Joachim's Overture to Herman Grimm's Demetrius (1853–54) elicited this revealing response from Sir Donald Francis Tovey decades later: ‘Joachim showed me both the arrangement [by Brahms, 1856] and the original score of the Overture to Demetrius, saying with glee, “it's awful! – an attempt at psychological music!” … The psychology of it was good enough to prove that Joachim understood Liszt and his Weimar group of revolutionaries through and through before he renounced their ways.’

The Overture to Demetrius indeed appears to reveal a battleground for some Lisztian formal, harmonic, and motivic conflict. In part it appears as a life-size musical portrait of a character with considerable ‘psychological’ depth; that is, Tovey locates the ‘psychological’ in the overture itself, specifically in its New German manner. But what exactly the composer meant by attempting to compose ‘psychological music’ remains open to debate. Just as in ‘Abendglocken’, there is again a particularly autobiographical background lurking behind the Demetrius Overture, making it a ‘psychological’ overture in more than a programmatic way. The most important addressee of Joachim’s revealing autobiographical ‘programme notes’ – in the form of his letters – was Gisela, for whom he documented part of the work's genesis: it was began in October 1853, a draft was completed in February 1854, and revisions lasted at least until the summer 1854, or perhaps until September 1854.

Some general answers to the question ‘why autobiography?’ can perhaps be gained by investigating the concepts of subjectivity and authorship in Joachim's circle. Herman Grimm, the dedicatee of the overture, had his own ideas, some related to one of his essays about ‘Dichter und Dichten’ (‘poets and poems’), which may help to enlighten us about Joachim's personal approach as a subjective Tondichter (composer). The Demetrius Overture itself is a case in point. Its suggestive use of form, motifs, and harmony was born out of an attitude of ‘uncompromising subjectivism’, which was not unusual for works of Weimar composers (or, for that matter, Weimar-influenced composers) of the early 1850s. Hans von Bülow, for example, returned in 1854, ‘after a long time’, to his Stimmungsbild, or Nirwana Overture, which went through many different titles before it was published in 1866 as a ‘Symphonisches Stimmungsbild’.