We experience the realms of performing and composing as intimately linked in many areas of music-making today, as can be gleaned from musical interactions and activities such as ‘collaborative composition’, ‘distributed creativity’, improvisatory performance, interdisciplinary artistic research, and many others. But in the mid-to-late 19th century and, in fact, until recently, performing and composing artists, respectively, inhabited relatively separate spheres. Whereas the ‘l'art pour l'art’ ideology had composers and their works squarely separated from any social values and utilitarian functions (be they pedagogical, moral, or political), and also from the performer, whose job it was to disappear behind the composition, intersections between these two realms can generate all sorts of new understandings. Nicholas Cook (2013) and Mine Doğantan-Dack (2021) have shown just how ‘erased’ the performer was in twentieth-century musicological discourses.Footnote ¹ Indeed, the expertise and lived experience of performers just did not hold much weight in that century, during which performance ideologies circled above all else around hierarchical paradigms such as Urtext and Werktreue. Only with the recent ‘performative turn’Footnote ² or the ‘experience turn’Footnote ³ which is a ‘paradigm shift in scholarly ontology from music-as-text to music-as-performance’,Footnote ⁴ have areas such as Music Performance Studies and Artistic or Practice-based Research openly challenged the status quo and proposed new ways of thinking about theory and practice, which aim to reveal through research the performer's idiosyncratic experience and ‘new knowledge’.

This guest-edited issue was born out of a fascination for the violinist-composer Joseph Joachim (1831–1907), who, despite his famed interpretive skills and his advocacy of the Urtext and Werktreue ideologies, in fact struggled with the era's separatist and hierarchical mindset between ‘creating’ and ‘executing’ art/artists (‘schaffende’ and ‘ausübende’ Kunst/Künstler),Footnote ⁵ which eventually led Joachim to give up composing altogether. Signs of this struggle can be seen in the widely diverging musical viewpoints, identities and personas he represented, from a virtuoso performer-composer to a young violinist-composer in the orbit of the École de Weymar looking up to Franz Liszt, to a Brahms-supporting formalist and eventually to an exclusively performing artist. As recent research about little-known Joachim students Ettore Pinelli (1843–1915) and Ioannes Nalbandyan (1871–1942) has shown, Joachim cultivated interdisciplinarity among his students. And many of these students modelled their careers on the young Joachim – by composing music for their own performances, studying and performing all sorts of repertoire including virtuoso music, or conducting large (vocal-)instrumental ensembles in order to bring repertoires to a certain area.Footnote ⁶

Countless other performer-composers’ lives and works reveal enlightening ‘intersections’ of creativity. Why are Joseph Joachim's creative intersections worth investigating? The answer is twofold: Joachim is experiencing a renaissance of public interest, which, to some extent, was born out of a renewed fascination with his performance aesthetic within circles of historically minded performers. Second, the fruitful overlaps of creativity that can be explored in today's scholarly climate offer insights on ‘shared process’, ‘distributed creativity’ and the power of ‘the performer in the room’. From this perspective, Joachim's role in the creative processes of composers in his orbit, and in his own creative and performative output, offer a rich topic for reinvestigation.

How did Joseph Joachim inspire composers around him – including Liszt, Berlioz, Schumann and Brahms – through his performance aesthetic and his ways of channelling the composer, whether he played Bach or Beethoven? How did Joachim's talents as a composer and performer with a keen sense of improvisation intersect when he composed what he was best known for – cadenzas? How did Joachim's multi-layered beliefs about virtuosity influence his own compositions, leading gradually to a transformation where explicit virtuosic markers were exchanged in favour of an aesthetic oriented to shaping, phrasing and lyricism? And how can we compare Joachim's views on the physical, embodied nature of virtuoso performance to that of surrounding composers, including those in the Mendelssohn circle? The four essays in this issue, by Robert Eshbach, Tekla Babyak, Katharina Uhde and R. Larry Todd, offer an exploration of these and related ideas.

Robert Eshbach's ‘Joseph Joachim and Bach's Chaconne’ explores Joachim's devotion to this ‘masterpiece’ from two perspectives. On the one hand, Eshbach makes a case for Joachim's seminal role in elevating this work to canonical status; and on the other hand, Eshbach examines some of Joachim's criteria for ‘musical canonicity’ and locates Joachim's role as a canonic influencer in his biography and artistic identity. Eshbach offers a case study of Joachim's involvement with the cultural legacy of Johann Sebastian Bach, and his self-representation through repeated and evolving interpretations of Bach's Chaconne in D Minor for violin solo. Tekla Babyak's article ‘Joseph Joachim's Cadenzas as a Site of Performative and Compositional Virtuosity’ explores the intersection of composing and performing by investigating Joachim's cadenzas. Babyak shows how reception history has repeatedly linked Joachim's performance aesthetic with an ‘electrifying sense of merging with the composer’ (be it Tartini, Mozart, Viotti, Beethoven or Brahms), bringing to light intriguing slippages between composing and performing. Katharina Uhde's article focusses on the transformation of Joachim's programming aesthetic as the young virtuoso matured into the dignified Geigerkönig. As Uhde shows, Joachim's programming did not change overnight. The shift from performing and composing virtuoso pieces to identifying himself with lofty and serious works happened gradually. One vehicle through which Joachim transformed the state of ‘violin playing’ of the 1840s – a playground of virtuosos – was the violin romance. Lastly, R. Larry Todd's article ‘Beyond Virtuosity: Joachim, the Mendelssohn Circle, and the Illusion of Three Hands’ explores an intriguingly physical metaphor of virtuosity – performing with three or more hands – in the Mendelssohn circle, arguing that this virtuoso aesthetic was in dialogue both with the Golden Age of Virtuosity, and going beyond it. Like the ‘improvisation imaginary’, which lost some of its meaning between 1830 and 1850 as the practice of improvisation dropped off while a romanticized idea of it endured, the afterlife of multi-hand allusions in performance continued showing up after the 1830s and 40s and could be seen as a ‘spectacular virtuosity imaginary’.Footnote ⁷ As this article shows, Joachim helped to exorcise the spectre of Paganini, and to sweep effectively out the door the residual confetti of the Golden Age of Virtuosity.

Together with the contributors to this themed issue, I would like to thank everyone at Nineteenth-Century Music Review who has made this issue possible: the general editor Professor Bennett Zon and the associate editor Dr Erin Johnson-Williams, the editorial assistant Sue Allerton, and the anonymous peer reviewers who helped us bring this themed issue into its current shape.