How ‘Hungarian’ was Joseph Joachim?

Type of Abstract (select):

Abstract (max. 250 words):
Joseph Joachim, arguably the 19th century’s greatest violinist, lies buried in the cemetery of Berlin’s Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gedächtniskirche. In his maturity, Joachim was the founding director of Berlin’s Hochschule für Musik, a senator of the Königliche Akademie der Künste, and a leading gatekeeper of the Prussian musical establishment. His elaborate Evangelical Christian funeral was treated as an affair of state. Joachim’s profound musicianship was widely regarded as a German trait, and he was eulogized at his death as a ‘German artist’ for his immersion in the ‘inner world.’

Nevertheless, Joachim began his life as a Hungarian Jew: he was born into a family of Jewish wool merchants in Köpcsény in Western Hungary, the present-day Austrian town Kittsee. He lived in Pest from the age of two to the age of seven, when the great flood of 1838 destroyed his family home and his father’s business. The following year he was sent to his relatives in Vienna, and eventually to Leipzig to be trained as a virtuoso. He never returned to Hungary to live.

Born in 1831, Joachim grew up in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, when Latin was still the official language of Hungary. He spoke German, and, like Liszt, he never knew more than a few phrases of Magyar. Nevertheless, Joachim turned to his Hungarian background for expressions of deep feeling and authenticity, and he composed several pieces in the Hungarian manner. He acknowledged his complex cultural heritage, once notably saying “as a violinist, I am German; as a composer, I am Hungarian.” In his lifetime, and for years thereafter, Joachim’s Hungarian violin concerto was deemed his greatest work, and considered an enduring masterpiece of the violinist's repertoire.

In this talk, I will examine Joachim’s Hungarian youth, his connection to the land of his birth, and offer thoughts on the question “How ‘Hungarian’ was Joseph Joachim?”



Brief Professional Bio (max. 100 words):
Robert Whitehouse Eshbach is an honors graduate of Yale University (BA), where he majored in music history and minored in German literature. He studied violin at the Vienna Conservatory (now the Konservatorium Wien Privatuniversität), and earned a Master of Music degree in violin at New England Conservatory. His recent publications and invited papers have focused on nineteenth-century musicians: Joachim, Brahms, Mendelssohn, Schumann, Reinecke, Ede Reményi, and Wilhelmine Norman-Neruda. He has presented papers in London, Oxford, Cardiff, Southampton, Meiningen, Leipzig, Weimar, New York, Boston, New Haven, Nashville and elsewhere.
Eshbach is an associate professor of music at the University of New Hampshire.