From Berlin to Łódz, or the History of a Manuscript

At the height of the Second World War, in 1943, boxes filled with rare books and materials from the ‘Philipp Spitta Nachlass’ left the library of the Berlin Staatliche (formerly Königlich Akademische) Hochschule für Musik, the institution Joachim had founded in 1869, and were relocated to Poland. Two years later, they resurfaced at the library of the newly founded University of Łódz. Among the evacuated volumes in Box 18 was a bound manuscript containing three youthful compositions by Joseph Joachim: two fantasies for violin and orchestra, one on Hungarian, the other purportedly on Irish themes, and a cadenza for Beethoven's Violin Concerto. The catalogue number on the cover – 10849 – matches that of the hand-written library record. Until 1989, when Christoph Wolff unearthed the Nachlass in Łódz, Box 18 seemed to have vanished. The two fantasies garnered scant attention, remote and hidden as they were, though their titles appear in some surviving, albeit outdated or incomplete, thematic catalogues and biographies.

If the manuscript's whereabouts from 1943 onwards was veiled, its provenance until 1943 was no more clear. During Joachim's lifetime, the volume apparently passed to at least two people. Unlike many of the composer's early works, the fantasies were not shared with friends and supporters. A single passage in Joachim's published Briefe acknowledges that on 22 August 1852 he revised the ‘[G minor] concerto and fantasies’. Joachim resisted performing the fantasies widely and left them unpublished; no primary records exist after the premiere of the Irish Fantasy in 1852, and after a handful of performances of the Hungarian Fantasy, all between 1850 and 1853. According to Andreas Moser, we are fortunate that the composer's ‘pessimistic impulse’ did not destroy the fantasies – a fate that befell several other early compositions.

Today the autograph of the fantasies is kept at the University Library of Łódz. The cover reads: ‘Original-Manuskript / von Joseph Joachim / 1. Fantasie über ungarische Motive / 2. Fantasie über irische Motive [beide] für Viol. u. Orch. / Am Schluß: Cadenz zu Beethovens / Violinkonzert. / (vor 1853) 69 Blatt’ (Illustration 1.1). The inside front cover adds in blue ink ‘Jugendwerke von Joseph Joachim / Original-Handschrift’, and underneath, in pencil: ‘vor 1853’.