Joachim's Three Pieces Op. 5, ‘Lindenrauschen’, ‘Abendglocken’, and ‘Ballade’, though among his most idiosyncratic compositions, have elicited hardly any public response. An early private performance by Clara Schumann and Joachim possibly took place on 20 January 1854, at the Hotel Royal in Hanover, in the presence of Robert Schumann. While the first securely datable performance of the second piece was documented in Hanover on 8 May 1856, the next dated performance by Joachim did not take place until 19 February 1894 in London, when Nos. 2 and 3 were performed at a Monday Popular Concert. Joachim offered Op. 5 No. 2 in March 1856 in Hanover but no date is recorded. A performance by Joachim in Berlin for Auguste Grimm, Herman's sister, was announced in a letter of May 1859, but with no specified date. Franz Liszt loved the ‘Gisellen’, as he called the Three Pieces: ‘I haven't encountered such sympathetic, and in their own way perfect, instrumental things in years – Stör und Laub [two violinists] alternate in playing them for me.’7 But again no specific dates are attached to Stör's and Laub's performances. The only documented performance of all three pieces occurred in Weimar on 6 February 1860, and was given not by Joachim but by the violinist Singer and the pianist Lassen. As Joachim wrote to Clara Schumann on 7 December 1854, the pieces were too intimate to be performed publicly; they were ‘conceived in such a special mood, that I prefer not playing them other than for rather valuable friends’. Joachim added that he ‘almost’ regretted having submitted the pieces for publication to Breitkopf & Härtel, who had published them in July 1854. For the composer they had special significance; their ‘programme’ – two ciphers, one standing for himself (FAE, ‘frei aber einsam’ or ‘free but lonely’), the other for Gisela von Arnim (Gis-E-La, or G#-E-A) – did not lose their fascination for Joachim, even after he and Gisela separated in 1857 and she married Herman Grimm, her long-time friend since childhood, in 1859.

But let us return to where it all began. In the days after 5 September 1852, as Frau von Bülow reported, Bettine von Arnim and her daughters Armgart and Gisela arrived in Weimar, the town of Goethe and Liszt on the river Ilm, settling in at the Hotel Elephant.