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now give for a ticket of admission to that concert at the Gewandthaus where Joachim made his first public appearance in Leipzig! The concert was given by Madame Pauline Viardot, who sang, while Schumann stood behind the hall listening to the performance. Madame Schumann and Mendelssohn played one of Schumann's compositions together on two pianofortes; Mendelssohn accompanied Joachim, but, unfortunately, just at the beginning of this piece Joachim's string snapped, owing to the heat of the room. They had no sooner started once more when there was an alarm of fire, and the whole company rushed out of the place.

Joachim was six years in Leipzig. Mendelssohn's constant advice to his pupil was to never play anything but the best music conscientiously, with more thought for the composition than for the effect which was produced. Young as he was, Joachim had his own standard, he responded to Mendelssohn's serious views, he did not care for virtuosity, and from what he had heard rather shrank from an introduction to Liszt. It is interesting to read of Mendelssohn's reply to Joseph when he expressed this feeling. Wait a bit, my son; there is so much that is unusual and beautiful in his playing, that I feel sure you will return converted. God speed you. Greet Liszt from me.' And Mendelssohn was right in his prediction.

When Mendelssohn died suddenly, in 1847, the whole musical world mourned for Lycidas. To Joachim it was a deeper personal sorrow, one of the keenest he ever experienced.

There is always something satisfying in the thought of past and present friendship between people who are one's friends in spirit— it is only an accident whether one knows them or not in person. The friendship between Joachim and Mendelssohn is as delightful to think of as that between Jonathan and David. It is always a sort of music to hear of true friends. Can one not imagine these two as they come walking together in the evening, and the boy Joachim answers Mendelssohn's charming talk with intelligent apprehension and caps a quotation from Jean Paul with the apt application of a passage from his Flegeljahre '? Mendelssohn looked at him with surprise, and from that evening we are told his interest in the Teufelsbraten,' as he called him, grew to the greatest affection. He agreed with Schumann, and only placed in the first rank artists who could not only play, possibly one or two instruments, but who were also human enough to understand the writings of Shakespeare and Jean Paul.'

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When Joachim first came to England, in 1844 (his second visit, when I first heard him, was in the fifties), Mendelssohn wrote to the secretary of the Hanoverian Embassy: These few lines are to introduce Joseph Joachim, from Hungary, a boy of fifteen, of whom I have become exceedingly fond during the nine months I have known him; indeed I really love him and think very highly of him, a thing I can say of few of my recent acquaintances. His interpretation, his perfect comprehension of music, and the promise in him of a noble service to art [is it not finely said?] will, I am sure, lead you to think of him as highly as I do.. Be kind to him, look after him in great London, introduce him to those of our friends who will appreciate such an exceptional personality, and in whose acquaintance he for his part will also find pleasure and stimulation; I here allude principally to the Horsleys.'

This letter of Mendelssohn's recalls to the writer's mind one unforgettable meeting with Joachim many years after, when one misty afternoon, with a young cousin, a friend of Miss Horsley's, she went to inquire for Mrs. Horsley, the mother of the family, who was dangerously ill in her house on Campden Hill. There was a garden in front of the house, and the door opened as we came up, and then someone who had been watching from the window ran out quickly from within, passing the maid who had come to the door, and saying, I saw you crossing the garden. Come in, come, both of you. Come quietly; my mother is very, very ill. But Joachim is here, he has come to play to her; she wanted to hear him once more. .' In a dim, curtained back room looking across another garden the dying mistress of the house sat propped up with cushions in a chair. Joachim stood with his back to the window holding his violin, and we sat in silence by the doorway. He played gravely and with exquisite beauty, and the sad silent room was full of the blessing of Bach, coming like a gospel to people in need of rest.

Mrs. Horsley only lived for a few days after this, and now her daughter has followed her, that charming, gracious, emphatic, grey-haired Sophy, bestowing kindness and help and music upon all in her path. She had been the intimate friend of Mendelssohn, who dedicated one of his most lovely compositions to her. She treasured his portrait and his drawings; one almost seemed to see him there when she spoke of him.

Weimar, that wonderful little Olympus where so many gods

have congregated, seemed to have an instinct for great men, and first offered to Joachim official recognition. The sketch of Weimar and its musical politics and vehement partisanship is well given in Dr. Moser's book. One can realise it all, and the battles of the new and the old school, under the rule of Liszt, the great man, the arbiter of these passionate strifes. Liszt himself belonged to the school of those who would weave impulse and passion into their art rather than beauty, order, and self-suppression. Anyhow, he was the irresistible and brilliant leader and advocate of the new school of music. Raff and Bülow were also at Weimar studying under the great Kapellmeister. Joachim, who was now appointed Konzertmeister, was for a time, as Moser tells us, 'completely conquered by the magic spell of the new characteristic music.' He took immense pains to raise the standard of the Weimar orchestra, and, together with his friends, constantly gave and conscientiously rehearsed Wagner's music. Bülow, we are told, was delighted to have won Joachim over, as he thought, to the magician's influence, for Joachim himself was regarded as only next to Liszt at Weimar in importance and power.

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One day came a letter from Richard Wagner to Listz, which is given by Moser: 'I have just been reading the score of my "Lohengrin "—as a rule I do not read my own work. I have an intense longing that this work should be performed. I hereby beseech you, perform my "Lohengrin." You are the only man to whom I would make this request; to no one but you do I trust the making of this opera.'

I have read somewhere of the circumstances under which this letter was written. It was in Paris, after his great disappointments there, that one day sitting in his room, lonely, despondent, poor, numbed, as he said pathetically, not knowing where to turn, to find rendering for that which was his creation, Wagner's eyes happened to fall upon the score of 'Lohengrin' lying neglected on a shelf. Suddenly an immense pity came over him, a pity to think of that beautiful music buried for ever in a sepulchre of paper and fruitless hope. It was under this influence that he wrote, and almost by return of post he heard from Liszt that 'Lohengrin' was to live and to be produced to the best of their ability by the musicians on the Weimar stage.

There is one happy idyllic interlude which must not be passed over in the story of Joseph Joachim's life; the coming to Weimar of Bettina, Goethe's child-friend, now a mother with charming

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grown daughters. To her rooms, day after day, come the young, happy musicians; they sing, they make music, they wander by moonlight, they make love-at least Grimm makes love and eventually marries the attractive Gisela. On the last night they all sit up till three in the morning to see the ladies off by the earliest train. Sterner times followed upon all this happiness and gaiety. Joachim was appointed to Hanover as Konzertmeister, while Liszt was still ruling at Weimar and bringing the new school' more and more to the front. He was performing his own and Wagner's compositions almost exclusively; and not only this, but he was preaching a somewhat arrogant doctrine, and declaring that both conductor and performers must possess a certain power of enthusiastic divination for the proper performance of his works! Then it was that Joachim made a protest, notwithstanding the cost it was to his loyal and responsive nature. But he had to speak the truth and without reserve. 'I am quite impervious to your music,' he writes, in a memorable letter to Liszt; it contradicts everything in the works of our great masters on which my mind has been nurtured since the days of my early youth. cannot be a helpmate to you, and I must no longer let it appear that I serve the cause that you and your disciples advocate.'

Rubinstein compared Joachim in his youth to a novice in a convent who knows he can choose between the convent and the world, and who has not yet taken his part. We know which part in life Joseph Joachim has always preferred.

When the writer first personally knew Dr. Joachim, it was in her father's house at Palace Green. She can remember seeing him coming in one rainy afternoon in spring-time, and entering the long light-blue drawing-room. He was a young man then. He was carrying a rolled-up scroll-it was an original score of Beethoven's which someone had just given him; he showed us the cramped, fierce writing, the angry-looking notes of those calm harmonies. I have never again seen a Beethoven MS.; but the remembrance is distinct of that one, as well as of Joachim's talk of Beethoven himself, of his mighty self and his protesting nerves, and his impossible difficulties with housekeepers and maids-of-allwork. I have sometimes heard Joachim speak of Schumann with the gentlest affection and reverence, and then of Brahms-above all of Brahms, and of his meeting with him, one of the greatest emotions of his life.

We had once the happy opportunity of hearing the Joachim

quartet at Dresden. It seemed to me then, as now, that I had never heard music before: so beautiful, so exquisite did it sound in that dark, bare Gewandthaus by the Elbe. It may be a foolish fancy, but to the writer's mind music never sounds so well as when there is flowing water within reach-whether it is best for those who listen by the Rhine at Bonn or by the Elbe at Dresden matters little; or shall we write of a Romance of Schumann's, a Concerto of Mozart's, that were sounding but a few days ago in an old Chelsea house? Joachim was not there, but it was his teaching and inspiration that called forth the harmony. One of his most faithful followers was at the piano; his friend and pupil, Mrs. Liddell, had brought her violin. To the writer, hurrying home afterwards with happy pulses, the very mists of winter seemed to bear the beautiful impression along with them, and the tides of the stream to repeat it.

But perhaps of all places the Hochschule at Berlin is the place in which one likes best to remember Dr. Joachim, and to think of him in the midst of his young pupils, as they sit in serried rows in the concert-room. It is a sight to satisfy the touched spectator, for so much that is personal goes into music that to watch the master gravely facing the pupils, and that vast young assembly eagerly attentive and following his guiding hand and glance, seems a revelation to the music itself. Many of the scholars are scarcely more than children, but they play as if they were men and women grown, and they answer in a moment to his sign. Some especial bar or cadence does not go rightly; he makes them repeat it again and again; suddenly, with a flash along the line, they understand correctly, and then the music goes on once more. It was Beethoven's great concerto for the violin that they were playing when we were there. A few parents and friends sit listening, a daughter of Mendelssohn's among them. As the countless bows sweep up and down, an up-springing wave of swelling sound seems to spread from one end to the other of the great hall. The young, serious musicians bring the movement triumphantly to its close; the master looks approving; then comes a moment's pause. Miss Leonora Jackson will play the solo,' he says, and a girl of sixteen, in a straw hat, with a long plait of hair, steps quickly forward, lays her straw hat upon a chair, tosses back her fair hair, and begins to play.

It was a child playing to the others, a child with perfect taste and sure handling; the young orchestra listened and approved,

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