Chronology

With the Overture to Henry IV, composed in 1853–54, Joachim continued his work on ‘hybrid’ overtures ‘for both theatre and concert hall’. Having completed the Overture to Hamlet (begun in 1851), and before beginning work on Demetrius (1853–54, finished before Henry IV), the composer now took up his second Shakespearean overture. Partially drafted during the summer of 1853, it was completed one year later, in July 1854, marking an unusually long genesis for a first draft. By 10 September 1853 Joachim had finished sketching the first half. But by November 1853, just a few days after dating his Op. 5 pieces, Joachim still had no draft of the whole. In January 1854 he reported that both the Demetrius and Henry IV overtures were almost realized in his head, the first also ‘on paper’.6 Now finding a burst of creativity, Joachim was able to finish the first version of the Demetrius Overture in February 1854, albeit not in time for a performance with Herman Grimm's play Demetrius, first staged on 24 February 1854. Three days later Robert Schumann's suicide attempt in the Rhine temporarily interrupted Joachim's progress, and his Henry IV Overture waited several months before its completion in July. The Overture to Henry IV was premiered on 24 March 1855 in Hanover in the newly opened Hoftheater, the first of only seven performances documented during Joachim's lifetime.

As with several of Joachim's previous compositions, his circle closely observed the overture's genesis and first steps into the world. Still under the spell of the New German aesthetic, the overture has a formal flexibility that accommodates the needs of the programme while maintaining a sense of thematic unity. Joachim continued drawing extensively on his experience at Weimar, and sent the work to Liszt after completing it.

At the same time, Joachim's Henry IV Overture betrays close contact with Schumann and Brahms. The tempo marking at the opening, ‘Mit feurigem Schwung’, could be a nod to Schumann, who was particularly fond of the overture and whose influence was even noted by a reviewer for the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik. By 25 January 1855 Joachim had made a copy specifically for Schumann;13 and after Schumann's death in July 1856, Joachim found several pages of his overture arranged for piano four hands among his mentor's last compositional efforts.