahms (Sinzig: Studio, 2001).
256
trasting expressive worlds—one associated with
immediacy, lyricism, and improvisation, the
other associated with rigorous formal and
motivic processes—animates much of the
concerto’s first movement.
My focus will be on several crucial areas
that highlight this tension: the primary theme
and the secondary thematic area in the opening
ritornello and the solo exposition, parts of the
development, and the cadenza that Joachim
penned for the movement. Throughout, I draw
on the conceptual framework established by
James Hepokoski and Warren Darcy in Ele-
ments of Sonata Theory: Norms, Types and
Deformations in the Late Eighteenth-Century
Sonata, which allows for an ongoing consider-
ation of the concerto’s engagement with the
generic expectations of Classical concerto-so-
nata form—a central and often self-conscious
process in the first movement.69 While I present
a detailed score-based analysis, many of the
features I describe acquire additional meanings
when imagined in the context of live perfor-
mances by Joachim. What emerges is a reading
of this movement that begins to account for
Joachim’s presence and the act of performance
more generally as integral components of this
concerto as a work.
Orchestral Exposition. The concerto’s opening
ritornello starts with a lilting D-major melody
based almost exclusively on broken tonic tri-
ads played in unison by strings, horns, and bas-
soons. After eight measures, this melody (an
implied antecedent phrase) reaches a hushed
pause on a half cadence, before continuing over
a sustained C-major chord (VII in D major).
With its modal implications and its shift to the
flat side, this move has strong pastoral conno-
tations, reinforcing the affect of natural sim-
plicity already implied by the instrumentation,
meter, and unfolding tonic triad of the initial
melody (ex. 1).
69
James Hepokoski and Warren Darcy, Elements of Sonata
Theory: Norms, Types, and Deformations in the Late Eigh-
teenth-Century Sonata (New York: Oxford University
Press, 2006).
  3 
4      KAREN
      LEISTRA-
JONES

  Joachim’s
 dolce “Presence”
  3  

4 

  
   



         
10

   

 

     
         
     
 
      
 
17
 

 




 
 
  



 
 
  
 
 
 
  
 





Example 1: Primary theme, mm. 1–26.
As Robert Hatten has shown, in the nine-
teenth century the pastoral mode went beyond
specifically rustic or Arcadian associations to
encompass more general themes of idealized
simplicity and wholeness.70 A yearned-for state
apart from modern complexity and ambiguity,
the pastoral was often symbolized by nature,
but at the same time provided access to a more
direct and unconstrained mode of existence that
was “natural” in the sense of being innocent
and whole. In nineteenth-century instrumen-
tal music, the pastoral mode could also repre-
sent a freedom from the symphonic tradition
and the complexities of sonata form.71 A simple,
harmonically static melody such as the open-
ing of this concerto does not demand a larger
structural and narrative process; its triadic ex-
pansiveness de-emphasizes the concise motivic
units that, in the symphonic tradition after
Beethoven, typically provided the basis for a
complex and ongoing process of development.
70
Robert Hatten, Interpreting Musical Gestures, Topics,
and Tropes: Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 2004), 55–65.
71
Ibid., 65–67.
    
 
 




Like many of its nineteenth-century prede-
cessors, the Violin Concerto does not present a
pure pastoral idyll but rather an initially inno-
cent world that is darkened and compromised
in various ways.72 After the half cadence at
mm. 7–8, the second phrase of the primary
theme not only leads through an initial shift to
flat-side harmony, but also begins to inject a
note of ambiguity by alluding briefly to the
minor mode (vii°7/V) in m. 15. Another half
72
These predecessors included the Beethoven Violin Con-
certo and Brahms’s own Second Symphony. The Second
Piano Concerto (composed three years later) follows a simi-
lar expressive trajectory. Each of these works, like the
Brahms Violin Concerto, presents an initial idyllic pasto-
ral world that is either internally compromised by
darkenings and ambiguities, or externally compromised
by events and processes that are unfriendly, or even hos-
tile. The opening of Brahms’s Violin Concerto has also
often been compared to the opening of Beethoven’s “Eroica”
Symphony, with which it shares the general triadic con-
tours of its theme. The shared characteristics between this
concerto and the Beethoven Violin Concerto, the “Eroica”
Symphony, and Brahms’s Second Symphony have often
been remarked on and noted by observers in Brahms’s own
day, including Hanslick and Kalbeck. Brinkmann provides
an overview of the tradition of seeing this group of works
as a linked set in Late Idyll, 57.
257
 19 TH Measure: 41 53
CENTURY
MUSIC
Secondary theme attempt Repetition of S-motive
Key: D G (dissolves)
MC-gesture
(D: HC)
Figure 1: Opening ritornello, secondary thematic area.
cadence in m. 17 elides with a third section of
the primary theme, a strained ascent that, in
its initial rise from A to B
, suggests another
borrowing from the minor mode. This phrase
disrupts the original lilting triple meter with
hemiola patterns and ruptures the mood of se-
renity with accents and a forte dynamic.73
Through these rhetorical and harmonic devices,
the direct simplicity implied in the first few
measures is lost. The initial eight-measure an-
tecedent phrase of the primary theme is never
rounded off by a symmetrical consequent; in-
stead it is swept into a discourse of growing
complexity and uncertainty.
Following this receding of the original pasto-
ral world, the movement’s secondary thematic
area is marked by a sense of loss and fragmen-
tation (fig. 1). It begins with a medial-caesura
(MC)-like gesture at m. 41, a strongly articu-
lated dominant followed by a pause in most of
the voices that provides an opening for a lyrical
secondary theme.74 In the next measure, an E
held by one of the oboes and one of the horns
does begin a tuneful melody that, in its contour
and its lyricism, hearkens back to the pastoral
opening of the primary theme. But at m. 53,
the swelling melody suddenly dissolves as the
dynamic falls to pianissimo, and a five-note
fragment from the attempted theme (hence-
forth labeled the S-motive) begins to repeat,
circling back on itself. At m. 59 the melody
disintegrates further, as the dynamic drops to
73
This section ultimately leads to an affirmative transition
passage based on a tutti restatement of the beginning of
the primary theme. See “tutti affirmation” in Hepokoski
and Darcy, Sonata Theory, 94, 101.
74
For more on the medial caesura in the context of generic
expectations of sonata form, see Hepokoski and Darcy,
Sonata Theory, 23–36.
258
69 78 90
Extended cadential

Repetition of S-motive progression
vii 7 d d: PAC
D
MC-gesture
(D: V7)
ppp and the descending fourth from the S-mo-
tive is in turn isolated and repeated (ex. 2).75
At m. 65, a second MC-like gesture—a V7
chord followed by a pause filled with rising
figuration—implies that there will be a renewed
attempt at a secondary theme. But two mea-
sures later, the figuration is repeated in the
minor mode, and rather than leading to a the-
matic realization of the space after the caesura,
this initiates a second section of ambiguous
fragmentation. Once more, the S-motive circles
around aimlessly, doubling back on itself. In
this instance it appears in counterpoint with
its own inversion, in minor mode, over a sus-
tained diminished-seventh chord, heightening
its connotations of complexity and negativity.
In m. 78 the diminished-seventh chord sud-
denly gives way to a sharply articulated D-
minor chord in first inversion, initiating a final
section that regains momentum through a force-
ful extended cadential progression, dominated
by dotted notes and agitated figuration. It
reaches a perfect authentic cadence (PAC) in D
minor at m. 90.76
75
Brinkmann describes a similar moment (the descending
arpeggiations and contracting diminuendo, mm. 20–31, be-
fore the trombones come in with the famous “darkening”
at m. 32) in the Second Symphony as a “taking back” in
Late Idyll, 76.
76
On the affective connotations of minor mode within the
sonata tradition, see Hepokoski and Darcy, Elements of
Sonata Theory, 306–10. Hepokoski and Darcy view mi-
nor-mode sonatas as having an additional “burden” in that
(unlike major-mode sonatas) they have the potential to
switch modes (and hence end in the major mode) during
the exposition and/or recapitulation. The concept of “bur-
den” is significant here, given the relative scarcity of ma-
jor-mode expositions that decay to the minor mode; in
this case, the events of the orchestral exposition raise the
question of whether subsequent rotations through these
events will alter the major-mode to minor-mode trajec-
tory.
 Secondary theme attempt S-motive
KAREN
LEISTRA-
JONES
 3 
41
              
     Joachim’s
  4                     “Presence”

  poco cresc.
  3   
 4             

     

MC-gesture
S-motive

  
          
51

    
  
 
      

             
        
  
  
 
 
60

   
   

 
 
       


 
 
MC-gesture
S-motive

 


69

 
   
  
  

 
  
 
 dim.

       




   
 
 




 


Example 2: Secondary thematic area, mm. 41–77.

The opening ritornello, then, presents a nar- by ambiguous passages of motivic fragmenta-
rative of loss, incompletion, and eventually cri- tion. The pastoral idyll is unsustainable, and
sis. The initial pastoral idyll proves unsustain- the symphonic process produces a negative out-
able, and D major falls to D minor. Further- come.
more, much of the exposition is characterized
by a sense of absence or impasse, especially in Solo Exposition and Development. This is the
the under-realized secondary thematic area, situation into which the soloist enters. Accord-
where attempts to recapture the wholeness and ing to the conventions of Brahms’s classical
lyricism of the opening are repeatedly undone double-exposition form, in the solo exposition

259
 19 TH the events of the orchestral exposition are re-
CENTURY
MUSIC visited and often altered.77 Much of the drama
in this unfolding process comes from the addi-
tion of the soloist, often cast as a heroic agent
in the nineteenth-century concerto tradition.78
The tradition of staging the soloist as an agent
with the capacity to effect change is particu-
larly important here, given the problematic na-
ture of the orchestral exposition. Furthermore,
when the soloist’s role is considered in light of
the concerto’s early performances, dominated
as they were by Joa-chim’s performing persona,
it takes on additional meaning.
From early on, it becomes clear that this
movement stages the soloist as aligned with
the expressive world of the movement’s open-
ing through his improvisatory qualities.79 With
a few crucial exceptions, his main contribu-
tions to the movement involve virtuosic im-
provisational passages and ruminations on pre-
viously presented material. He embellishes
themes from the orchestral exposition in a free
and expansive way, often during moments in
which the overall forward-directed process of
the movement (as laid out in the orchestral
exposition) is temporarily suspended. The
soloist’s persona is thus implicitly associated
with the idyll of the movement’s opening, in a
way that links the spontaneous creativity of
improvisation with a lost state of wholeness
and expressive immediacy.
This persona can be seen most clearly in the
soloist’s approach to the primary theme from
the orchestral exposition. After an extended
solo preface (mm. 90–135) in which the soloist’s
virtuosic, improvisatory playing helps to effect
77
Hepokoski and Darcy, Elements of Sonata Theory, 496–
97.
78
To take just one example, Hanslick famously complained
about the two-soloist format of Brahms’s Double Con-
certo as follows: “If there is any musical form of which it
may be said that its success depends on the ascendancy of
one conquering hero, that form is the concerto.” Eduard
Hanslick, “Brahms’s Newest Instrumental Compositions,”
in Brahms and His World, ed. Walter Frisch (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1990), 148.
79
For simplicity’s sake, I will refer to the soloist with mas-
culine pronouns in my analysis of Brahms’s Violin Con-
certo. This is not intended to imply the normativity of a
masculine concerto soloist-hero, but rather because my
reading of this concerto is predicated on the personality,
style, and symbolism associated with Joseph Joachim.
260
a transition from the fallen state that had con-
cluded the orchestral exposition back to D ma-
jor, the solo exposition proper begins at m. 136
(ex. 3). Here the soloist plays the lilting pri-
mary theme, restored to its original serene state.
In this initial section the soloist often seems to
deliberately hold onto the peaceful, uncompli-
cated parts of this theme with ruminative “im-
provisations” on the material, almost as though
unwilling to let go of the idyll and move for-
ward with a teleological sonata process. For
example, as in the orchestral exposition, the
opening melody halts on a half cadence after its
first phrase; here, however, this pause is filled
in by the soloist in a ten-measure expansion of
the space between the two initial phrases. The
dominant of the half cadence is prolonged dur-
ing these ten measures, providing a moment
that seems to lie outside the sonata’s sym-
phonic trajectory, and the soloist freely embel-
lishes the notes of the slow-moving chords with
gentle dissonances and lyrical trills.80
The secondary thematic area begins with the
soloist fulfilling a similar role, embellishing
material with lyrical figuration and avoiding
any direct interference with the previously es-
tablished sequence of events (see fig. 2). There
is, however, one crucial exception to this char-
acterization, which occurs at the second me-
dial caesura-like pause at m. 202. Previously,
this caesura had been filled with rising figura-
tion that, after two measures, had been repeated
in the minor mode, a change that had led to a
second failure to produce a lyrical secondary
80
There are several similar moments elsewhere in the pri-
mary theme; after this moment of suspended time, the
second phrase of the primary theme is recaptured at m.
152, appearing in the violins as the soloist plays a freely
embellished version in a higher register. This time, the
original idea is expanded from within, as internal motives
are taken up and repeated in mm. 157–58 to allow for a
necessary modulation to the dominant, while the soloist
continues to rhapsodize. Significantly, at m. 158 it is the
cellos that take up the melody and move it forward, not
the “dreaming” soloist, who by this point has abandoned
the thematic material altogether for free figuration and
arpeggios. The soloist’s role of embellishing material with
lyrical, improvisatory figuration can also be seen in the
chromatic ascent that occurs as the third section of the
primary theme. Here the chromatic ascent is presented by
the orchestra while the soloist ornaments it, first with
double-stop chords and second with florid arpeggios, be-
ginning at m. 164.
 
  KAREN
 3
136
LEISTRA-
Solo Violin
 4 JONES
 Joachim’s
“Presence”
  3  dolce
  4  
Orchestra

(reduction)
  3    

 4   
 


Expansion of half-cadence area
142
       
  
  
  

  
   
 
 

 

    
  
 


       
 
 
147
   


  
  
 

   
       
 

       
 

Example 3: Soloist’s expansion of primary theme, mm. 136–51.

Measure: 176 190 206 214 236 246 272

Orchestra repeats Extended cadential
Soloist’s soloist’s progression
Secondary theme attempt Repetition of S-motive new theme new theme Repetition of S-motive (expanded) EEC

Key: A D (dissolves) A A a a a a: PAC

MC-gesture MC-gesture a: V7
(A: HC) (A: V7)

Figure 2: Solo exposition, secondary thematic area.

theme and a decisive turn to the minor mode Following this intervention, at m. 206 the
for the remainder of the exposition. This time, soloist fills what had been an ambiguous space
however, the soloist takes over the second rep- with a new, effortlessly lyrical melody. This
etition and keeps the figuration in the major new theme is marked as a moment of height-
mode, a crucial modification that paves the ened expressivity, with sigh gestures and un-
way for an even more significant change to the usually detailed hairpin dynamics. Essentially
original expositional layout. replacing the fragmented and belabored mate-

261
 19 TH Soloist’s new thme
 
 3     
CENTURY 202

MUSIC
 4
  
 
  3   
     
 4      

  3          

 4    
           
     
 
MC-gesture


Orchestra repeats solosits’s new theme
210
   
          
 

           
        
       
           
    

    
     

Example 4: Soloist’s new theme, mm. 202–15.

rial that had appeared at this juncture in the
orchestral exposition, this new melody is an
unusual moment of “unmediated” expressive
outpouring, a glimpse of wholeness separate
from the surrounding reality. As such, it fur-
ther affirms the association of the improvisa-
tory soloist with expressive qualities such as
immediacy, simplicity, and lyricism.
This new theme (ex. 4), however, is marked
as a moment apart from the unfolding sonata
process. At m. 214, the orchestra takes up the
soloist’s melody; this results in a collapse to
the minor mode, and at m. 236 the original
sequence of events from the orchestral exposi-
tion is resumed. The fragmented S-motive that
had previously filled the post-caesura space is
reinstated, and the rest of the solo exposition
proceeds precisely according to the original lay-
out, reaching a final cadence in A minor at m.
272. This cadence, the movement’s “Essential
Expositional Closure” (EEC), confirms the tragic
narrative from the orchestral exposition; the
soloist’s new theme has not produced any long-
range change, and the solo exposition ends in a
similar atmosphere of crisis.81
The development section further emphasizes
the tension and conflict between two opposing
orientations, one associated with lyricism,
wholeness, improvisatory writing, and the so-
loist, and the other associated with motivic
manipulation, fragmentation, the orchestra, and
darkened minor-mode regions. Beginning in the
orchestra at m. 272, two important ideas from
the exposition—the soloist’s lyrical new melody
and the fragmented S-motive—are repeatedly
81
Hepokoski and Darcy define the essential expositional
closure as “the first satisfactory perfect authentic cadence
[in the exposition’s new key] that proceeds onward to dif-
fering material. . . . It is toward the accomplishing of this
PAC, marking the end of S-space, that we understand all
the preceding music to have been aiming.” The attain-
ment of this cadence in the new key is one of the central
generic obligations of the secondary thematic area, and
one of the sonata’s most important tonal moments. See
Hepokoski and Darcy, Elements of Sonata Theory, 120–
24.

262
 S-motive KAREN
 3
304



LEISTRA-
 4

 
 



  JONES
 
Joachim’s
poco  espress. dim.
“Presence”
  3  
  4

 
 
 

poco cresc.  

  34 


       



    
  
 


   
  
  


 
   



tranquillo
  
   
  

   
311

 

  
leggiero ma espressivo (grazioso)

  

( )  


 
   



 dolce
    


 

 
c: PAC
Example 5: Lyrical transformation of S-motive in development, mm. 304–15.
set against each other.82 In this section, C ma-
jor eventually cedes to C minor, and this key,
along with the oscillation between lyricism and
fragmentation, continues to be important when
the soloist enters the development. At m. 304
(ex. 5), the soloist takes up the S-motive, rounds
it out, and transforms it from a motivic unit
into an expressive, self-contained melody. The
key of C minor, however, continues to signal a
fallen state, and indeed, a C-minor cadence at
m. 312 elides with a return to the sense of
uncertainty and impasse associated with this
motive. In mm. 312–31 fragments of the S-
motive continue to circle in the orchestra
against the soloist’s repetitive figuration, the
82
In m. 288 the orchestra reprises the first four measures of
the soloist’s lyrical song in C major. But at m. 292, this
melody is interrupted by the S-motive, its connotations of
uncertainty, emptiness, and fragmentation only somewhat
tempered by the C-major key. After four measures, the
soloist’s song appears once again, now in a weakened form:
mezzo-piano, with a fall in pitch between its first and
second two-measure units. At m. 300 it is interrupted
once again by the descending S-motive, whose negative
connotations are now made explicit by the C-minor key.
 
   

 


mm. 316–31: Repetitive figuration, circulation of S-motive fragments
entire passage trapped in C minor.83 Finally, at
m. 332 (ex. 6) the soloist tries to break out from
this trance-like state, struggling against the ap-
proach of yet another C-minor cadence by play-
ing a series of forcefully articulated trills, with
each measure of the violin part outlining a
triad. Notably, mm. 333–35 stage the soloist as
trying to avoid C minor by outlining V, I, and
IV (respectively) in C major. But on a local level
the soloist’s efforts are again ineffective; the
movement toward the minor-mode cadence be-
comes inexorable, and the passage ends with
yet another perfect authentic cadence in C mi-
nor in m. 340.
Up to this point, then, the movement has
been defined by a tension between two con-
83
Also see William Horne’s analysis of this passage as a set
of variations on the theme at m. 304. As Horne points out,
the passage’s affinities with Bach’s D-Minor Chaconne and
Tartini’s ‘Devil’s Trill’ Sonata may have been a deliberate
nod to repertoire that was closely associated with Joachim.
William Horne, “The ‘Still Center’ in Brahms’s Violin Con-
certo, op. 77,” American Brahms Society Newsletter 29/1
(Spring 2011): 1–5.
263
 19 TH 
CENTURY a tempo
 

MUSIC
 3

332




 



 
 4   



 3         
 4            
a tempo poco  marc. cresc.

  3
 

  

4  

 
()

 

#
337
 




 
  
  
# # # # # #
   ↓ ↓  
        
    
     
  ↓ ↓
 
   
  


   
    
c: PAC

Example 6: Soloist’s struggle against C-minor PAC, mm. 332–40.

trasting discourses. On the one hand, there is of the lyrical, song-like new theme in the sec-
the pastoral idyll from the opening of the move- ondary thematic area. His active contributions
ment, an ideal state presented as effortless, natu- to the movement also take the form of inter-
ral, and whole. On the other hand, there is the ventions in negative events, such as his struggle
symphonic trajectory of the movement at large, against the C-minor cadence in the develop-
with its generic demands such as working out ment, but notably, these have little effect on
motivic material, overall forward momentum, processes already set in motion.
and attaining such structural goals as the “es- These expressive features take on additional
sential expositional closure” (EEC). This pro- resonances when considered in the context of
cess is often associated with more troubled or Joachim’s performances of the concerto, given
ambiguous affects, particularly in the C-minor his established ability to make composed mu-
tonal regions of the development, the frag- sic sound thought up on the spot while also
mented under-realized secondary thematic area, seeming to “merge with” or “channel” the com-
and the major-to-minor trajectory of both the poser creating the work in real time. Joachim’s
orchestral and solo expositions. close association with Brahms and his known
For the most part, the soloist is aligned with involvement in the concerto’s compositional
the former, rather than the latter, reality. When genesis made these impressions all the more
he is not freely embellishing material that has powerful. In this performed context, the
already been laid out, his most prominent mo- movement’s central tension is between two
ments often occur in a kind of stopped time contrasting visions of creativity, one involving
marked as separate from the unfolding sym- spontaneous inspiration and improvisation at
phonic trajectory. These moments include his an instrument, the other, the rigors of logical,
improvisational rhapsodies set in the middle of planned out, and written composition. Signifi-
the pastoral primary theme in the first part of cantly, the former creative model is treated in
the solo exposition, as well as his introduction an “idyllicizing” manner, as moments of whole-

264
Measure: 417 431 445 453
Secondary Orchestra repeats
theme Repetition of Soloist’s soloist’s
attempt S-motive new theme new theme
Key: D G F F D d
MC-gesture MC-gesture d: V7
(D: HC) (F  : V7)
Figure 3: Recapitulation, secondary thematic area.
ness that remain unintegrated into the sur-
rounding troubled symphonic discourse. The
movement thus far stages the demands of “com-
position” dominating the soloist and his more
spontaneous expressive world, but this produces
considerable affective consequences.
The cadenza. In the cadenza, Brahms provided
a site for the potential resolution of some of
these oppositions. Famously, he left the ca-
denza toward the end of the concerto’s first
movement open for the performer to fill in.
This harkened once again to a classical prac-
tice, that of leaving a space for the performer to
improvise a cadenza, a moment of unfettered
creativity and virtuosic freedom. But in addi-
tion to being a moment of improvisatory free-
dom for the performer, this cadenza also fulfills
an important structural role. It is situated ex-
actly at the site of the movement’s “Essential
Structural Closure” (ESC), the perfect authen-
tic cadence at the end of the secondary the-
matic area that serves to secure the tonic key
once and for all, and the most important tonal
goal of the movement.84 As such, it provides a
unique moment in which the soloist’s impro-
visatory freedom can be staged as coinciding
with—and even intervening in—the move-
ment’s larger symphonic sonata process (fig. 3).
The cadenza is approached as follows. The
layout of the recapitulation corresponds almost
exactly to that of the solo exposition, and at m.
513, the movement is poised to reach a grim
conclusion with a perfect authentic cadence in
84
The essential structural closure is the first perfect au-
thentic cadence in the tonic that occurs within the
recapitulation’s secondary thematic area and proceeds on-
wards to differing material. Hepokoski and Darcy, Ele-
ments of Sonata Theory, 232–33.
479 487 513 527 KAREN
Extended cadential
LEISTRA-
Repetition of progression Transitional Cadenza JONES
S-motive (expanded) Passage (Joachim) ESC Joachim’s
“Presence”
d d DC d D D: PAC
D-minor ESC D-major ESC
avoided attained
6
D: V 4
D minor.85 In the solo exposition, this had been
the EEC (Essential Expositional Closure) in A
minor; this cadence, then, would be a minor-
mode ESC, indicating an undeniably tragic over-
all narrative. Just as this is about to occur,
however, the final D-minor cadence is replaced
with a deceptive cadence, which sets off a new
harmonic progression that eventually pauses
on V64 of D major in m. 525. Through this
classic V64 gesture, Brahms opened up space for
the cadenza, and also provided one final oppor-
tunity to avoid a D-minor conclusion to the
movement.
Significantly, however, Joachim chose to
compose a cadenza for the Violin Concerto,
rather than improvise one on the spot in his
various performances. As noted above, his ca-
denza for this movement has achieved a near-
textual status as an integral part of the con-
certo, and indeed, Joachim seems to have re-
garded the creation of the cadenza as a serious
compositional task.86 His cadenza has remark-
85
There are a few differences worth noting: the return of
the primary theme at the beginning of the recapitulation
eschews its original pastoral affect, opting instead for a
fortissimo orchestral tutti statement. At the half cadence
at m. 389 the soloist enters, bringing the emotional pitch
back down to one of serene, ruminative contemplation,
and thus reestablishing both the pastoral mode and his
own fundamental identification with that mode. In an-
other example of the soloist’s incompatibility with the
symphonic sonata process, he introduces his lyrical melody
in the “wrong” key of F  major at m. 443, leaving it to the
orchestra to bring the melody back to “reality” via a turn
to D major at m. 457.
86
Joachim continued to tinker with the text for this ca-
denza until its publication in 1902. There is some ambigu-
ity as to Brahms’s own preferred version of the cadenza,
owing to an 1884/85 copy of the cadenza by Joachim’s
pupil Marie Soldat containing suggestions for cut passages
in Brahms’s hand. Soldat wrote to her mother: “Brahms
265
 19 TH ably little nonthematic virtuosic figuration and
CENTURY
MUSIC elects instead to present and work through
themes and motives from the movement (ex.
7).87 Furthermore, his sequential ordering of the
concerto’s thematic modules and his recom-
positions of preexisting material seem to imply
a critical or interpretive commentary on the
movement thus far. Nevertheless, the cadenza’s
improvisatory rhetoric is unmistakable, as is
the symbolism of Joachim, the spontaneous
soloist, taking over the process of composition.
Table 1 (p. 269) divides Joachim’s cadenza
into sections based on its use of various themes,
motives, and figurations from the rest of the
movement. From section 1 though section 7,
the cadenza revisits many of the movement’s
main themes and motives in the order in which
they had originally appeared. Joachim begins
with a strong articulation of the opening of the
primary theme. Omitting the second phrase of
this theme and its move to VII, he next revisits
its third section, now reinterpreted such that
its upward striving is a lyrical lusingando. Here,
Joachim skips over the exposition’s ambiguous
secondary thematic area and in section 3 revis-
its the dotted motif that had ushered in the
minor-mode extended cadential progression that
concluded the exposition. At this point he does
revisit the S-motive, but in its lyrical form
from the soloist’s entrance to the development,
followed by the circling figuration that had im-
mediately followed it there. After a series of
modulating arpeggios, Joachim continues with
material from the development in section 7.
This section is based on the soloist’s embel-
lishment of the ascending final section of the
primary theme, embellishment that had ap-
peared at the end of the development, where it
had prepared the way for the prolonged domi-
nant that had ushered in the return of the pri-
mary theme in the recapitulation.
Essentially, the cadenza up to this point has
struck out some of the cadenza for me, since he found it
too long.” The two recent editions of the concerto dis-
agree on the extent to which this reflects an earlier ver-
sion by Joachim, or Brahms’s independent suggestions. See
Brown, critical commentary, iv–v, and Roesner and Struck,
critical commentary, iii.
87
This is transcribed from the 1902 printed edition of the
cadenza, as given in Johannes Brahms: Violinkonzert D-
Dur opus 77, 300–01.
266
reproduced the main musical events (albeit in
condensed form) that had led to the recapitula-
tion with its narrowly avoided D-minor ESC.
The cadenza’s next move implies a need for
some kind of change. After a passage of free
virtuosic figuration (section 8), Joachim backs
up and revisits the ascending theme from sec-
tion 7, this time combining it with two impor-
tant moments from earlier in the movement.
First, by presenting the ascending theme as
accented trills in an upper line combined with
a three-note figure in a lower line, this passage
alludes to m. 332 in the development, where
the soloist had briefly (and unsuccessfully)
struggled against an impending C-minor per-
fect authentic cadence. Second, through a dra-
^
matic pause on E (scale degree 2 in D major)
over an implied dominant harmony, combined
with trills and brief hints of A and D , and (at
m. 75) D  and F, it harkens back to the half-
cadence pause on V at m. 150 at the end of the
first phrase of the primary theme. At that mo-
ment, there had not been the expected resolu-
tion back to D major, but rather a move to VII,
C major, for the second phrase of the primary
theme. This tense moment in the cadenza
brings about a series of lyrical scales that, be-
ginning in m. 78, correspond to those found at
the end of the solo-preface (mm. 131–35). It
accordingly ushers in a gentle D-major ESC at
the end of the cadenza.
This penultimate section, then, alters the
outcome of two crucial junctures from the pre-
ceding movement. It revisits the struggle against
C minor from m. 332 in such a way that C
minor is now successfully avoided, and it re-
resolves the half-cadence pause in the primary
theme that previously had led to C major and
the first darkening of the original D-major pas-
toral theme. Significantly, the D-major cadential
closure at the end of the cadenza elides with a
final expansive, tranquillo apotheosis of the
primary theme. Here, in its ultimate appear-
ance, the soloist allows the theme to dissolve
into unbridled, improvisatory lyricism. The
movement eventually ends on a celebratory
note, as this pastoral apotheosis—the pastoral
regained through the intervention of the
soloist’s cadenza—becomes livelier, ending with
a virtuosic celebration of the primary theme in
the final measures.
             

1 2 lusingando KAREN
 3


 
LEISTRA-
 4       JONES
     

Joachim’s
“Presence”
 dimin.

     marcato
3
   
 

8
         )      (  )
  
  
 
 
 & &
  
   '  '   '   '
cresc.

 ten.
   (  )   ten.

   
16

&  (  & &  (  &

ten.
& &  &  &    '  
  ' ' '  '  '   '    * * * *  *
  dim.

  espressivo
23

      * 
                  *  
      dolce  

+
5

          
in tempo
30
 poco rit.
   
                 
  cresc.
 
35
         
       

  
    
     

 cresc. 
+ + + + +

  
6

   
41
 


( 
' 
  
          & 
+ + + + + +  con brio

  
 (    '    

45
 ( ' 

 &    & 

49
 
(


&






 
 dimin.


54
 


7

    un poco rit.

 

 
  
 
 &
   
 
 

      


Example 7: Joachim’s cadenza.

267
 19 TH

8


   
  
                 
61
CENTURY
MUSIC
 & 

  
      




9



65
  

  



   
  
una corda

      10
    '           
71
       (   
       '    


    
         
,
   

 
77

  
  riten. 

Example 7 (continued)

One reading of Joachim’s cadenza, then,
might be that it functions as a synthesis of the
movement’s ongoing dialectic between impro-
visation and composition. Situated at the cusp
of an important structural goal, the cadenza
allows the improvisatory soloist to finally as-
sert his agency in the unfolding sonata process.
In this ultimate location of improvisatory free-
dom, he fundamentally alters some of the cru-
cial events in the concerto’s narrative, such
that they lead to a dramatically different con-
clusion: the regaining of the initial state of
wholeness and immediacy implied by the D-
major pastoral theme at the beginning of the
movement, and the closure of the entire move-
ment in this original major key, rather than its
darkened minor-mode alternative.
But it is worth inquiring further into what
manner of resolution this cadenza achieves.
On the one hand, its improvisatory character is
immediately obvious, defined as it is by rhe-
torical hesitations, free modulations, figurative
passages, and an “unmeasured” sound. But as-
pects of this cadenza’s improvisatoriness are
markedly different from the improvisatory
rhetoric encountered in the rest of the con-
certo. Notably, Joachim does not freely rhapso-
dize his way toward the cadenza’s resolution.
There are few instances of the unbridled lyri-
cism or stopped-time improvisatory passages
that had characterized the naïve or “natural”
side of the concerto’s soloist; particularly re-
markable is the absence of the new melody
that the soloist had memorably introduced in
m. 206. Instead, in this cadenza Joachim seems
to engage with the concerto’s musical material
as a composer or analyst. Underneath the im-
provisatory rhetoric, the cadenza is tightly con-
structed, relying almost exclusively on themes
and motives from the movement, and these
(especially in the crucial transformation in sec-
tion 9) are treated in a deliberate, reflective
manner. Indeed, based on his approach to the
cadenza, it might be said that Joachim privi-
leged other aspects of the movement’s central
problem than those that I have described in
this article. While I have suggested that the
movement’s animating tension is between ideas
of wholeness and fragmentation, improvisation
and composition, the naïve and the sentimen-
tal, Joachim’s efforts at resolution are oriented
more toward a tonal problem: the pastoral D
major versus the darker VII regions that sub-
vert it in the primary theme and the develop-
ment.
The cadenza, then, occupies a crucial but
complex position within the concerto’s staging
of different types of creative agency. The rest of
the concerto, the written work of a composer
known for his painstakingly logical approach,

268
 Table 1
Thematic analysis of Joachim cadenza
Section Material
1 Opening pastoral theme, from solo preface
2 Third section of primary theme (ascending chromatic figure),
lyrical reinterpretation
3 Dotted motif, developed motivically
4 S-motive in lyrical form from development
5 Circling figuration from development
6 Virtuosic arpeggios (not thematically derived)
7 Third section of primary theme, as embellished by soloist in
development
8 Virtuosic figuration (not thematically derived)
9 Third section of primary theme; soloist’s struggle against C-minor PAC
in development; half-cadence pause in primary theme
10 Lyrical scales; ending taken from solo preface
had included passages designed to sound im-
provised. These passages activated cultural as-
sociations of improvisation with spontaneous,
inspired creativity, and in performance could
create the illusion of Joachim-qua-Brahms “in-
venting” on the spot. The cadenza, however,
was staged as a moment when the performer—
the natural, improvisatory soloist—was actu-
ally able to assume sole creative control. It
sounds improvisatory, but was written as a text,
and, as we have seen, carefully constructed.
Not only did the cadenza highlight Joachim’s
improvisatory and virtuosic abilities; it also
emphasized his identity as an insider who
writes, analyzes, and “understands” music.
Joachim had extensive experience as a com-
poser, and especially during their early friend-
ship, he had engaged with Brahms as much in
this capacity as in the role of performer.88 In-
88
Through the 1850s both musicians acknowledged
Joachim’s greater skill in various aspects of composition.
The First Piano Concerto, Brahms’s previous effort in the
genre, had been written in close deference to Joachim’s
compositional advice; Brahms made significant changes to
the piece’s compositional layout and orchestration in re-
sponse to Joachim’s suggestions. See Koch, Das
Klavierkonzert, 305–25, and George S. Bozarth, “Brahms’s
KAREN
LEISTRA-
JONES
Joachim’s
“Presence”
Corresponding
measure numbers
90–94
164–69
246–49
304–12
312–31
348–60
17–20, 332–37, 150–51
131–35
deed, Joachim would have argued that it was
precisely because of his immersion in the art of
composition that he could identify so success-
fully with composers’ thoughts in his perfor-
mances. Here, then, improvisation is celebrated
while also being assimilated and contained.
Improvisatory rhetoric is present, but channeled
toward distinct thematic and structural ends;
Joachim’s creative agency is staged as taking
over, but it is a composer-legitimated creative
agency that applies many of the tools and val-
ues associated with Brahms’s own composi-
tional aesthetics.
Arguably, however, Joachim’s compositional
approach to the cadenza was overshadowed by
the remainder of the concerto, which would
continue to stage him in the role of “natural”
First Piano Concerto Op. 15: Genesis and Meaning,” in
Beiträge zur Geschichte des Konzerts: Festschrift Siegfried
Kross zum 60. Geburtstag (Bonn: Schroder, 1990), 211–47.
While their relationship had changed by the time of the
Violin Concerto, and Brahms was more likely to ignore
Joachim’s compositional suggestions (even as he requested
them), Joachim’s critical involvement in the concerto’s
genesis still went well beyond matters of violin technique
to touch on more basic aspects of the concerto’s musical
materials. Schwarz, “Joseph Joachim,” 503–26.
269
 19 TH improviser. Each of the concerto’s remaining
CENTURY
MUSIC movements thematizes ideas that are intimately
related to the first movement’s improvisatory
idyll. The second movement recaptures a pas-
toral mood through its initial gently triadic
woodwind theme, and similarly associates this
mood with soloistic improvisation via the
soloist’s free internal expansion of that theme
and his subsequent florid, improvisatory me-
lodic lines. The third movement famously al-
ludes to Joachim’s Hungarian nationality, and
perhaps also to his Hungarian Concerto, through
its use of the style hongrois.89 But this “Hun-
garian” style, in evoking Joachim’s Hungarian-
ness, also evoked a wide range of cultural asso-
ciations, including the notion of Hungarian gyp-
sies as natural, primitive, and free—qualities
that were supposedly best expressed in their
rhapsodic, improvisatory music.90
Conclusion
Brahms has long been considered a composer
with a particularly strong orientation toward
musical works as written texts. He occupied a
prominent position within a culture that ven-
erated composers’ scores as monuments that
transcended the conditions of any given perfor-
mance, and he seems to have shared many of
its values.91 Numerous well-known anecdotes
89
John Daverio has also shown that certain passages of the
first movement, including the solo preface and the C-mi-
nor S-motive melody in the development, allude to an
improvisational Hungarian Gypsy style. See John Daverio,
Crossing Paths: Schubert, Schumann, and Brahms (New
York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 216.
90
Jonathan Bellman, “The Hungarian Gypsies and the Po-
etics of Exclusion,” in The Exotic in Western Music, ed.
Jonathan Bellman (Boston: Northeastern University Press,
1998), 74–103. Margaret Notley has argued that Brahms’s
incorporation of an improvisational Gypsy style in his late
adagios functioned as a marker of emotional immediacy;
it was the Gypsy style that allowed him to convey an
expressive depth in these works that he otherwise found
difficult to achieve late in his life. Notley, Lateness and
Brahms, 195–203.
91
Roger Moseley has demonstrated that, over the course of
his own performing career, Brahms’s views toward the act
of musical performance probably became increasingly an-
tagonistic, as he adopted a more rigid stance on the impor-
tance of works as notated texts. See Roger Moseley, “Work
or Play? Brahms’s Performance of His Own Music,” in
Johannes Brahms and His World, ed. Kevin C. Karnes and
Walter Frisch (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009),
145.
270
record him downplaying the importance of per-
formers and performance in general, in keeping
with familiar Werktreue rhetoric. When Flo-
rence May solicited his advice on playing
Mozart, for example, he pointed to the score
and said, “It is all there.” On playing Beethoven,
he supposedly remarked, “I have absolutely no
individuality in relation to it; rather I try to
reproduce the piece as well as Beethoven wrote
it. Then I have (quite) enough to do.”92 And just
as these are often cited as Brahms’s views on
performance, our contemporary image of
Joachim is as the performer who, to an excep-
tional degree, was able to achieve these ideals.
Behind our understanding of these roles lies
an important tradition in nineteenth-century
music historiography, a tradition that sees, in
Carl Dahlhaus’s influential terms, a “funda-
mental rift” between work-based and event-
based cultures. To Dahlhaus, while music in
the event-based tradition such as virtuoso show-
pieces and some Italian opera might best be
understood as a “recipe for performance,”
Austro-German instrumental music in the
Beethovenian tradition produced “inviolable
musical texts” whose meanings transcended
their various performances and needed to be
deciphered with “exegetical interpretations.”93
While many of the premises behind this binary
have been questioned in recent years, Dahl-
haus’s description of a split between work-based
and event-based musical cultures has proven
conceptually useful and continues to inform
critical approaches to nineteenth-century mu-
sic.94 Tellingly, opera studies have long sought
out ways to consider performance as a cultural
practice that shapes musical meaning, while
such approaches have been slower to appear in
92
Both of these anecdotes are quoted in Musgrave, A Brahms
Reader, 129–30.
93
Carl Dahlhaus, Nineteenth-Century Music, 9–10.
94
For a consideration of the philosophical underpinnings of
Dahlhaus’s dualism and a summary of the range of orien-
tations in response to Dahlhaus’s “rift” in current scholar-
ship, see James Hepokoski, “Dahlhaus’s Beethoven-Rossini
Stildualismus: Lingering Legacies of the Text-Event Di-
chotomy,” in The Invention of Beethoven and Rossini:
Historiography, Analysis, Criticism, ed. Nicholas Mathew
and Benjamin Walton (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2013), 15–48.
considerations of music in the “Beethovenian”
instrumental tradition.95
Joachim’s involvement in Brahms’s Violin
Concerto shows that the rhetoric surrounding
works and performances did not always corre-
spond to musical practices, and that twenty-
first-century concepts of Werktreue perfor-
mance can be anachronistic when applied to
nineteenth-century performance culture. It re-
veals Brahms’s Violin Concerto as a work not
only situated in a musical score, but also con-
taining quasi-dramaturgical implications that
could be realized in its unfolding as a performed
event. As such, it encourages us to look for
ways in which Dahlhaus’s “exegetical inter-
pretations” may be fruitfully combined with
what have been called the “presence effects” or
“drastic” qualities of performance.96 To search
for these implications is not to elevate a his-
torical performance or set of performances to
the status of “Ur-event,” by which every other
performance must be judged, but rather to em-
phasize that the conditions surrounding perfor-
mance can be vital in the production of mean-
ing under given historical conditions. The Vio-
lin Concerto was not merely influenced by
Joachim’s personality and style as a performer;
it staged him in the role of soloist, and his
95Some representative examples include Leon Plantinga,
Beethoven’s Concertos: History, Style, Performance (New
York: Norton, 1999); David Trippett, “Après une Lecture
de Liszt,” 52–93; and Roger Moseley, “Work or Play?
Brahms’s Performance of His Own Music,” in Johannes
Brahms and His World, 137–65.
96Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, Production of Presence: What
Meaning Cannot Convey (Stanford: Stanford University
Press, 2004), 17, and Carolyn Abbate, “Music—Drastic or
Gnostic,” Critical Inquiry 30 (2004): 505–36.
performances have left indelible traces
on the concerto as a work. l KAREN
LEISTRA-
JONES
Joachim’s
“Presence”
Abstract.
Boris Schwarz once characterized Brahms’s Violin
Concerto, op. 77, as an “intangible interplay be-
tween the art of Brahms and that of Joachim.” The
celebrated violinist was not only the inspiration for
this concerto; he also played a crucial role in its
compositional genesis and early performance his-
tory. But while Joachim’s compositional contribu-
tions to the concerto have been well documented,
his importance as a performer is usually acknowl-
edged only in vague terms. We sense that Joachim
the performer is somehow “in” this concerto with-
out being able to articulate how.
This article examines the intersections between
Joachim’s style and persona as a performer, the cul-
tural meanings ascribed to performance, and specific
formal and expressive features of the Violin Con-
certo. Particularly important was Joachim’s perceived
ability to present composed musical works as though
they were being improvised, created on the spot
through a mysterious fusion of Joachim himself with
the mind and spirit of the composer. In the later
nineteenth century, as the practice of improvisation
began to disappear from the concert stage, improvi-
sation could represent a lost ideal of spontaneous,
unmediated subjective expression.
An analysis of the concerto’s first movement
shows that it thematizes tensions between two con-
trasting visions of creativity—one involving sponta-
neous inspiration and improvisation at an instru-
ment, the other, the rigors of logical, planned out,
and written composition. These expressive features
take on additional meanings when considered in the
context of Joachim’s performances of the concerto,
and they allow for a recovery of some of its histori-
cal meanings that resided not only in the notated
score, but also in performed events.
Keywords: Johannes Brahms; Joseph Joachim; impro-
visation; Violin Concerto in D, op. 77; performance
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