Improvisational Idyll Joachim’s “Presence” and Brahms’s Violin Concerto, Op. 77

8/16/2019 Improvisational Idyll Joachim’s “Presence” and Brahms’s Violin Concerto, Op. 77

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KARENLEISTRA-JONESJoachim’s“Presence”

19th-Century Music, vol. 38, no. 3, pp. 243–271 ISSN: 0148-2076, electronic ISSN 1533-8606. © 2015 by the Regents ofthe University of California. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce articlecontent through the University of California Press’s Rights and Permissions Web site, at http://www.ucpressjournals.com/reprintInfo.asp. DOI: 10.1525/ncm.2015.38.3.243.

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 someyears [Joachim] was the only interpreter. Whatpart he bore in the actual making of the workitself will never be known; but the acceptedcadenza is owned as his; and, without his play-ing, the work must have fallen dead as far aspractical music is concerned, since no one elsewould have been able to show the public allthat it contained of beauty and depth.”1 Hisaccount reflected commonly held views onJoachim’s singular importance to this work.Brahms had conceived the concerto withJoachim in mind as the soloist, and from the

very beginning Joachim had been actively in-volved in shaping it. In August 1878, Brahmshad begun to send passages from the new con-certo to his friend, asking for comments andsuggestions about the violin writing. Joachimhad happily obliged, contributing numeroussuggestions on the solo violin part, many ofwhich Brahms incorporated into the final ver-sion.

As Fuller Maitland noted, Joachim alsoplayed an important role in disseminating andinterpreting the concerto in its early years. Be-ginning with its premiere in Leipzig on 1 Janu-ary 1879, he performed the concerto in citiesacross Europe, and until the concerto was pub-lished ten months after the premiere, he wasthe 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

Improvisational Idyll: Joachim’s “Presence”

and Brahms’s Violin Concerto, op. 77

I would like to thank James Hepokoski, Margaret Notley,and Matthew Butterfield for their insightful comments onvarious drafts of this article.

1J. A. Fuller Maitland, Joseph Joachim (London: J. Lane,1905), 39–40.


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of this work. So strong was its identificationwith his persona and playing style that otherviolinists were reportedly reluctant to incorpo-rate it into their repertoire, even after it be-came available in published form. It was notuntil later, in the 1880s and 1890s, that suchviolinists as Adolph Brodsky, Marie Soldat, andBranislaw Huberman took up the concerto.2

Joachim’s presence in Brahms’s Violin Con-certo continues to be felt today. Hardly anyprogram note fails to mention his importanceto the concerto, and his cadenza has achievednear textual status as by far the most widelyperformed option in the concert hall.3 BorisSchwarz articulated a common perception whenhe wrote in 1983 that the concerto was not just

for Joachim; instead, it represented an “intan-gible interplay between the art of Brahms andthat of Joseph Joachim.”4

But what does it mean for a performer to be“in” a musical work, so closely associated withit that his or her personality seems integral toits identity? Thanks to Schwarz and two recentcritical 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. Asidefrom more technically oriented studies of per-formance practice, critical discussions havetended to highlight the importance of Joachim’sperformances only in vague terms.6 They typi-

cally remind us that the concerto was com-posed for Joachim, with his performance stylein mind, and describe the Hungarian-style fi-nale as an homage to Joachim’s Hungarian na-tionality and to his Hungarian Concerto—butthey stop there.7 A full understanding ofJoachim’s role in this concerto must accountfor the role played by his carefully crafted per-sona as a performer and the cultural meaningsthat this persona activated.

As one of the most celebrated performers ofhis 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 hisapproach to performance (often praised for itsself-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 hasoften been equated with the deliberate nega-tion of the performer’s agency and presence, anexamination of contemporary Joachim recep-tion shows that in his performances, this wasnot usually perceived to be the case.9 In fact, arecurring trope in Joachim reception associatedhim with an ideal of improvisation-like perfor-mance that, as Mary Hunter has shown, playedan important role in Romantic performanceaesthetics, yet it has often been overlooked in

2Boris Schwarz, “Joseph Joachim and the Genesis ofBrahms’s Violin Concerto,” Musical Quarterly 69/4 (1983):525.3This is reflected in critical editions of the concerto; theBrahms Neue Ausgabe sämtliche Werke includes variousversions of Joachim’s cadenza in an appendix in the vol-ume devoted to this work. In Joachim’s own edition of theconcerto’s solo part, published as part of his Violinschule(1902–05), the cadenza is merged seamlessly into the textof 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 AndreasMoser, Violinschule, 3 vols. (Berlin: Simrock, 1905), III,27–48.4Schwarz, “Joseph Joachim,” 503.5Ibid., 503–26; Roesner and Struck, critical commentary toJohannes Brahms: Violinkonzert, xi–xxiii; and Clive Brown,critical commentary to Brahms: Concerto in D Major forViolin and Orchestra, op. 77 (New York: Bärenreiter, 2006),iii–xviii.6Examples of performance practice studies include Brown,critical commentary, Concerto in D Major, xiii–xvii andidem, “Joachim’s Violin Playing and the Performance of

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), 48–98.7Schwarz’s article is typical in this respect; he writes,“Brahms seems to have projected his concerto throughJoachim’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 toJoachim who had dedicated his Hungarian Concerto toBrahms.” Schwarz, “Joseph Joachim,” 506.8See Beatrix Borchard, Stimme und Geige: Amalie undJoseph Joachim, ein Beitrag zur Künstlersozial- undInterpretationsgeschichte 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): 397–436.9For a consideration of this form of Werktreue, see LydiaGoehr’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.


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modern scholarship.10 In an extended essay onthe subject, the critic Paul Bekker defined thisideal as follows: “the spirit of the improvisa-tion ideal (Improvisationsideal) is to allow themusical work to emerge as though in the mo-ment of sounding through the intimate, cre-

ative fusion of composer and performer, and inthis way, to bring it into accord with the origi-nal creative impulse.”11 Musical performance,Bekker continued, is “according to its originsand essence, an art of improvisation. It createsfrom the inspiration of the moment—evenmore, it is the immediate registering of a mo-ment that has been heightened to the mostintense aliveness possible. Music is indeed onlyto be thought of as arising in the moment ofsounding.”12 Writing in 1921, Bekker wastroubled by what he saw as the ascendancy ofthe ideal of “reproduction,” or strict fidelity tocomposers’ texts at the expense of the per-former, and he rather surprisingly cast Joachim,along with the pianist Hans von Bülow, as thelast great representative of the contrasting im-provisation ideal. While Bekker’s essay mightbe dismissed as a nostalgic idealization of a lost“golden age” of performance, his commentsechoed descriptions of Joachim’s playing bymany of the violinist’s contemporaries, whichoften remarked on his almost uncanny abilityto present composed musical works as thoughthey were being improvised, created on the spotthrough a mysterious fusion of Joachim him-self with the mind or spirit of the composer.

The idea of an improvisatory fusion betweenperformer and composer was important toBrahms’s Violin Concerto not only because theconcerto was known to be the result of closecollaboration between Joachim and Brahms. Theideal of improvisation was also inscribed with

cultural meanings, especially when situatedwithin 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 examinethe intersections that can exist between a par-ticular performer, the meanings ascribed to per-formance, and specific formal and expressivefeatures of a musical work. In this article, Ioutline how Joachim was able to create theimpression of “improvised” musical works,what these performances meant to some of hisnineteenth-century listeners, and what impro-visation and spontaneity could symbolize inBrahmsian compositional aesthetics and in Ro-mantic concepts of authorship. These questionslead to a reading of the Violin Concerto thatmoves beyond the traditional concept of themusical work as an entity that, while it mayhave been influenced by a performer, is ulti-mately located in the composer’s text. Instead,this reading conceives of the Violin Concertoas a “script,” and Joachim’s performances asacts that worked in conjunction with that scriptin an unfolding process of signification.13 Thisoffers a new way of conceptualizing Joachim’s“presence” in that work, one that emphasizesthe tensions that it activated between improvi-sation and composition, doing and thinking,and performing and composing. The larger goalof this reading is to recover some of the histori-cal meanings that resided in not only theconcerto’s notated score but also its status as aperformed event.

Improvising Musical Works

Accounts of Joachim’s playing often describedhim as an exceptionally improvisatory or spon-taneous-sounding performer, despite his cel-

10Mary 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 daraufaus, das Musikstück durch innige, schöpferische Ver-schmelzung von Komponist und Darsteller als imAugenblick des Erklingens entstehend erscheinen zu lassenund dadurch mit dem ursprünglichen Schaffenswillen inEinklang zu bringen.” Paul Bekker, “Improvisation undReproduktion,” in Klang und Eros (Berlin: DeutscheVerlags-Anstalt, 1922), II, 302.12“Die ausübende musikalische Kunst ist ihrem Ursprungund Wesen nach eine Kunst der Improvisation. Sie schafftaus der Eingebung des Augenblickes, mehr noch, sie istüberhaupt unmittelbare Erfassung eines zu intensivstemLebensgefühl gesteigerten Augenblickes. Musik isteigentlich nicht anders als im Augenblick des Erklingenserst entstehend zu denken.” Bekker, “Improvisation undReproduktion,” 300.

13See Nicholas Cook, “Between Process and Product: Mu-sic and/as Performance,” Music Theory Online 7/2 (April2001).


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ebrated fidelity to composers’ texts. As early as1844, 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 extemporaneousperformance and admits a greater degree of en-

thusiasm on the part of the instrumentalist.”14This reviewer attributed this impression toJoachim’s practice—still unusual at that time—of playing musical works from memory. Butsimilar observations would occur regularly overthe course of his long career. In 1898, for ex-ample, Andreas Moser would make a similarclaim: one of the main charms of Joachim’splaying was that he obeyed “the inspiration ofthe moment . . . [the work is] always createdanew.”15 These comments do not merely de-scribe a spontaneous or engaging performancestyle; instead, they describe a performance situ-ation in which an existing musical work ispresented 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 withJoachim’s well-established reputation as an un-compromising Werktreue performer who wasrespectful of composers’ presumed “intentions”almost to the point of self-effacement. An im-provisatory performance aesthetic allows forthe illusion of authorial agency on the per-former’s part. The performer, in other words,can appear as the creator or originator of themusical material being presented, which mayappear to be a challenge to the reverence forthe figure of the composer that is a definitivefeature of the Werktreue tradition. But instead,

in many of Joachim’s performances, the illu-sion of improvisation seemed to open up a spacein which the here and now of performancemerged with the idea of the musical work asthe expression of the thoughts and feelings ofan absent composer; to many observers, Joachim

seemed to fuse with, channel, or even becomethe composer of the work he was presenting.To Fuller Maitland, Joachim had “the power ofmaking music seem like the natural spontane-ous utterance of his inmost feelings, as well asa faithful reproduction of the thoughts of what-ever master he may be interpreting.”16 VonBülow went even further and experiencedJoachim playing as Beethoven; he quipped, “Yes-terday Joachim did not play Beethoven and Bach;Beethoven played himself.”17 Brahms himselfreminisced about a time in his life when, still“wandering in chaotic enthusiasm,” he heardJoachim play Beethoven’s Violin Concerto andunderstood Joachim to have been the composerof the concerto. Describing the occasion toJoachim several years later, in 1855, he wrote,“I was your most enthusiastic listener. . . . Itwasn’t at all important to me to take you forBeethoven. I have always considered his con-certo to be your own.”18 Brahms was compli-menting his friend; rather than implying thatJoachim had allowed his own personality toeclipse that of Beethoven, Brahms describedhis impression that Joachim, having identified

14“Philharmonic Concerts,” Illustrated London News (1June 1844): 354.15“Seine Vorträge wirken hauptsächlich darum sohinreissend, weil sie, von den Eingebungen des Augenblicksbeeinflusst, niemals stereotypisch sind. Vielmehr muss deraufmerksam Lauschende den Eindruck davontragen, dasser auch bei der Wiedergabe eines hundertmal gespieltenStückes immer noch nachschöpferisch thätig ist und demKunstwerk neue Seiten abzugewinnen weiss.” Moser, Jo-seph Joachim, 273. Joachim himself worked with Moseron 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 tothis text by referring to the authors as Moser/Joachim, acoauthor team. Borchard, Stimme und Geige, 26.

16Alexander Fuller Maitland, Joseph Joachim, 26. As FullerMaitland’s observation shows, such descriptions also ap-peared sometimes in response to other members of theBrahms circle. Walter Hübbe, for example, famously de-scribed Brahms’s performance style in similar terms: “Hedoes 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 interpretsthe 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 inMichael Musgrave, A Brahms Reader (New Haven: YaleUniversity Press, 2000), 122.17“Nicht Joachim hat gestern Beethoven und Bach gespielt,Beethoven hat selbst gespielt.” Quoted in Borchard, Stimmeund Geige, 511.18“Du spieltest es in Hamburg, es muss viele Jahre hersein, ich war gewiss Dein begeistertster Zuhörer. Es wareine Zeit, in der ich noch recht chaotisch schwärmte undes mir gar nicht darauf ankam, Dich für Beethoven zuhalten. 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.


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himself so completely with the concerto, wasable to present it as though it were “his own,”as though he himself was the work’s creator.

At times the impression that Joachim wasembodying 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’sperformances of the Beethoven Violin Concertothat appeared in Berlin’s National Zeitung in1852:

. . . with the first tones of his violin I forgoteverything else—the concert room, the public, even

Herr Joachim. . . . During the Adagio I first lookedtowards the platform, but I could no longer perceivethe figure of the player, for it was to me completelyobliterated by another. I clearly recognized it, thatthickset, carelessly-clad figure, with wild hair allstanding on end, and high forehead upon which theloftiest thoughts had left their illuminating traces,deep-sunk eyes, from which beamed the boldest spiritand the warmest love for humanity, and lips onwhich pain had drawn its sharpest lines and creases—the same features as those in the picture whichhangs above my piano, and which so often lookeddown on me and appeared to smile sympatheticallywhen my fingers falteringly played the Sonata in Fminor, or that in B major, or the Fantasia Op. 77. Itwas he himself, the creator of the Ninth Symphony,whom I imagined I saw face to face. As the subject ofthe Finale rang forth, his face assumed an expressionof 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 laststroke of the bow, the vision vanished. Before methere stood again Herr Joachim, who had played thewhole concerto by heart, and who departed amidstsuch a storm of applause as had never been heard inthis hall before.19

In Gumprecht’s account, Joachim’s playing lit-erally seemed to conjure Beethoven as a physi-cal and visual presence, a creator who experi-enced, felt, and lived the music as it arose inreal time.

Such ideas about a subjective merger between

performer and composer were not entirely newin Joachim’s time. A longstanding tradition hasvalued the qualities of spontaneity, extempori-zation, and immediacy even within the con-fines of the Werktreue ideal, and celebratedperformers 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. Numerousaesthetic treatises and performance manualsfrom the early nineteenth century described anideal of performance as “spontaneous cre-

19“Aber bei den ersten Klängen seiner Geige vergass ich allesandre, den Konzertsaal, das Publikum, sogar Herrn Joachim.. . . Erst im Adagio blickte ich wieder hin, aber von derGestalt des Geigers konnte ich nichts mehr bemerken; siewar mir durch eine andere ganz und gar verdeckt. Icherkannte sie wohl, diese gedrungene, nachlässig gekleideteGestalt mit ihren wirren, emporstehenden Haaren, der hohenStirn, auf der die erhabensten Gedanken ihre leuchtendenSpuren hinterlassen, mit ihren tiefliegenden Augen, ausdenen der kühnste Geist und die wärmste Menschenliebehervorschauten, mit den Lippen, um der Schmerz seineschärfsten Linien und Falten gezogen. Dieselben Züge hatten

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-Duroder die Phantasie op. 77 stammelten. Er war es selbst, derSchöpfer der ,neunten Symphonie’, den ich von Angesichtzu Angesicht zu schauen wähnte. Als das Thema des Finaleerklang, nahm sein Antlitz den Ausdruck des übermütigenHumors an, der mit Behagen dem Narrenspiel des Lebenszusieht. Bei jeder neuen Tonfigur veränderten sich dieMienen, die eine ganze Welt der Empfindungen abspiegelten,bis die Vision mit dem letzten Bogenstriche plötzlichverschwand. Vor mir stand wieder Herr Joachim, der dasganze Konzert auswendig gespielt hatte und mit einem

Beifallsturm, wie ihn dieser Saal wohl noch nie gehört,entlassen wurde.“ Otto Gumprecht, Berliner NationalZeitung (13 Dec. 1852). Quoted in Andreas Moser, JosephJoachim: Ein Lebensbild (Berlin: Verlag der DeutschenBrahms-Gesellschaft, 1908), I, 128–29.20In 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 comparisonbetween what was being heard and some lurking double,some transcendent work to which they had to measureup.” Carolyn Abbate, In Search of Opera (Princeton:Princeton University Press, 2001), xiv. Similarly, ElliottCarter described “the impression of improvisation of themost rewarding kind when good performers take the troubleto 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 feelthe carefully written-out piece as part of themselves andof their own experience, which they are communicatingto others directly from themselves at the moment of theperformance, in an alive way.” Allen Edwards, FlawedWords and Stubborn Sounds: A Conversation with ElliottCarter (New York: Norton, 1971), 78.


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ation.”21 According to this ideal, the performer,in real time and through intense identificationwith 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 performanceas both transparent to the work and fullypresent.”22

But as Hunter notes, the practice of perfor-mance in the early-Romantic era was generallyfreer and less work-centered than theoreticalprescriptions about it.23 During the time of thetreatises described in her study there was rela-

tively little practical concern with the problemof absolute fidelity to composers’ intentions inmusical performance, and the improvisationideal does not seem consistently to have in-formed responses to performers in the earlypart of the nineteenth century.24 Performanceculture 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-

ning of Joachim’s mature career in the 1850sand 1860s, performance values had begun tochange, and a new group of performers, withJoachim as one of its foremost representatives,had made it its mission to replace popular andflamboyant styles of virtuosity with a more

responsible, text-oriented approach appropriateto music’s new position within a “museumculture.”26 In this context, it was not unusualto encounter descriptions of performers thatcelebrated their ability to make well-knownworks seem newly created in performance—especially when those performers were thoughtto be particularly identified with the canonictradition.27 But even within this newly work-

oriented performance culture, Joachim’s impro-visatory style and his apparent ability to mergewith the absent figure of the composer wereseen as unique. To Carl Flesch, reminiscingfrom a twentieth-century vantage point, thisquality set Joachim apart from his fellow musi-cians: it was the “internal animation . . . andimaginative freedom of the rendition, for all itsfaithfulness to the text,” more than anythingelse, that “left [Joachim] on so lonely a highthrone.”28

21Hunter, “To Play as if from the Soul,” 367. The sourcesHunter cites include Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel,

Vorlesung über die Ästhetik (1818–29), Jean-JacquesRousseau’s entry “Exécution” in his Dictionnaire demusique (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), PierreBaillot, Méthode de violon (1803, with Pierre Rode andRodolphe Kreutzer) and L’art du violon (1835), and JohannNepomuk Hummel, Ausführliche theoretisch-practische

Anweisung zum Pianoforte-Spiel (1828).22Hunter, “To Play as if from the Soul,” 373.23Ibid., 361.24There were, of course, exceptions. Hunter cites a reviewcelebrating Baillot for being able to “[strip] away his ego tobecome, by turn, Haydn, Boccherini, Mozart, andBeethoven.” Ibid., 370.25See Carl Dahlhaus, Nineteenth-Century Music, trans. J.Bradford Robinson (Berkeley: University of California Press,1989), 134–42; William Weber, The Great Transformationof Musical Taste: Concert Programming from Haydn toBrahms (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.

26See Richard Taruskin’s discussion of the work-based “mu-seum culture” that had come to dominate concert life byBrahms’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 MusicalWorks: An Essay in the Philosophy of Music (New York:Oxford University Press, 2002), esp. 243–86.27For example, a review of Clara Schumann in the Leipzig

Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung in 1871 described herrendition of Beethoven’s C-Minor Piano Concerto as fol-lows: “This concerto appeared to be newly created underher hands, through this simple, clear, and yet still spiritedperformance by Frau Schumann, and it made the impres-sion of something immediately given forth” (So erschiendasselbe durch den einfachen, klaren, und dennochbegeisterten Vortrag der Frau Schumann wie eben unterihren Händen neu geschaffen und machte den Eindruckdes unmittelbar Gegebenen). Anonymous, Leipzigerallgemeine musikalische Zeitung 6/48 (1871): 764.28“Es war nicht die Vollkommenheit seiner geigerischenMittel, die ihn auf so einsamer Höhe thronen liess; es warnicht der schöne Klang ‘an sich,’ der sein Quartettspielzum Erlebnis werden liess; es war die innere Beseeltheit,der Adel der Gesinnung und die bei aller Texttreuephantasievolle Freiheit der Wiedergabe, die seinem Spieljenen undefinierbaren Reiz gaben, dem jeder feinfühligeMusiker erliegen musste.” Carl Flesch, Erinnerungen einesGeigers (Freiburg: Atlantis Verlag, 1960), 32.


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Creating the Improvisation Illusion

How, then, was Joachim able to create theseimpressions and inspire these kinds of responsesin his audience? Two of Joachim’s English sup-porters, Fuller Maitland and Donald Francis

Tovey, attempted to answer these questions byproviding technical explanations for the mys-terious “internal animation” of his perfor-mances. Fuller Maitland pointed to theviolinist’s frequent subtle modifications to themetronomic value of individual notes within aphrase, 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 challengethe popular notion that a performance must beeither subjective, individual, and personal or“faithful, conscientious, clear,” and focused onbringing out “the intentions of the composer.”30

In Tovey’s essay, Joachim, after a lifetime ofstudy during which his “personality grew in

the process of understanding and reproducingthe thoughts of the great composers,” was ableto combine fidelity with subjectivity through ahighly developed ability to “sympathize” withthese composers.31 An important aspect of hisplaying that allowed this merger to happen washis approach to rhythm, which Tovey called“true” rather than “strict.” According to Tovey,Joachim’s “true” rhythm was able to maintaina sense of expansiveness from beat to beat, allwhile keeping relatively steady time. This ex-pansiveness, Tovey argued, freed up space forJoachim to employ “agogic” accents and a freeapproach to rhythm, even while keeping a rela-tively steady tempo.32

These kinds of observations are certainly cor-roborated by Joachim’s recordings with theGramophone & Typewriter Ltd. in 1903, inwhich he often made dramatic adjustments torhythm, sometimes going so far as to alter the

notated values significantly.33 This flexibilitywas entirely in keeping with his written viewson the matter; Joachim’s introduction toMendelssohn’s Violin Concerto in hisViolinschule praised that composer’s perfectunderstanding of “the elastic management of

time as a subtle means of expression.”34 Whendescribing these aspects of the Joachim record-ings, commentators have typically emphasizedthe “structural” or analytical reasons forJoachim’s deviations from strictly notated mu-sical time, but it is equally important to notethat to some of Joachim’s contemporaries suchas Tovey this aspect of his playing provided anecessary bridge between the “here and now”

of performance and the thoughts and feelingsof 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 forthe impression of improvisational freedom;these technical and stylistic features of his play-ing were meaningful only in the context of hisbroader image as a performer. This context in-

volved his reputation, physical comportmentduring performances, social connections, andpractices both within and outside the concerthall. Many of these aspects of his performingpersona 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

29Fuller Maitland, Joseph Joachim, 26.30Donald Francis Tovey (“Tamino”), “Performance and Per-sonality,” part I, Musical Gazette (Dec. 1899): 1.31Ibid., 3–4.32Donald Francis Tovey (“Tamino”), “Performance and Per-sonality,” Part III, Musical Gazette (July 1900): 33–35.

33Joachim recorded five pieces; his own Romance in C, hisarrangement of Brahms’s Hungarian Dances Nos. 1 and 2,and two Bach movements for solo violin (the Prelude fromSonata No. 1 and the Bourrée from Partita No. 1).34Joachim and Moser, Violinschule, III, 228. Elsewhere inthis violin method Moser described rhythmic freedom as“inwardly assimilated conformity with the law” that mustbe used with restraint and caution (III, 16). For a detaileddiscussion of these recordings and Joachim’s approach torubato, see Brown, “Joachim’s Violin Playing,” 87–90.35David 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 emphasizenotes of “structural importance” by so lengthening them.David Milsom, Theory and Practice in Late Nineteenth-Century Violin Performance: An Examination of Style inPerformance, 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.


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members of the Joachim Quartet, for example,he once performed the Cavatina from Beetho-ven’s op. 130 in the room in which Beethovenwas thought to have been born, on instrumentsassociated with the deceased composer,36 anevent 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, andBrahms) to help create an image of himself assomeone unusually intimate with the creativefigures whose works he interpreted. In the caseof Beethoven, in which a direct biographicalconnection was impossible to establish, Joachim

emphasized his closeness to the composerthrough a few degrees of separation, noting inhis biography with Moser that those in noblecircles in Pest who had championed Joachim ata young age had been the very same friends andsupporters of Beethoven: “One can almost finda certain omen in the fact that he who laterbecame the greatest interpreter of Beethovenwas, already in his earliest childhood, connected

with people who, while they uttered the name‘Beethoven’ with sacred awe and reverence, hadalso been personally and spiritually close withthe great genius.”37

Joachim’s relationship to his late-nineteenth-century audiences and the fantasies and desiressurrounding 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 notonly to a performer who was highly skilled atmaking his performances seem like “spontane-ous creations” but also to a community of lis-teners eager to think of a Joachim concert as anoccasion on which great composers could be-

come “present,” or, as a sonnet to Joachim byRobert Bridges phrased it, “the soul of greatSebastian [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 Hunternotes, in the nineteenth century the act of per-formance was often conceived in dialecticalterms, as a site in which oppositional dualities(including “the I and not-I of performer andmusic; materiality of technique vs. ineffabilityof expression; emptiness of virtuosity vs. moralhigh ground of true music-making”) might beresolved.39 One of the most important of these

dualities concerned the opposed concepts offidelity, on the one hand, and expressive imme-diacy and subjectivity, on the other. WithinWerktreue discourse, fidelity to the composer’stext was often articulated in such a way that aperformer’s “transparency” and self-abnegationin the service of the composer’s ends becamemoral exigencies. At the same time, there wasa concern that such disinterested fidelity could

lead to mechanical, disengaged, or inauthenticperformances of musical masterworks. In otherwords, late-nineteenth-century audiences, inaddition to demanding respect for musicalworks, wanted the assurance that performerswere fully present and engaged with the music,and that they possessed an authentic relation-ship to the subjectivity assumed to reside withinthat music.40 A large part of a performer’s taskwas to establish that he or she possessed a“true” relationship to and experience of greatworks in performance.

The improvisation illusion provided a spacein which some of these competing demands

36Borchard describes this event in Stimme und Geige, 513.37“Es liegt nahe, darin eine gewisse Vorbedeutung zu finden,dass der nachmalige grösste Interpret BeethovenscherMusik schon in frühester Kindheit mit Personen in Verkehrtrat, die zwar den Namen Beethoven mit einer gewisser-massen heiligen Scheu und Ehrfurcht aussprachen, die aberandererseits doch wieder dem grossen Genius menschlichund seelisch nahe gestanden haben.” Moser, JosephJoachim, 8. For more on these circles, see Robert Eshbach,“Joachim’s Youth—Joachim’s Jewishness,” Musical Quar-terly 94/4 (2011): 548–92.

38“Belov’d of all to whom that Muse is dear / Who hid herspirit of rapture from the Greek, / Whereby our art excelleth

the antique / Perfecting formal beauty to the ear; Thou thathast been in England many a year / The interpreter who leftus nought to seek / Making Beethoven’s inmost passionspeak, / Bringing the soul of great Sebastian near; Theirmusic liveth ever, and ‘tis just / That thou, good Joachim—so high thy skill— / Rank, as thou shalt upon the heavenlyhill / Laurel’d with them; for thy ennobling trust /Remember’d when thy loving hand is still / And ev’ry earthat heard thee stopt with dust.” Quoted in Fuller Maitland,Joseph Joachim, 23.39Hunter, “To Play as if from the Soul,” 371.40See Leistra-Jones, “Staging Authenticity.”


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could be reconciled. In accounts such asGumprecht’s (in which Joachim “became”Beethoven while on stage), Bridges’s (in whichBeethoven “spoke” through Joachim), andMoser’s (in which Joachim’s performances werespontaneous 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 awork by Beethoven, in other words, allowed foran experience of music as unmediated self-ex-pression. In this context, it is significant thatenthusiasm about Joachim’s performances asspontaneous “creations” arose at a time when

actual improvisation was increasingly excludedfrom concerts that focused on the performanceof canonic works. That is, they arose at a timewhen composers themselves were becomingless present in concert halls as interpreters oftheir 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 morepronounced. Accounts of listeners receivingmusical works “as though improvised” suggestthat there may have been some sense of lossassociated with these developments in concertlife. They show that for some listenersJoachim’s performances involved a combina-tion of Werktreue principles with the memoryof (and perhaps nostalgia for) the excitement

and spontaneity of a culture of improvisation, aculture in which composer-performers regularlyplayed, embellished, and even “thought up”their own music in real time before an audi-ence.42 This experience may have been other-

wise difficult to access as performers turnedtheir energy toward the responsible interpreta-tion of works by deceased composers, whoselives and worlds were slipping into a past thatwas no longer fully accessible to a modernizingworld.

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 alsoplayed a significant role in compositional aes-

thetics. Fantasies about Joachim’s “improvisa-tions” involved not only a virtuoso in the actor 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 musicalwork to sound improvised? And what were theimplications of this ideal for Brahms’s music,in particular?

In a recent study, literary historian AngelaEsterhammer has explored the widespread phe-nomenon of improvised poetic performances inthe Romantic era.43 This genre of performancewas most associated with Italian performersknown 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. AsEsterhammer shows, improvisation and impro-visers became the locus for a number of potentcultural meanings during this time. Amongthese was the concept of the improviser as theembodiment of inspired poetic genius, a figure

41As Laudan Nooshin has shown, improvisation has beenan “icon of musical difference” within the Western classi-

cal tradition, especially beginning in the nineteenth cen-tury when an exclusively notated “art music” traditionbecame a symbol of European musical superiority. AsNooshin writes, qualities such as immediacy, spontane-ity, and subjectivity could be understood variously as marksof inferiority, or romanticized as qualities that were beinglost in modern Western societies. See Laudan Nooshin,“Improvisation as ‘Other’: Creativity, Knowledge andPower: The Case of Iranian Classical Music,” Journal of the Royal Musical Association 128/2 (2003): 242–96.42For a discussion of this culture of improvisation, as wellas the ways in which improvisational practices such as

preluding survived into the age of the work-oriented pianorecital, 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; andKenneth Hamilton, After the Golden Age: RomanticPianism and Modern Performance (New York: OxfordUniversity Press, 2008).43Angela Esterhammer, Romanticism and Improvisation,1750–1850 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008).Also see Melina Esse, “Encountering the improvvisatricein Italian Opera,” Journal of the American MusicologicalSociety 66/3 (2013): 709–70.


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who was able to put the workings of creativeinspiration on display for an audience. Theimproviser’s creativity was often understoodaccording to a particular Romantic poetic ideal:that of the “natural genius,” whose effusionswere spontaneous, sudden, and seemingly un-

tutored.44 For the “natural genius,” the poemor composition springs to completion sponta-neously, without conscious deliberation or in-tervention on the part of the poet, and withoutthe arduous process of revising, reconsidering,and fine-tuning that normally attends poeticinvention.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 ofthe nineteenth century. In an era increasinglydominated 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 thecourse of his career, Schumann gradually reinedin the improvisational play that had furnishedthe material for many of his early composi-

tions in favor of a more “mental” approach inwhich he rigorously worked through musical

ideas in his head before writing them down.47

As Schumann grew increasingly committed tothis approach, musical materials that bore thetrace of an improvisational origin (such as re-petitive figurative passages, variations on simpleharmonic 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 dueto its association with the spontaneous, theephemeral, and the unwritten; they also in-volved its grounding in the physicality of aperformer’s relationship to an instrument. Bythe midcentury, these qualities were increas-

ingly cast in opposition to the concept of “au-tonomous” musical works and the attendantaesthetic values of formal coherence, logic, anddevelopment.48

Brahms, of course, inherited many of Schu-mann’s aesthetic positions, and his place in amusical culture predicated on written worksenduring 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 outpouringassociated with improvisation. Stanley Cavell,for instance, in a reflection on improvisation inmusic, described his practice of listening to agreat 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 thecomposer were re-enactments, or dramatiza-

44Esterhammer, Romanticism and Improvisation, 47.45M. H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp: RomanticTheory and the Critical Tradition (New York: Oxford Uni-

versity Press, 1953), 189.46Significantly, Schiller’s language in On Naïve and Senti-mental Poetry often implied a connection between naïvepoetry, nature, and some of the qualities associated withimprovisation such as spontaneity and live presence. Thenaïve artist, for example, was able to “touch us by nature,by sensual truth, by the living present” (Jene rühren unsdurch Natur, durch sinnliche Wahrheit, durch lebendigeGegenwart). Friedrich von Schiller, “Über naive undsentimentalische Dichtung,” in Schillers sämtliche Werke(Stuttgart: Verlag der Gotta’schen Buchhandlung, 1894),XV, 29.

47Dana Gooley, “Schumann and Agencies of Improvisa-tion,” in Rethinking Schumann, ed. Roe-Min Kok andLaura Tunbridge (New York: Oxford University Press,2011), 129–56.48Gooley also locates an important social factor in the

increasing devaluation of improvisation in the growingubiquity of the Bildungsideal (with its attendant values ofwork, 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 thesame 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 theform of children, respectability, and household income.”Ibid., 149.49J. Peter Burkholder, “Brahms and Twentieth-CenturyClassical Music,” this journal 8 (1984): 75–83.


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tions, of successes his improvisations had dis-covered—given the finish and permanence theoccasion deserves and the public demands, butcontaining essentially only such discoveries.”50

And yet for Cavell not all music was amenableto 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 reinforcethe impression of his music’s distance fromimprovisation-like spontaneous inspiration. InGeorge Henschel’s account of an 1876 conver-sation, Brahms opined:

There is no real creating without hard work. Thatwhich you call invention, that is to say, a thought,an idea, is simply an inspiration from above, forwhich I am not responsible, which is no merit ofmine. Yea, it is a present, a gift, which I ought evento despise until I have made it my own by right ofhard work. And there need be no hurry about that,either. It is as with the seed-corn; it germinatesunconsciously and in spite of ourselves. When I, forinstance, have found the first phrase of a song. . . . I

might shut the book there and go for a walk, dosome other work, and perhaps not think of it againfor months. Nothing, however, is lost. If afterward Iapproach the subject again, it is sure to have takenshape: 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) comesas an immediate inspiration. The composer’snext task, however, is to achieve distance fromthe immediacy of its first impression, first, bytaking time (during which the idea uncon-sciously “germinates”) and second, by “reallyworking on it” (employing, presumably, such

logical techniques as counterpoint and the-matic-motivic development).53 The need toachieve distance in order to reflect on one’sfirst inspiration is further emphasized in theless well-known continuation of Henschel’saccount, in which Brahms castigated compos-ers “who sit at the piano with a poem beforethem, putting music to it from A to Z until it isdone. They write themselves into a state of

enthusiasm which makes them see somethingfinished, something important, in every bar.”54

Here the distance from one’s initial enthusi-asm is to be achieved explicitly by removingoneself from the physical instrument.

Nevertheless, some of the expressive idealsassociated with improvisation do play an im-portant (if ambiguous) role in many of Brahms’scompositions. There has been a longstanding

tradition, dating back to Brahms’s own time, ofhearing a tension between those expressive ele-ments, on the one hand, and opposing values

50Stanley Cavell, “Music Discomposed,” in Must We MeanWhat 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 theboundary between actual improvisation and compositionin Liszt’s “Dante” Sonata, which isolates passages that“suggest a physical relation to the instrument,” concludes

that Liszt’s music “continually challenges the aestheticboundaries of composition, improvisation, and perfor-mance.” Trippett, “ Après une Lecture de Liszt: Virtuosityand Werktreue in the ‘Dante’ Sonata,” this journal 32(2008): 77, 54.51Cavell, “Music Discomposed,” Must We Mean What WeSay?, 200–01. Cavell writes: “Somewhere in the develop-ment of Beethoven [the impression of improvisation] ceasesto be imaginable. (I do not include all music afterBeethoven. Chopin and Liszt clearly seem improvisatory,in the sense intended; so do Brahms Intermezzi, but notBrahms Symphonies; early Stravinsky, perhaps, but not

recent Stravinsky.)” Similarly, in an essay exploring thereasons for the devaluing of improvisation in Western artmusic, Bruno Nettl, like Cavell, used Brahms’s sympho-nies to represent a notated tradition that is resistant topractices 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 devaluingof improvisation in Western art music. Bruno Nettl, “In-troduction: An Art Neglected in Scholarship,” in In theCourse of Performance: Studies in the World of MusicalImprovisation, ed. Bruno Nettl and Melinda Russell (Chi-cago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 4.

52George Henschel, Personal Recollections of JohannesBrahms; Some of His Letters to and Pages from a JournalKept by George Henschel (Boston: Richard G. Badger, 1907),22–23.53This assessment of melodic inspiration vs. logical elabo-

ration also carried political overtones in Brahms’s late-nineteenth-century Viennese milieu, as Margaret Notleyhas shown. Emotion, instinct, and immediacy were oftenassociated with composers like Wagner and Bruckner andthe 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 inthe Twilight of Viennese Liberalism (New York: OxfordUniversity Press, 2007), esp. 15–35.54Henschel, Personal Recollections, 23.


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such as reserve, logic, irony, and ambiguity inBrahms’s music.55 More recently, ReinholdBrinkmann interpreted this typically Brahmsianexpressive tension according to the concept ofhistorical lateness, as a yearning for an unme-diated and direct mode of expression, or nostal-

gia for an artistic consciousness free from theburdens of history, self-consciousness, skepti-cism, and irony. Brinkmann heard this tensionas the expressive foundation of Brahms’s Sec-ond Symphony, in which an initial pastoralidyll 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 upwith the awareness of a historical loss. . . .Brahms’s idyllicizing expresses that melancholywhich is the product of ‘mourning’ for a ‘lostpossession.’”57

A tension between immediacy and learnedreflection, the naïve and the sentimental, isalso one of the animating expressive features ofBrahms’s Violin Concerto, op. 77. The Violin

Concerto was composed only a year after theSecond Symphony and also underwent its maincompositional germination while Brahms wasat his summer residence in the town ofPörtschach, where he described the WörtherSee area as “virgin soil” where the air was sofull of melodies that “one had to be careful notto step on them.”58 It shares significant affini-ties with that symphony, most notably the pres-

ence in its first movement of an initial pastoralidyll subjected to darkening and ambiguity asit is incorporated into a symphonic sonata pro-cess.59 Over the years, several listeners and crit-ics have attributed this tension to the contrastbetween tuneful lyricism and symphonic writ-

ing. For example, Hubert Foss wrote in 1952that “of all of Brahms’s major works, [the Vio-lin Concerto] is the one which shows in thehighest degree of perfection the reconciling ofthe two opposite sides of his creative mind—the lyrical and the constructive: Brahms thesong writer and Brahms the symphonist. Forthis concerto is a song for the violin on a sym-phonic scale—a lyrical outpouring which nev-

ertheless exercises to the full his great powersof inventive development.”60

Other commentators, however, have sug-gested that the concerto’s main fault line liesbetween improvisatory writing and symphoniccomposition. Tovey, for example, wrote of theViolin 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 communicatingthreads 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 phraseplays 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 isa remarkable work showing great facility of

55This tension has been explained in various terms, as“emotion” versus “logic,” as an imperfectly subdued “earlyself” (the “young Kreisler”) coming through in Brahms’solder, more “mature” compositions, and so forth. WalterNiemann, for example, relates this to Brahms’s inherentlyNorth German nature, which displayed “both sides of theNordic nature: on the one hand, that of the meditativeHolsteiner, inclined to imaginings, now of a fantastic

daemonic order, now romantically idyllic; and, on the otherhand, that of the robust, materialistic, reserved Ham-burger.” Walter Niemann, Brahms, trans. Catherine AlisonPhillips (New York: Knopf, 1930), 320 and 217.56Reinhold Brinkmann, Late Idyll: The Second Symphony of Johannes Brahms (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UniversityPress, 1997).57Ibid., 200.58“Der Wörther See ist ein jungfräulicher Boden, da fliegendie Melodien, dass man [sich] hüten muss, keine zu treten.”Letter to Hanslick, quoted in Max Kalbeck, JohannesBrahms, vol. 3 (Tutzing: Hans Schneider, 1976), 175.

59Walter Niemann, for example, heard in this work the“virile struggle of this so-called ‘harsh’ composer againsthis tender North German emotional nature, his conflictwith self, [which] follows almost the same course as in thefirst 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 ofthe tradition of hearing the Second Symphony and theViolin Concerto as linked, in Late Idyll, 57.60Hubert Foss, “Johannes Brahms” in The Concerto, ed.Ralph Hill (New York: Penguin Books, 1952), 187.61Donald Francis Tovey, Essays in Musical Analysis, vol.III: Concertos (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981),164.62Malcolm MacDonald, “‘Veiled Symphonies?’ The Con-certos,” in The Cambridge Companion to Brahms (NewYork: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 165.


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invention. It sounds as if he were improvisingand the whole thing is conceived and carried outin such a masterly fashion.”63 Brahms wrote thisletter as he began work on his own violin con-certo, and improvisation was clearly somethingthat 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’screative collaboration in more detail. Whilesome of Joachim’s compositional input intothe concerto is traceable through the availabledocumentary sources, a significant part of hiscontribution remains nonrecoverable. This isbecause in addition to their correspondence re-

garding the concerto, Brahms and Joachim metseveral times to work together on the concerto.The first of these meetings occurred inPörtschach in early September 1878. Anothertook place in Berlin in April 1879, at a pointwhen Joachim had performed the concerto sev-eral times but a final version had yet to beestablished. 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 dayssurrounding the Vienna premiere on 14 Janu-ary 1879, and met for a final prepublicationproofreading in August 1879. As Schwarz notes,perhaps the most important of these meetingswas the one in Pörtschach in September 1878.During this time, Brahms’s ideas were still influx, and Joachim was likely able to experi-

ment with new material directly on his violin,coming up with alternative suggestions througha semi-improvisatory process of trial and er-ror.64

The likelihood that Joachim could contrib-ute to the composition through unpracticedperformance on the spot is significant given

that Brahms was so uncharacteristically con-cerned with achieving an idiomatic, violinisticsolo part in this concerto. In his first letter toJoachim regarding the concerto, Brahms askedJoachim to forbid clumsy and uncomfortablepassages, and in his response, Joachim prom-

ised to get back to Brahms as to whether theconcerto would be enjoyable to play—even in ahot concert hall.65 The concern with idiomati-cally natural violin writing in the Violin Con-certo is often explained as the result of Brahms’suncertainty and corresponding conscientious-ness when dealing with the violin.66 But it isalso significant when we consider that much ofthe violin part for this concerto is written in a

markedly spontaneous, rhapsodic way, that itwas written for a soloist, Joachim, who wasparticularly adept at creating an illusion of im-provisation (with its connotations of emotionalimmediacy) in his performances, and that itwas written through an engagement withJoachim’s real-time process of trying out musi-cal ideas on his instrument. The emphasis onidiomatic writing in this violin part not only

63Johannes Brahms and Clara Schumann, Letters of ClaraSchumann and Johannes Brahms, 1853–1896, ed. BertholdLitzmann (New York: Longmans, Green and Co., 1927),34. The Viotti concerto was clearly on Brahms’s mind ashe worked on his own concerto. Not only was the quotedletter written as Brahms began work on his Violin Con-certo; Joachim confessed to hearing certain passages as“unconscious echoes” of similar passages in the Viottiwhen he published the solo part to the Brahms concerto inhis Violinschule. See Joachim, Violinschule, III, 27.64Schwarz, “Joseph Joachim,” 524.

65Brahms wrote: “Nun bin ich zufrieden, wenn Du einWort sagst, und vielleicht einige hineinschreibst: schwer,unbequem, unmöglich, usw. Die ganze Geschichte hat vierSätze; vom letzten schrieb ich den Anfang—damit mirgleich die ungeschickten Figuren verboten werden!” Let-ter to Joachim, 22 August 1878. Joachim’s response was asfollows: “Ich habe sofort durchgesehen, was Du schicktest,und Du findest hie und da eine Note und Bemerkung zurÄnderung—freilich ohne Partitur lässt sich nicht geniessen

herauszukriegen ist das meiste, manches sogar rechtoriginell violinmässig—aber ob man’s mit Behagen allesim heissen Saal spielen wird, möchte ich nicht bejahen,bevor ich’s im Fluss mir vorgeführt.” Letter to Brahms, 24August 1878. Both letters are in Johannes Brahms inBriefwechsel mit Joseph Joachim, II, 126–27. This is amarked departure from Brahms’s attitude to soloistic vir-tuosity in other compositions, most notably in his twopiano concertos. As numerous performers and critics havepointed 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 virtuosicwriting.66As Brahms would write to Joachim about the DoubleConcerto, “Oh, how much more agreeable and sensible itis to write for an instrument one knows through andthrough—as I presume to know the piano!” (Ach, wievielangenehmer und gescheiter ist es, für ein Instrumentschreiben, das man durch und durch kennt—wie ich meinedas Klavier zu kennen!) Letter to Joachim, early October1887, in Johannes Brahms in Briefwechsel mit JosephJoachim, II, 226.


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heightens its impression of improvisation(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 morenatural or simple (rather than belabored and

complex) mode of artistic expression.

Improvisational Idyll

In what follows, I present a reading of the firstmovement of Brahms’s Violin Concerto thatfocuses on the connection it makes betweenimprovisation and musical material that iscoded 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 rhapsodicimproviser. Throughout the movement, how-ever, lyrical, pastoral, and improvisatory pas-sages are presented in tension with a largersymphonic process. This latter process mani-fests itself in a number of ways. The ViolinConcerto, like Brahms’s other works in the

genre, used a deliberately backward-lookingclassical concerto form, with an opening or-chestral ritornello preceding the onset of thesolo exposition. As such, it was in dialoguewith a concerto-sonata form that had been es-tablished by Mozart and Beethoven nearly acentury earlier.67 Furthermore, in this workBrahms intentionally evoked the ideal of the“symphonic” concerto, an epithet often approv-

ingly applied to nineteenth-century concertosin recognition of their uncommon complexity,seriousness of purpose, and emphasis on “sym-phonic” processes of motivic working-out anddevelopment.68 The tension between these con-

trasting expressive worlds—one associated withimmediacy, lyricism, and improvisation, theother associated with rigorous formal andmotivic processes—animates much of theconcerto’s first movement.

My focus will be on several crucial areas

that highlight this tension: the primary themeand the secondary thematic area in the openingritornello and the solo exposition, parts of thedevelopment, and the cadenza that Joachimpenned for the movement. Throughout, I drawon the conceptual framework established byJames Hepokoski and Warren Darcy in Ele-ments of Sonata Theory: Norms, Types andDeformations in the Late Eighteenth-Century

Sonata, which allows for an ongoing consider-ation of the concerto’s engagement with thegeneric expectations of Classical concerto-so-nata form—a central and often self-consciousprocess in the first movement.69 While I presenta detailed score-based analysis, many of thefeatures I describe acquire additional meaningswhen imagined in the context of live perfor-mances by Joachim. What emerges is a reading

of this movement that begins to account forJoachim’s presence and the act of performancemore generally as integral components of thisconcerto as a work.

Orchestral Exposition. The concerto’s openingritornello starts with a lilting D-major melodybased almost exclusively on broken tonic tri-ads played in unison by strings, horns, and bas-

soons. After eight measures, this melody (animplied antecedent phrase) reaches a hushedpause on a half cadence, before continuing overa sustained C-major chord (VII in D major).With its modal implications and its shift to theflat 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).

67On Brahms’s decision to use classical concerto form forhis concertos—already a backward-looking decision whenhe composed his First Piano Concerto in the 1850s, see

James Hepokoski, “Monumentality and Formal Processesin the First Movement of Brahms’s Piano Concerto No. 1in D Minor, Op. 15,” in Expressive Intersections in Brahms:Essays in Analysis and Meaning, ed. Heather Platt andPeter H. Smith (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,2012), 217–51.68For a discussion of “symphonic” elements in nineteenth-century concertos, and the concomitant prestige attachedto such features, see Juan Martin Koch, Das Klavierkonzertdes 19. Jahrhunderts und die Kategorie des Symphonischen:Zur Kompositions- und Rezeptionsgeschichte der Gattungvon Mozart bis Brahms (Sinzig: Studio, 2001).

69James Hepokoski and Warren Darcy, Elements of SonataTheory: Norms, Types, and Deformations in the Late Eigh-teenth-Century Sonata (New York: Oxford UniversityPress, 2006).


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As Robert Hatten has shown, in the nine-teenth century the pastoral mode went beyondspecifically rustic or Arcadian associations toencompass more general themes of idealizedsimplicity and wholeness.70 A yearned-for stateapart 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 thatwas “natural” in the sense of being innocentand whole. In nineteenth-century instrumen-tal music, the pastoral mode could also repre-sent a freedom from the symphonic traditionand the complexities of sonata form.71 A simple,harmonically static melody such as the open-ing of this concerto does not demand a largerstructural and narrative process; its triadic ex-

pansiveness de-emphasizes the concise motivicunits that, in the symphonic tradition afterBeethoven, typically provided the basis for acomplex and ongoing process of development.

Like many of its nineteenth-century prede-cessors, the Violin Concerto does not present apure pastoral idyll but rather an initially inno-cent world that is darkened and compromisedin various ways.72 After the half cadence atmm. 7–8, the second phrase of the primarytheme not only leads through an initial shift toflat-side harmony, but also begins to inject a

note of ambiguity by alluding briefly to theminor mode (vii°7/V) in m. 15. Another half

70Robert Hatten, Interpreting Musical Gestures, Topics,and Tropes: Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert (Bloomington:Indiana University Press, 2004), 55–65.71Ibid., 65–67.

72These predecessors included the Beethoven Violin Con-certo and Brahms’s own Second Symphony. The SecondPiano Concerto (composed three years later) follows a simi-lar expressive trajectory. Each of these works, like theBrahms Violin Concerto, presents an initial idyllic pasto-ral world that is either internally compromised by

darkenings and ambiguities, or externally compromisedby events and processes that are unfriendly, or even hos-tile. The opening of Brahms’s Violin Concerto has alsooften 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 thisconcerto and the Beethoven Violin Concerto, the “Eroica”Symphony, and Brahms’s Second Symphony have oftenbeen remarked on and noted by observers in Brahms’s ownday, including Hanslick and Kalbeck. Brinkmann providesan overview of the tradition of seeing this group of worksas a linked set in Late Idyll, 57.

Example 1: Primary theme, mm. 1–26.


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cadence in m. 17 elides with a third section ofthe primary theme, a strained ascent that, inits initial rise from A to B, suggests anotherborrowing from the minor mode. This phrasedisrupts 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 fewmeasures is lost. The initial eight-measure an-tecedent phrase of the primary theme is neverrounded off by a symmetrical consequent; in-stead it is swept into a discourse of growingcomplexity and uncertainty.

Following this receding of the original pasto-ral world, the movement’s secondary thematicarea 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 ofthe voices that provides an opening for a lyricalsecondary theme.74 In the next measure, an Eheld by one of the oboes and one of the horns

does begin a tuneful melody that, in its contourand its lyricism, hearkens back to the pastoralopening of the primary theme. But at m. 53,the swelling melody suddenly dissolves as thedynamic falls to pianissimo, and a five-notefragment from the attempted theme (hence-forth labeled the S-motive) begins to repeat,circling back on itself. At m. 59 the melodydisintegrates further, as the dynamic drops to

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 V7chord followed by a pause filled with risingfiguration—implies that there will be a renewed

attempt at a secondary theme. But two mea-sures later, the figuration is repeated in theminor mode, and rather than leading to a the-matic realization of the space after the caesura,this initiates a second section of ambiguousfragmentation. Once more, the S-motive circlesaround aimlessly, doubling back on itself. Inthis instance it appears in counterpoint withits own inversion, in minor mode, over a sus-

tained diminished-seventh chord, heighteningits 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 finalsection that regains momentum through a force-ful extended cadential progression, dominatedby dotted notes and agitated figuration. Itreaches a perfect authentic cadence (PAC) in D

minor at m. 90.76

73This section ultimately leads to an affirmative transitionpassage based on a tutti restatement of the beginning ofthe primary theme. See “tutti affirmation” in Hepokoskiand Darcy, Sonata Theory, 94, 101.74For more on the medial caesura in the context of genericexpectations of sonata form, see Hepokoski and Darcy,Sonata Theory, 23–36.

75Brinkmann describes a similar moment (the descendingarpeggiations 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” inLate Idyll, 76.76On 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 toswitch modes (and hence end in the major mode) duringthe 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; inthis case, the events of the orchestral exposition raise thequestion of whether subsequent rotations through theseevents will alter the major-mode to minor-mode trajec-tory.

Figure 1: Opening ritornello, secondary thematic area.

Measure:

Key:

Secondary theme attempt

41

D

MC-gesture

Repetition of S-motive

53

G (dissolves)


69

vii 7

D

MC-gesture

(D: V7)(D: HC)

Extended cadentialprogression

78

d d: PAC

90


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poco cresc.

dim.

Secondary theme attempt S-motive

MC-gestureS-motive

S-motive

MC-gesture

The opening ritornello, then, presents a nar-rative of loss, incompletion, and eventually cri-sis. The initial pastoral idyll proves unsustain-able, and D major falls to D minor. Further-more, much of the exposition is characterizedby a sense of absence or impasse, especially inthe under-realized secondary thematic area,where attempts to recapture the wholeness andlyricism of the opening are repeatedly undone

by ambiguous passages of motivic fragmenta-tion. The pastoral idyll is unsustainable, andthe symphonic process produces a negative out-come.

Solo Exposition and Development. This is thesituation into which the soloist enters. Accord-ing to the conventions of Brahms’s classicaldouble-exposition form, in the solo exposition

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


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the events of the orchestral exposition are re-visited and often altered.77 Much of the dramain this unfolding process comes from the addi-tion of the soloist, often cast as a heroic agentin 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 ofthe concerto’s early performances, dominatedas they were by Joa-chim’s performing persona,it takes on additional meaning.

From early on, it becomes clear that thismovement stages the soloist as aligned with

the expressive world of the movement’s open-ing through his improvisatory qualities.79 Witha few crucial exceptions, his main contribu-tions to the movement involve virtuosic im-provisational passages and ruminations on pre-viously presented material. He embellishesthemes from the orchestral exposition in a freeand expansive way, often during moments inwhich the overall forward-directed process of

the movement (as laid out in the orchestralexposition) is temporarily suspended. Thesoloist’s persona is thus implicitly associatedwith the idyll of the movement’s opening, in away that links the spontaneous creativity ofimprovisation with a lost state of wholenessand expressive immediacy.

This persona can be seen most clearly in thesoloist’s approach to the primary theme from

the orchestral exposition. After an extendedsolo preface (mm. 90–135) in which the soloist’svirtuosic, improvisatory playing helps to effect

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 thoughunwilling to let go of the idyll and move for-ward with a teleological sonata process. Forexample, as in the orchestral exposition, theopening melody halts on a half cadence after itsfirst phrase; here, however, this pause is filledin by the soloist in a ten-measure expansion of

the space between the two initial phrases. Thedominant of the half cadence is prolonged dur-ing these ten measures, providing a momentthat seems to lie outside the sonata’s sym-phonic trajectory, and the soloist freely embel-lishes the notes of the slow-moving chords withgentle dissonances and lyrical trills.80

The secondary thematic area begins with thesoloist fulfilling a similar role, embellishing

material with lyrical figuration and avoidingany direct interference with the previously es-tablished sequence of events (see fig. 2). Thereis, 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 repeatedin the minor mode, a change that had led to a

second failure to produce a lyrical secondary

77Hepokoski and Darcy, Elements of Sonata Theory, 496–97.78To take just one example, Hanslick famously complainedabout the two-soloist format of Brahms’s Double Con-

certo as follows: “If there is any musical form of which itmay be said that its success depends on the ascendancy ofone conquering hero, that form is the concerto.” EduardHanslick, “Brahms’s Newest Instrumental Compositions,”in Brahms and His World, ed. Walter Frisch (Princeton:Princeton University Press, 1990), 148.79For 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 amasculine concerto soloist-hero, but rather because myreading of this concerto is predicated on the personality,style, and symbolism associated with Joseph Joachim.

80There are several similar moments elsewhere in the pri-mary theme; after this moment of suspended time, thesecond phrase of the primary theme is recaptured at m.152, appearing in the violins as the soloist plays a freelyembellished version in a higher register. This time, theoriginal idea is expanded from within, as internal motivesare taken up and repeated in mm. 157–58 to allow for a

necessary modulation to the dominant, while the soloistcontinues to rhapsodize. Significantly, at m. 158 it is thecellos that take up the melody and move it forward, notthe “dreaming” soloist, who by this point has abandonedthe thematic material altogether for free figuration andarpeggios. The soloist’s role of embellishing material withlyrical, improvisatory figuration can also be seen in thechromatic ascent that occurs as the third section of theprimary theme. Here the chromatic ascent is presented bythe orchestra while the soloist ornaments it, first withdouble-stop chords and second with florid arpeggios, be-ginning at m. 164.


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Solo Violin

Orchestra

136

142

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dolce

Expansion of half-cadence area

(reduction)

theme and a decisive turn to the minor modefor the remainder of the exposition. This time,however, the soloist takes over the second rep-etition and keeps the figuration in the majormode, a crucial modification that paves theway for an even more significant change to theoriginal expositional layout.

Following this intervention, at m. 206 thesoloist fills what had been an ambiguous spacewith a new, effortlessly lyrical melody. Thisnew theme is marked as a moment of height-ened expressivity, with sigh gestures and un-usually detailed hairpin dynamics. Essentiallyreplacing the fragmented and belabored mate-

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

Figure 2: Solo exposition, secondary thematic area.

Measure:

Key:

Secondary theme attempt

176

A

MC-gesture


190

D (dissolves)

206

MC-gesture

(A: V7)(A: HC)

Orchestra repeatssoloist’s

new theme

214

a a: PAC

Soloist’snew theme

A A


236

a

Extended cadentialprogression(expanded)

246

a

272

EEC

a: V7


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Improvisational Idyll Joachim’s “Presence” and Brahms’s Violin Concerto, Op. 77

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