Valerie Woodring Goertzen, Ph.D.,

Professor of Music History Loyola University New Orleans 

 

Joachim's 1883 Swiss Tour

 

​

Abstract

​

 

In the Newberry Library is a small "Tournée-Buch" containing an itinerary for Joseph Joachim's three-week tour to Switzerland in February 1883. Each opening of the book, provided by the Hermann Wolff Concert Agency in Berlin, is devoted to a single day, with the blanks in the template filled in by hand by Wolff. Sponsoring organizations and conductors are specified for each concert, along with rehearsal time, Joachim's honorarium, works to be performed by him, train schedules, and lodging arrangements. This paper explores contexts for this tour book, including Joachim's connections with the Wolff Agency and with musicians and musical societies in the cities he visited, the repertory he performed, and his personal and financial circumstances at the time of the tour. Comparison is made with other tours for which detailed information is available, e.g., Joachim's travel with Brahms in the Siebenbürgen in September 1879. The findings shed light on aspects of Joachim's biography and, more generally, on the experiences and changing status of artists in the later nineteenth century.

 

 

Biography

​

​

Valerie Goertzen is Professor of Music History at Loyola University New Orleans. For the new Collected Edition of Brahms’s works (Johannes Brahms Gesamtausgabe) she has edited two volumes containing Brahms’s arrangements of works of other composers for piano four hands, two pianos, and piano solo. She has presented her research on Brahms, Clara Schumann’s improvisations and concert programming, and the music of Joseph Joachim in essay collections and at conferences in the U.S. and Europe, most recently at the Sixth Biennial Conference on Nineteenth-Century Music in Chapel Hill, NC, and at Clara Schumann 200 in Zwickau-Dresden-Leipzig. She is President of the American Brahms Society and co-editor of the Society’s Newsletter. Her current projects include co-editing the essay collection The Creative Worlds of Joseph Joachim with Robert Eshbach, and writing a book on Brahms’s piano arrangements with support of a grant from the Louisiana Board of Regents.

 

Sanna Pederson, who specializes in German music history and culture in the nineteenth century, has been the Mavis C. Pitman Professor of Music at the University of Oklahoma since 2001.  Her most recent work focuses on chamber music in Berlin from 1870-1910, and specifically the concerts of the Joachim Quartet. Other interests include the aesthetic theories of Richard Wagner, about which she contributed to The Cambridge Wagner Encyclopedia. Other papers and publications are about romanticism, the term absolute music, and the history of musicology. Earlier research focused on the reception of Beethoven, on which she has published with regard to nationalism, gender studies, narrative theory, and historiography.