Joseph Joachim and the Violin Romance: Reforming the Playground of Virtuosos

In an enticing article for the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik , Hans von Bülow suggested that Joseph Joachim would be well suited to achieve a reform of violin playing in the 1850s, which would effectively close the door behind Virtuosentum . The Golden Age of virtuosity had been on its way out for several years, impacting also violin performance. And yet, violin programming in the musical metropolises London and Paris was slow to adapt. As recent work on Joachim's virtuoso years has shown, his repertoire during the 1840s encompassed far more than German classics. It accommodated plenty of virtuoso music by H.W. Ernst, de Bériot, Ferdinand David, and Vieuxtemps, as well as his own substantial, virtuoso compositions, composed for his London tours in the 1840s. As this article argues, Joachim's programming did not change overnight: the shift from performing and composing virtuoso pieces to identifying himself with lofty and serious works happened gradually. One vehicle through which Joachim transformed the state of ‘violin playing’ of the 1840s was the violin romance. Joachim, who spent three months in Paris in early 1850, used the aesthetic of the romance to transform not only the state of violin playing but also the violin romance itself. Two simple romances he composed in 1850 were followed by a third romance in 1857. The third was, in effect, a Bravourstück in disguise, exhibiting none of the older virtuoso tricks such as flying bow strokes that had fallen out of favour. Rather, in Joachim's third romance, the conspicuous, ‘1840s’ virtuosity merged into ‘shape-oriented virtuosity’, a term used in a 1854 review of Joachim's playing. Many later nineteenth-century composers of violin romances from Bruch to Sibelius adopted Joachim's romance model, negotiating between melodic simplicity and violinistic demand, resulting in lyrical pieces in which virtuosity was an undercurrent, hidden but present.