Romance in C Major
JOSEPH JOACHIM
Born June 28, 1831, Pressburg
Died August 15, 1907, Berlin

Joseph Joachim was one of the greatest violinists of the nineteenth century, a performer of impeccable technique and complete artistic integrity-not for him were the flashy crowd-thrilling antics of some nineteenth-century virtuosos. Joachim knew and worked with almost every major musical figure of his era, and his influence as performer, teacher, and adviser was profound. The young Brahms was unstinting in his admiration for the violinist, writing to Clara Schumann to say that "There is more in Joachim than all us young people put together."

Born in what is now Hungary, Joachim was a prodigy who began performing in public while still a child. At 8 he was sent to Vienna to continue his studies, and at 12 he went to study with Mendelssohn in Leipzig. Mendelssohn recognized that there was nothing the boy had to learn about playing the violin, so he concentrated on his musical education instead: in Leipzig, Joachim worked with Mendelssohn's concertmaster, Ferdinand David, and often performed with Mendelssohn himself. At 19 Joachim became concertmaster of Liszt's orchestra in Weimar, but left two years later, feeling that his and Liszt's artistic aims were so different that they could not work together. Instead, Joachim became a part of the circle of Robert and Clara Schumann, and there he met Brahms when both were in their early twenties: it would prove a long, productive, and at times very difficult friendship. In 1868 Joachim became director of the new Hochschule für Ausübende Tonkunst in Berlin, where he taught for the remaining 39 years of his life. Joachim was an early champion of Bach's music for unaccompanied violin, his performances of Beethoven's Violin Concerto established that piece in the repertory, and he was a lifelong advocate of Brahms, giving the premières of both the Violin Concerto and the Double Concerto. Joachim also gave the première of Bruch's Violin Concerto No. 1, and his quartet introduced some of Dvo?ák's chamber music.

Joachim composed a great deal, and much of his music is for the violin: there are three violin concertos as well as a number of chamber pieces. But today, a century after Joachim's death, this music is seldom performed, and that makes a performance of the Romance in C Major all the more welcome. Joachim published this music in 1900, but it was probably written some years before that. In music, romance is a term without precise formal meaning-it has come to denote a short piece of expressive character. Joachim's Romance in C Major opens with a flowing melody over active piano accompaniment, but the music quickly grows more animated and virtuosic, and its complex double-stopping and sweeping runs suggest just how good a violinist Joachim must have been.

NOTE: Those interested in this music should know that in 1904 Joachim made some of the earliest recordings of classical music: he recorded some short pieces by Brahms, several of Bach's movements for unaccompanied violin, and his own Romance in C Major. Though he was 73 at the time he made these recordings and his technique was inevitably showing the effects of age, these performances are still worth hearing for Joachim's sovereign control, his sound, and his musical intelligence.