The Influences of Performers and Composers on Selected Violin Works of Johannes Brahms

<p>Joseph Joachim was the most influential violinist in Brahms’s life. Not only did the pair have a close personal friendship, but they also admired and respected each other on a professional level. Their high esteem and appreciation for each other led to performance and compositional collaborations. One of the most beloved and well-known works of Brahms’s violin music, the Violin Concerto, was dedicated to Joachim. Indubitably, Joachim influenced the Violin Concerto. Regardless, there are many debates on how much of an input Joachim had on the concerto. In order to examine the influences of performers and composers on selected violin works of Johannes Brahms, the three sections in this paper will investigate Joachim and Brahms, then discuss the importance of a performer-composer’s relationship in the 19th century and, finally, assess the amount of Joachim’s influence on the Brahms Violin Concerto. Each category will have an introduction and information presented in a biographical form, a historical form and musical analysis. Some of the following analysis may be hypothetical, yet, a possibility. Further part of my research will conclude with a recital programme consisting of the Beethoven Violin Concerto in D major, Op. 61, I. Allegro Ma Non Troppo, Brahms Sonata No. 3 in D minor, Op. 108, Sonatensatz/Scherzo movement of the F-A-E Sonata, and Hungarian Dances No. 1, 5 and 7. This will take place on June 18, 2011 in the Adam Concert Room at New Zealand School of Music at 10:30 A.M.</p>

The Influences of Performers and Composers on Selected Violin Works of Johannes Brahms

<p>Joseph Joachim was the most influential violinist in Brahms’s life. Not only did the pair have a close personal friendship, but they also admired and respected each other on a professional level. Their high esteem and appreciation for each other led to performance and compositional collaborations. One of the most beloved and well-known works of Brahms’s violin music, the Violin Concerto, was dedicated to Joachim. Indubitably, Joachim influenced the Violin Concerto. Regardless, there are many debates on how much of an input Joachim had on the concerto. In order to examine the influences of performers and composers on selected violin works of Johannes Brahms, the three sections in this paper will investigate Joachim and Brahms, then discuss the importance of a performer-composer’s relationship in the 19th century and, finally, assess the amount of Joachim’s influence on the Brahms Violin Concerto. Each category will have an introduction and information presented in a biographical form, a historical form and musical analysis. Some of the following analysis may be hypothetical, yet, a possibility. Further part of my research will conclude with a recital programme consisting of the Beethoven Violin Concerto in D major, Op. 61, I. Allegro Ma Non Troppo, Brahms Sonata No. 3 in D minor, Op. 108, Sonatensatz/Scherzo movement of the F-A-E Sonata, and Hungarian Dances No. 1, 5 and 7. This will take place on June 18, 2011 in the Adam Concert Room at New Zealand School of Music at 10:30 A.M.</p>

"[...] über die outrirte, willkürliche Bezeichnung"

Instructive editions from the late 19th and early 20th century include various annotations regarding musical and interpretative aspects, such as articulation, bowings, fingerings, dynamics, note values, or vibrato As a popular medium at the time, instructive editions were often in the centre of contemporary discussions and attracted the attention of musicians and music teachers, bequeathing us a wide corpus of valuable sources. Joseph Joachim was arguably the most prominent violinist and a sought-after pedagogue in the German-speaking world at the time. Hitherto unknown letters as well as revisited statements by Joachim lead to new insights regarding his attitude towards instructive editions: he viewed them - despite his (few) publications in this genre - very critically, as he was convinced that detailed instructions would limit the freedom of the performer. He instead preferred editions without annotations, but interpreted the music freely andd variably in what he considered the spirit of the composer. Joachim's attitude thus poses general questions as to the role and freedom of performance and interpretation in the second half of the nineteenth century.

Orgelvirtuose - ein "männlicher" Künstlertypus?

In ihrem 2004 erschienenen Aufsatz "Der Virtuose - ein ,weiblicher' Künstlertypus?" differenziert Beatrix Borchard am Beispiel von Joseph Joachim und Clara Schumann zwischen dem "männlichen Interpreten" und dem "weiblichen Virtuosen" als zwei kontraren Kunsdertypen des vom polaren Geschlechterdenken gepragten 19. Jahrhunderts. Daran anknüpfend unternimmt der vorliegende Beitrag den Versuch, den Orgelvirtuosen, der im Bereich instrumentalen Virtuosentums von jeher eine Sonderstellung einnimmt, in diese Differenzierung einzuordnen. Dabei sollen die beiden Künstlertypen, die jeweils auf der Ebene des sozialen und des biologischen Geschlechts betrachtet werden müssen, zunachst anhand des "weltlichen" Virtuosentums erläutert werden. Im Hauptteil des Beitrags geht es um den Orgelvirtuosen, der sich im 19. Jahrhundert unter dem Vorzeichen kirchlicher und nationaler Funktionalität als ausgesprochen "männlicher" Künstlertypus darsteIlt, während am Beginn des 21. Jahrhunderts ein zum Teil radikal säkularisiertes Orgelvirtuosentum einen diametral entgegengesetzten "weiblichen" Orgelvirtuosentypus in Erscheinung bringt.

Antisemitismus im Berliner Musikleben des Kaiserreichs

Max Bruch was one of the most successful German composers of the 19th century. It was only towards the end of the century that his music increasingly lost of its appeal with audiences who turned toward more modern composers (Strauss, Mahler, Reger). Disappointed at the growing number of compositional failures, Bruch began to sympathize with anti-Semitic thought which had been spreading in Berlin since the 1870s. It seems particularly paradox that, in a letter written in 1902 to his publisher Simrock, Bruch attacked three Berlin musicians with brutal anti-Semitic invectives, who had been his best and most loyal friends for decades, and to whom he owed decisive contributions to his compositional career: Joseph Joachim, Friedrich Gernsheim and Siegfried Ochs. Although in this partivular case the anti-Jewish statements of the composer were triggered by dashed hopes for performances and publications, and although his bitter outburst was deeply rooted in his particular personality structure, Max Bruch can be regarded as the exemplary case of the "bourgeois" anti-Semitism of the imperial era.

Beethoven's String Quintet in C major, Op. 29, and Brahms's String Sextets: A Wallflower Blooms

Beethoven's String Quintet, Op. 29, has been described as a ‘wallflower’ work that, without enough suitors, remains on the sidelines of the string chamber music repertoire. But in the nineteenth century it had a prominent champion, Joseph Joachim, whose performances of the quintet must have attracted the attention of his close friend, Johannes Brahms. The opening theme of Brahms's String Sextet, Op. 18, is clearly reminiscent of the beginning of Beethoven's quintet. Evidence from Donald Francis Tovey's recollections of Joachim, Joachim's correspondence with the Brahms biographer Max Kalbeck, and the manuscript of Op. 18 shows that Joachim influenced an important revision that aligns the beginning of Brahms's sextet closely with the opening of Beethoven's Op. 29 also in terms of texture and formal design. The striking tremolo opening and virtuosic scale passages in the finale of Beethoven's quintet prefigure similar elements in the last movement of Brahms's Op. 36 sextet. But the deeper relationship between these movements lies in certain shared formal elements: a common emphasis on sound, texture and sharp contrasts between agitato and pastoral elements as defining features of the overall form – and several distinctive similarities of contrapuntal strategy, form and tonal design between the substantial fugatos that dominate the development sections of both movements. It is often observed that Brahms wrote chamber works in pairs. Scholars have often posited that his two string sextets form such a pair, but the separation of four years in their inceptions and his extensive use of Baroque-style materials composed in the 1850s in the later sextet have made this argument tenuous. It now emerges that an unusual pairing feature of Brahms's string sextets is that both works respond to Beethoven's ‘wallflower’ masterpiece.

Introduction

This introductory chapter establishes foundations of the book: who formed the priesthood of art (Johannes Brahms, Clara Schumann, Amalie Joachim, Joseph Joachim) and the birth of artistic priesthood from the art-religious spirit of German Romanticism in the early nineteenth century. In particular, this chapter introduces the notion that the artistic priesthood occupied a kind of alternative gendered space—neither fully masculine nor feminine—and that desirable characteristics of an artistic priest (devotion, humility, spiritial leadership) could be gendered in various ways in musical-critical discourse. After midcentury, changes in music aesthetics and gender roles created pressure to understand Romantic notions of musical priesthood as antiquated and outmoded. In short, Brahms offers a case study in the intersection of art-religious values with a gender dichotomy that became increasingly prescriptive over the second half of the nineteenth century.