Staging Authenticity: Joachim, Brahms, and the Politics of Werktreue Performance

Journal of the American Musicological Society, Vol. 66, Number 2, pp. 397–436 ISSN 0003-0139, electronic ISSN1547-3848. © 2013 by the American Musicological Society. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permissionto photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press’s Rights and Permissions website,www.ucpressjournals.com/reprintInfo.asp. DOI: 10.1525/jams.2013.66.2.397.

Staging Authenticity: Joachim, Brahms, andthe Politics of Werktreue Performance

KAREN LEISTRA-JONES

In 1873 the American pianist Amy Fay traveled to Weimar to study withFranz Liszt. While there, she penned some memorable descriptions of thegreat virtuoso at a time in his life when he seldom concertized in public.

Several of her accounts focused on the question of Liszt’s subjective engage-ment with the music that he played and his relationship to his audience:

When Liszt plays anything pathetic, it sounds as if he had been through every-thing, and opens all one’s wounds afresh. All that one has ever suffered comesbefore one again. . . . Liszt knows well the influence he has on people, for he al-ways fixes his eyes on some one of us when he plays, and I believe he tries towring our hearts. . . . But I doubt if he feels any particular emotion himselfwhen he is piercing you through with his rendering. He is simply hearing everytone, knowing exactly what effect he wishes to produce and how to do it. Infact, he is practically two persons in one—the listener and the performer.1

Some years later, Fay compared Liszt to the only other performer she had seenwho was (in her words) “worthy to be mentioned in the same breath withhim,” the violinist Joseph Joachim:

Liszt, in addition to his marvelous playing, has his unique and imposing per-sonality, whereas at first Joachim is not specially striking. Liszt’s face is all a playof feature, a glow of fancy, a blaze of imagination, whereas Joachim is absorbedin his violin, and his face has only an expression of fine discrimination and of intense solicitude to produce his artistic effects. Liszt never looks at his instru-ment; Joachim never looks at anything else. Liszt is a complete actor who in-tends to carry away the public, who never forgets that he is before it, and whobehaves accordingly. Joachim is totally oblivious of it. Liszt subdues the peopleto him by the very way he walks on the stage. . . . Joachim, on the contrary, isthe quiet gentleman-artist. He advances in the most unpretentious way, but ashe adjusts his violin he looks his audience over with the calm air of a musical

I would like to thank Matthew Butterfield, Stephen Gosden, James Hepokoski, Brian Kane,Gundula Kreuzer, James O’Leary, and the anonymous reviewers for this Journal for their helpfulcomments and suggestions at various stages of this project. Translations are mine unless otherwisenoted.

1. Fay, Music Study in Germany, 207–8.

398 Journal of the American Musicological Society

monarch, as much as to say, “I repose wholly on my art, and I’ve no need ofany ‘ways or manners.’ ”2

Fay claimed to be equally impressed by Liszt and Joachim, but she took themto represent two opposite and “extreme” positions in contemporary musicalperformance.

Fay’s framework for drawing these conclusions was based on one of themost influential binaries in nineteenth-century performance: theatricality andauthenticity. Liszt, in Fay’s description, was the ultimate theatrical actor: alienated from himself (two persons in one), subjectively detached from hisperformance, always aware of his audience, and dependent on flamboyant,larger-than-life gestures in order to produce his effects. In contrast, she de-scribed Joachim as a paragon of authenticity: at one with himself, absorbed inthe activity at hand, unaware of or independent from his audience, modest,and restrained in his gestures and overall expressivity.

Despite Fay’s apparent neutrality, comparisons that invoke this binary inevitably raise a number of fraught questions concerning performance, subjectivity, and identity. This was especially true in Joachim’s and Liszt’snineteenth-century context, a period in which critics have often noted aheightened imperative of authenticity in northern European expressive cul-ture. As Lionel Trilling theorized it in his 1972 study, Sincerity and Authen -ticity, the authentic subject was concerned above all with a need to be “true tooneself.” At the same time, however, she or he uniformly rejected the ideal of“sincerity,” or the notion that one is obliged to convey or perform one’s innernature to others. Trilling argued that the model of authentic subjectivity, characterized by its cultivation of an inner space, but also by its extremely am-bivalent relationship toward the externalization, communication, and repre-sentation of that inner space, definitively eclipsed the sincerity ideal in thenineteenth century. It replaced an emphasis on sociability and performancewith a concern “not . . . with energy directed outward upon the world . . .but, rather, with such energy as contrives that the centre shall hold, that thecircumference of the self keep unbroken, that the person be an integer, impen-etrable, perdurable, and autonomous.”3

This authenticity paradigm is intuitively familiar to observers of nineteenth-century culture and has recently been the subject of several studies of Ro -mantic and Victorian literature and theater.4 Ideas about authenticity andtheatricality have also provided the conceptual apparatus behind a number ofdiscussions of performance in popular music.5 Nevertheless, the importance ofthe concept of authenticity to nineteenth-century musical performance re-

2. Ibid., 248–49.3. Trilling, Sincerity and Authenticity, 99. Peter Gay has also explored this dynamic, albeit

from a perspective less explicitly concerned with performance; Bourgeois Experience, 4:1–10.4. See, for example, Voskuil, Acting Naturally, and Auerbach, Private Theatricals. For a more

sociohistorical discussion of this theme, see Sennett, Fall of Public Man.5. Auslander, Performing Glam Rock; and Mazullo, “Man Whom the World Sold.”

Joachim, Brahms, and the Politics of Werktreue Performance 399

6. See Goehr, Imaginary Museum, esp. 243–86.7. See Carl Dahlhaus’s description of how a “work-based” performance culture of “interpre-

tation” superseded an “event-based” culture of virtuosity and improvisation beginning aroundthe middle of the century, and William Weber’s account of the self-consciously “serious” concertprogramming that became increasingly prevalent beginning in the 1850s. Dahlhaus, Nineteenth-Century Music, 134–42; and Weber, Great Transformation, 237–38. Dahlhaus’s historiographyhas been echoed by a number of more recent studies, including Samson, Virtuosity and theMusical Work.

8. By the 1880s, Hans von Bülow was also increasingly associated with Brahms’s position inthe musical world, although his relationship to the Brahms–Liszt factionalism was complicatedand changeable. Walker notes that while Bülow occasionally played Brahms’s music as early as1854, he was still very much identified (rightly or wrongly) with the Liszt school during much ofhis career. His gradual change of heart about Liszt’s music and Brahms’s status as “heir” toBeethoven appears to have happened in the late 1870s and early 1880s. Certainly by this time hisuncompromising programming, emphasis on fidelity to musical texts, and avoidance of physicaland expressive flamboyance aligned him with Brahmsian musicians like Joachim and ClaraSchumann, as did his numerous public statements in support of Brahms. See Walker, Hans vonBülow, 202–5, 287–90.

mains underexamined, despite its ubiquity (whether implicit or explicit) inmany discussions of the age’s great performers. In this article, I argue that au-thenticity was an animating concept behind one of the most important devel-opments in nineteenth-century performance culture: the shift away fromflamboyant, popular, and spectacular forms of virtuosity toward what is oftencalled the Werktreue ideal.6 Werktreue, as is well known, was characterized bythe principle of the performer’s fidelity to the composer’s presumed “inten-tions” in a musical work. While it was present as a discursive ideal in earlyRomantic writings on performance, it was not until later in the century that itbecame a dominant paradigm for performance, as a “museum” concert cul-ture based on the faithful presentation of musical works gradually supplantedpopular concerts based on improvisation, audience interaction, and the starpersonalities of virtuosos.7

As Fay’s comments imply, Joseph Joachim was immensely influential indefining and promoting a particular vision of the Werktreue ideal, one that wascharacterized by self-restraint and claims to moral authority on the part of theperformer. In turn, this authority was intimately bound up in the increasingcultural importance of the Austro-German musical canon. Critics often recog-nized the importance and influence of Joachim’s position (whether or notthey agreed with it) and associated it not only with Joachim himself, but alsowith other prominent members of the Brahms-Schumann circle (most notablyBrahms and Clara Schumann).8 For example, Eduard Hanslick, a clear sup-porter of Joachim’s position, celebrated him as one of four “true priests” of artwho had revitalized performance (after the virtuosic excess of the 1830s and1840s) during the Nachmärz era, the others being Clara Schumann, Brahms,and Julius Stockhausen. Hanslick described this group as being closely boundby a shared ideal of art and by personal friendships in which collaborative per-formances worked to promote their shared ideals as well as to establish them


as the “most perfect personification of the true mission of the virtuoso.”9

Authenticity played an important role in this “mission,” and significantly, theauthenticity of these performers was often articulated in contradistinction tothe theatricality associated with other well-known virtuosos, including, ofcourse, Franz Liszt and other members of his school.10 Furthermore, as weshall see, the authenticity projected through their performances often dove-tailed with the so-called conservative musical values that were coming to be as-sociated with Brahms’s music in aesthetic debates at the time.

The first part of this article examines how two of the most prominentmembers of this group, Joachim and Brahms, projected authenticity in differ-ent forms of self-representation. I treat authenticity not as a stable quality thatcertain musicians possessed and others did not, but rather as a performativecategory—that is, as an identity continually constructed through the repeti-tion of culturally encoded performative acts.11 These “acts,” defined broadly,include autobiographical writings, publicity photographs, and actual musicalperformances. In addition, I examine the connection between an idealized authentic subjectivity and the aesthetics associated with nonprogrammatic instrumental music—a connection that played an important role in these mu-sicians’ positioning in the larger musical field in the second half of the nine-teenth century. While Joachim and Brahms were some of the most celebratedand critically acclaimed figures of their time, however, their stance was notwithout its ambiguities, and the terms of authenticity remained vehementlycontested by various factions. In the second part of this article, therefore, I ex-plore some of the larger cultural and political stakes surrounding the conceptof authenticity in later nineteenth-century musical performance. This line ofquestioning takes us beyond the “how” to questions of “who” in Werktreue

9. “Insbesondere vier echte Priester der Kunst haben bei wiederholten und längerenBesuchen in Wien stets den gleichen Anklang gefunden: Clara Schumann, Joachim, Brahms undStockhausen. Diese durch ein gleiches Kunstideal, wie durch persönliche Freundschaft engver-bundenen Musiker haben auch häufig zusammengewirkt, Brahms spielte in den Concerten derSchumann, Joachim und Brahms, Stockhausen und Brahms gaben gemeinschaftliche Concerte.Fast zählen wir diese Künstler, welche uns die echte Mission des Virtuosen so vollständig personi-siziren zu unserm Besitz.” Hanslick, Geschichte des Concertwesens in Wien, 418.

10. For a general discussion of this binary in the context of performance theory, see Davis andPostlewait, “Theatricality: An Introduction,” in their Theatricality, 1–39. The idea that these per-formers represented an antidote to Liszt also appeared in Hanslick’s historiography: Brahms,Joachim, and Clara Schumann were figureheads in what Hanslick called a “Musical Renaissance”that occurred after the 1848 revolution. As such, they swept away the glittering superficiality thatHanslick associated primarily with Liszt and Thalberg in the Virtuosenzeit from 1830–1848.Hanslick, Geschichte des Concertwesens in Wien, 412.

11. This definition of “performative” is indebted to Judith Butler’s well-known discussion ofgender and performativity in Gender Trouble, esp. 191–93. To treat authenticity as a performativecategory is not to equate it with Trilling’s sincerity. While sincerity acknowledges and even cele-brates the imperative to perform oneself, authenticity does not. Thus to speak of authenticity interms of performativity means to examine how the quality of “not performing” is constructedthrough performance, whether or not the performance is acknowledged as such.


performance: in particular, who could claim the level of cultural and spiritualaptitude necessary to inhabit the thoughts and feelings of the master com-posers of the past?12 Ultimately, the politics of authenticity intersected withnotions of nationality, race, and gender during a period in which participationin Germanic culture was being conceived of in increasingly exclusive terms.

Truthfulness, Absorption, and Self-Restraint

Amy Fay’s description of Joachim was consistent with many of the violinist’sown self-representations, in which he depicted himself as someone who wasnot only untheatrical but so truthful and authentic that he was constitutionallyincapable of acting. His 1898 biography, which Joachim cowrote with his stu-dent Andreas Moser, narrated how during the 1850s Joachim had movedfreely between the warring Schumann and Liszt camps.13 This oscillation be-tween the two factions seemed to demonstrate an adaptability of principlesthat was in danger of coming across as duplicitous or insincere. Retro -spectively (and somewhat disingenuously), Joachim addressed this potentialcriticism of his actions by projecting their implied falseness onto his favoriteantagonist, Franz Liszt:

The attentive reader will have noticed that during the first years of his sojournin Hanover Joachim had regular dealings with leaders of the opposing factionsin music. . . . A diplomatic character like Liszt without doubt would haveknown how to bear himself in such a confusing medley, without getting intodifficulties with any party. But for an uncomplicated nature like Joachim’s, itwas impossible to find satisfaction in maneuvering around between the differ-ent parties.14

This backhanded compliment evoked Liszt’s pre-existing reputation as a cos-mopolitan, diplomatic traveling virtuoso—a “man of the world”—in order to

12. Mary Hunter has explored an early Romantic version of this ideal, which involved theperformer’s spontaneous intersubjective merger, or spiritual communion, with the composer, in “ ‘To Play as if from the Soul.’ ”

13. Joachim’s own involvement in writing this biography, his close relationship with AndreasMoser, and the biography’s appearance within Joachim’s own lifetime all combine to make this animportant source of information on how Joachim wanted to be perceived by his contemporaries.In her biography of Amalie and Joseph Joachim, Beatrix Borchard acknowledges Joachim’s heavyinvolvement in this text by referring to the authors as Moser/Joachim, a co-author team;Borchard, Stimme und Geige, 26.

14. “Dem aufmerksamen Leser wird es nicht entgangen sein, in welch regem VerkehrJoachim während der ersten Jahre seines Aufenthaltes in Hannover mit den verschiedenenHäuptern der widerstreitenden Musikrichtungen stand. . . . Eine diplomatische Natur, wie dieLiszts, wäre ohne Zweifel imstande gewesen, sich in einem solchen Wirrsal zurecht zu finden,ohne es mit einer Partei ganz zu verderben. Aber ein so wenig komplizierter Charakter, wie derJoachims, konnte auf die Dauer an dem Herumlavieren zwischen den verschiedenen Lagern kei-nen Gefallen finden.” Moser, Joseph Joachim: Ein Lebensbild, 149–50. Translation adapted fromMoser, Joseph Joachim: A Biography, 165.


demonstrate his ability to act, to feign, to seem other than how he is; or worse,to imply his lack of an essential, authentic self that would remain constant un-derneath his social transformations.15 Moreover, this description was clearlyintended to set off the opposite qualities in Joachim, who was apparently fun-damentally unable to alter his outward appearance or behavior in ways thatwere incompatible with his true self.

It followed that whatever self-revelation occurred in Joachim’s public ap-pearances was unconscious and unintentional rather than deliberately con-structed. This was a central claim made in John Alexander Fuller-Maitland’sshort biography of the violinist. Eager to depict Joachim in the most positiveterms, Fuller-Maitland claimed that while Joachim may “reveal” himself in hisperformances, this self-display was never calculated and considered, but ratherunconscious; it happened inadvertently, without regard to the audience:

In the case of public performers, where technical skill has reached its highestpoint of perfection, a kind of self-revelation takes place in every performance;and, besides the ideal interpretation of the music he plays, Joachim uncon-sciously tells every one who has ears to hear what manner of man he is in him-self. Truth, rectitude, earnestness of purpose, singleness of artistic aim, achildlike clarity of the inner vision, combined with the highest dignity—allthese are evident to any but the most superficial listener, and there is a certainquiet ardour, eloquent of strong emotion strongly controlled, such as distin-guishes only those who possess the highest imagination.16

Descriptions by sympathetic critics like Fuller-Maitland and Fay, combinedwith Joachim’s own assertions, give us a good idea of the idealized authentic-ity that was often associated with the violinist. They show Joachim construct-ing an identity characterized by truthfulness and inner coherence, as well as anintegrity that would remain uncompromised by a conscious desire to commu-nicate with and influence a public.

To assert one’s authenticity and truthfulness is one thing, however; to re-peatedly appear on stage as an authentic performer is another. How could aperformer like Joachim establish, or enact, an anti-theatrical persona in perfor-mances of musical works, in such a way that observers like Fay and Fuller-Maitland were convinced of his truthfulness? Performances of authenticitytypically involved the ways in which a performer visually presented himself orherself to an audience—how he or she communicated through the silent, yetnevertheless powerful language of bodily movements and gestures. These areinherently difficult to reconstruct; at best we have indirect access to the visualand sociable dimensions of nineteenth-century performances. There are, how-ever, numerous visual representations of performers from the later nineteenthcentury, especially in the then-new medium of photography, and Joachim’s

15. See Gooley, “Battle Against Instrumental Virtuosity,” 88–92, and idem, Virtuoso Liszt,esp. chap. 4.

16. Fuller-Maitland, Joseph Joachim, 48.


image seems to have been particularly ubiquitous. It appeared as monumentalbusts in conservatories, in cameo portraits on greeting cards, and in a largenumber of studio and private portraits circulated among the musical commu-nity. As Joachim biographer Beatrix Borchard has remarked, with Joachim’sgeneration it begins to be possible to speak of a performer cultivating a publicimage in the modern sense of the word.17

These photographs and portraits make implicit claims about Joachim’sphysical comportment as a performer, claims that consistently line up withother accounts of his playing. This is especially the case in those photographsin which Joachim is seen “playing” the violin, photographs that can be as-sumed to have closely corresponded to how he wanted to present himself as amusician. Despite their apparently natural qualities, however, these pho-tographs also clearly reflect a self-conscious attempt at presenting an image,rather than a candid glimpse of the violinist while actually performing.Exposure lengths in photography at the time were at least several secondslong, ensuring that Joachim could not actually play his violin while being photographed. Instead, he needed to act or pose as though he were playing.18

In this context, it is striking that these photographs invariably show Joachim instates of “absorption” (to use art critic Michael Fried’s well-known term).Completely engrossed in the task at hand, he is presented as being unaware ofthe presence of a viewer, and characterized by a total identification with, ab-sorption in, or nonalienated relation to the activity of making music on his vio-lin (Figs. 1–4).19 In each of these photographs Joachim avoids looking at thecamera and its implied spectator. In fact, he is never depicted looking any-where other than his violin or (occasionally) the musical score. His eyes arecast downward, his face is expressionless, and he seems completely absorbed inthe source from which his music emanates, to the exclusion of everything else.These photographs, in other words, are carefully staged so as to leave us withthe impression that we are looking in from the outside on a private moment,

17. Borchard, Stimme und Geige, 30.18. My analysis of these photographs of Joachim, Sarasate, and Ysaÿe is indebted to the in-

sights of Ben Donaldson at the Yale University Department of Photography, who explained theimplications for these images of late nineteenth-century photographic technology and helped meto situate these photographs within more widespread visual conventions of the time.

19. Fried’s overarching argument, developed over a number of books and essays, is that fromthe mid-eighteenth century through the nineteenth century, one of the central concerns in paint-ing became depicting individuals in states of absorption. This was intended to respond to whatwas perceived as a problem of theatricality—a “false” orientation toward a beholder—in painting.Absorptive states supposedly depicted more genuine or authentic modes of existence, and theyalso reflected a growing uneasiness with art’s status as something that existed for the viewer, orthat tried to get the viewer’s attention. Significantly, Fried notes that “the issue of theatricality wasfrom the outset defined in the starkest possible terms: either the figure or figures in a paintingseemed entirely oblivious to being beheld or they stood condemned as theatrical.” See Fried, “AnIntroduction to My Art Criticism,” in Art and Objecthood, 48. Other explorations of these ideasoccur in Fried’s well-known art-historical trilogy of books: Absorption and Theatricality, Courbet’sRealism, and Manet’s Modernism.


one in which our observing presence is not only unacknowledged but alsofundamentally unnecessary.20

Of course, Joachim was not the only musician of his time to adopt this ap-proach to publicity.21 What was unique to Joachim, however, was the fre-quency and exclusivity with which the portraits and photographs of theviolinist “playing” seem to have employed this approach, as can be seen in the

20. Figure 2 is one of several photographs that were taken in a single session in what appearsto be a home studio. In another photograph Joachim appears in front of the same backgroundstudiously reading what appears to be a newspaper. In yet another, the chair, stand, and lamp havebeen rearranged and Joachim is photographed from behind as he turns around, seemingly just in-terrupted from his violin practice.

21. Eugène Ysaÿe, for example, was also frequently photographed in absorptive poses, eitherdevoutly gazing down at his violin (not while playing) or casting his eyes downwards away fromthe audience while “playing,” as Joachim does in Figs. 2–4.

Figure 1 Studio portrait of Joachim with violin, by W & D Downey of London. No date (ca. 1890s).


more than eighty-five photographs, portraits, and caricatures of Joachim thatBorchard has made available on CD-ROM.22 This was not the case with manyof Joachim’s contemporaries who, while they may sometimes have drawn onthe standard iconographic conventions of absorption, did not use it as theironly mode of self-representation. For instance, there are a number of pho-tographs of one of Joachim’s main rivals, Pablo de Sarasate, in which he is“playing” the violin while looking outwards, implicitly demonstrating anawareness of the presence of an audience (Fig. 5). The same more outward-directed pose that overtly acknowledges the status of musical performance as

22. This disc accompanies Borchard, Stimme und Geige, and includes images taken fromarchives as well as private collections. Figs. 1–4 are taken from this disc.

Figure 2 Private photograph of Joachim posing as though playing the violin, ca. 1905


spectacle can be seen in a famous portrait of Joachim’s younger contemporary,the French violinist Eugène Ysaÿe (Fig. 6).

In addition to their downplaying of the performer’s relationship to his au-dience, the photographs of Joachim imply another important strategy in pro-jecting an authentic demeanor in performance: they generally depict theviolinist as lacking any external markers of emotion and expression. Oncemore, this is consistent with critical descriptions of Joachim’s physical and so-cial comportment. In the passage quoted at the beginning of this article, Faynoted that Joachim’s unchanging facial expression of “fine discrimination”contrasted markedly with Liszt’s physiological responsiveness to the emotionalcontent of his music. Hanslick similarly described Joachim’s constant “mea-

Figure 3 Private photograph of Joachim posing as though playing the violin. No date (ca. 1900s).


sured composure and lowered gaze” in a performance in Vienna in 1861.23 Ina letter to Clara Schumann, Julius Stockhausen implied that Joachim’s habit-ual restraint became even more pronounced when he was on stage—a ten-dency that affected his performances at the conductor’s podium as much asthey affected his appearance as a violinist: “[Joachim’s] expression becomestoo grave as soon as he seizes the baton, and he does not allow his real feelingsto be reflected on the mirror of [his] soul.”24

Themes of absorption, detachment from the audience, and expressive re-straint also appeared frequently in descriptions of performances by Brahms.25

While Brahms did not define himself primarily as a performer, he did appearregularly in this capacity, particularly in the earlier years of his career, but also

23. Hanslick, Concerte, 153: “Die gemessene Haltung und der gesenkte Blick gaben ihm eineigentümlich gesetztes, fast gesalbtes Aussehen.”

24. Julius Stockhausen, letter to Clara Schumann, 23 March 1863; in Litzmann, Clara Schu -mann: An Artist’s Life, 2:213–14. Joachim had conducted a performance of Robert Schumann’sFaust on 21 March in Hannover: “Aber sein Gesicht ist zu ernst, sobald er den Stab ergreißt under läßt die inneren Gefühle auf dem Spiegel der Seele nie gewahr aufgepaßt!” Litzmann, ClaraSchumann, ein Künstlerleben, 3:138.

25. For an in-depth consideration of the performance style(s) associated with Brahms and hiscircle that includes numerous contemporary accounts of performances, see Musgrave andSherman, eds. Performing Brahms. Roger Moseley has also considered Brahms’s changing atti-tudes toward virtuosity and Werktreue over the course of his career, and has described several waysin which performance, compositional style, and social ideology have interacted in Brahms’s music.See Moseley, “Brief Immortality,” esp. chap. 2; and idem, “Between Work and Play.”

Figure 4 Studio portrait of Joachim posing as though playing the violin, ca. 1903


later, as for example in the performance tour for his Second Piano Concertoduring the winter of 1881–82. Several descriptions of Brahms’s performancesshow another dimension to the principle of restraint: it applied not only to aperformer’s physical demeanor, but also to his or her expressivity through mu-sical sound. One of the most vivid descriptions of this expressive self-controlcan be seen in Hanslick’s well-known account from 1862 of Brahms’s pianoplaying, in which the critic compared what he saw as the “sincerity,” “truthful-ness,” and “sovereign subjectivity” of the young Brahms to that of Cordelia,Shakespeare’s “austere” heroine from King Lear:

Figure 5 Studio portrait of Pablo de Sarasate (1844–1908), ca. 1874. Used by permission ofHulton Archives/Getty Images.


There is no seeking after applause in Brahms’s music, no narcissistic affectation.Everything is sincere and truthful. With Schumann’s music it shares, to thepoint of stubbornness, a sovereign subjectivity, the tendency to brood, the re-jection of the outside world, the introspection. . . . Brahms’s piano playing is allof a piece with [this] artistic individuality. He wishes only to serve the composi-tion, and he avoids almost to the point of shyness any semblance or suggestionof self-importance or show. . . . It may appear praiseworthy to Brahms that heplays more like a composer than a virtuoso, but such praise is not altogetherunqualified. Prompted by the desire to let the composer speak for himself, he

Figure 6 Studio portrait of Eugène Ysaÿe (1858–1931), ca. 1908. Used by permission ofHulton Archives/Getty Images.


neglects—especially in the playing of his own pieces—much that the playershould rightly do for the composer. His playing resembles the austere Cordelia,who concealed her finest feelings rather than betray them to the people.26

Hanslick’s choice of Cordelia as Brahms’s literary correlate was significant.In King Lear, Cordelia, unlike her sisters Regan and Goneril, really does pos-sess authentic feelings of love for her father the king. Yet it is when she is askedto perform these feelings before an audience that she recoils, making it possi-ble for her sisters to gain the king’s favor through florid speeches overflowingwith superlatives, exaggerations, and sentimental conventions:27

Goneril: Sir, I love you more than words can wield the matter;Dearer than eye-sight, space, and liberty;Beyond what can be valued, rich or rare;No less than life, with grace, health, beauty, honour;As much as child e’er loved, or father found;A love that makes breath poor, and speech unable;Beyond all manner of so much I love you

Regan: I am made of that self metal as my sister,And prize me at her worth. In my true heartI find she names my very deed of love; Only she comes too short: that I professMyself an enemy to all other joys,Which the most precious square of sense possesses;And find I am alone felicitateIn your dear highness’ love.28

Cordelia, however—who remarks in an aside, “I am sure my love’s/Moreponderous than my tongue”—chooses to conceal her true feelings, to makethem seem less than they actually are.29 When it is her turn to speak she uttersthe famously cool lines: “I love your Majesty according to my bond; no more

26. “Mit Schumann teilt Brahms’ Musik vor allem die Keuschheit, den inneren Adel. Nichtsvon Gefallsucht oder bespiegelnder Affection, alles redlich und wahr. Mit Schumann teilt sie aberauch die bis zum Eigensinn souveräne Subjectivität, das Grübeln, die Abkehr von der Aussenwelt,das Insichhineinhorchen. . . . Brahms’s Clavierspiel steht in engem Zusammenhang und schöns-tem Verhältniss zu seiner künstlerischen Individualität überhaupt. Er will nur dem Geist derComposition dienen und vermeidet beinahe schüchtern jeden Schein selbstständigen Prunkes. . . . Es mag Brahms immerhin als ein Lob erscheinen, dass er mehr wie ein Componist als wie einVirtuose spielt, aber ganz unbedenklich ist dies Lob denn doch nicht. Geleitet von dem Bestre -ben, nur die Composition für sich selbst sprechen zu lassen, verabsäumt Brahms—namentlichbeim Vortrag seiner eigenen Stücke—manches, was der Spieler für den Componisten zu tun verpflichtet ist. Sein Spiel gleicht der herben Cordelia, die ihr bestes Gefühl lieber verschweigt, alsden Leuten preisgibt.” Hanslick, Aus dem Concertsaal, 286–88; trans. by Pleasants in Hanslick’sMusic Criticisms, 83–84.

27. It is also worth noting the gendered overtones of Hanslick’s comparison: Brahms/Cordelia’s restraint seems here to be coded as pure, virginal, and feminine. For more on therhetoric surrounding gender and purity in Brahms’s music see McManus, “Rhetoric of Sexuality.”

28. Shakespeare, King Lear, act 1, scene 1.29. Ibid.


or less.”30 Over the course of the play it is Cordelia’s reticence that proves tohave been the most appropriate and genuine response to the king’s crass de-mands. As Kent reminds the king later in the same scene, “Thy youngestdaughter does not love thee least; Nor are those empty-hearted whose lowsound / Reverbs no hollowness.”31

Nineteenth-century critics generally tended to be sympathetic to Cordelia’sevidently authentic character and principled stance.32 August Wilhelm Schlegelcould scarcely “venture to speak” of his reverent awe for her “heavenly beautyof soul, painted in so few words.”33 In Anna Brownell Jameson’s widely readCharacteristics of Women (1832)—published in two different German transla-tions as Frauenbilder, oder Charakteristik der vorzüglichsten Frauen in Shake -speare’s Dramen (1834) and Shakspeare’s weibliche Charaktere (1843)34—Cordelia’s character was described as “governed by the purest and holiest im-pulses and motives, the most refined from all dross of selfishness and passion,approaches near to perfection.”35 Jameson further attributed Cordelia’s “pe-culiar and individual truth of character” to a “natural reserve, a tardiness ofdisposition . . . a subdued quietness of deportment and expression, a veiledshyness thrown over all her emotions, her language and her manner; makingthe outward demonstration invariably fall short of what we know to be thefeeling within.”36 Significantly, Jameson explained Cordelia’s reticence as a re-action to the vile exaggerations of her sisters: “In proportion as her own mindis pure and guileless, she must be disgusted by their gross hypocrisy and exag-geration, their empty protestations, their ‘plaited cunning’; and would retirefrom all competition with what she so disdains and abhors.”37

Especially as interpreted by Jameson, this famous scene from King Lear res-onates with many of the issues surrounding performance in the later nine-teenth century: Hanslick’s choice of the literary metaphor to describe Brahmswas apt. If Brahms wanted to be recognized as a Cordelia-like figure, thenGoneril and Regan, with their “glib and oily art, / To speak and purpose not”could be any number of more theatrically minded virtuosos who seemed toorient their displays of expressivity toward the audience and worldly gain.Indeed, King Lear can stand in for an audience that not only demands gratifi-cation through ever more exaggerated displays but also cannot distinguish—or does not want to distinguish—between the authentic and the false.38

30. Ibid., 13.31. Ibid., 17.32. Dreher, Domination and Defiance, 107. Dreher notes the tendency of earlier critics to

idealize Cordelia, a tendency that was increasingly challenged in the twentieth century.33. Schlegel, “Course of Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature” (1808), 71–72.34. Jameson, Frauenbilder; and idem, Shakspeare’s weibliche Charaktere.35. Jameson, Characteristics of Women, 2:89.36. Ibid., 2:97.37. Ibid., 2:100.38. In at least one influential reading of this scene, Stanley Cavell has suggested that what

King Lear/the public really wants is not authentic love, but rather a public pretense of love, that


The Authentic Subject, the Paradox of Acting, and MusicalAesthetics

Like Cordelia, Brahms and Joachim sought to avoid theatrical falsenessthrough expressive self-discipline, presenting a restrained self as an authenticone. This staging was successful due in part to the ambiguous role of convention—a stock repertory of gestures, expressions, and poses—in perfor-mance. Richard Sennett and others have shown how many modes of perfor-mance are predicated on the use of conventions to communicate emotionalcontent to an audience.39 But this reliance on convention simultaneously raisestroubling questions about mechanization, manipulation, and theatricality.Expressive conventions in music, acting, and language can be mechanically reproduced, and it is often impossible to determine whether any given con-vention correlates with a genuine emotional state or whether it is the emptyrepetition or mechanical reproduction of a stock gesture. Conventions, inother words, can be merely mimetic, establishing a similarity to the “realthing” (that is, authentic, lived emotion) but ultimately empty, devoid of con-tent, and thus false.40

The problem of gestural conventions and mimesis brings up one of thecentral preoccupations concerning acting in the nineteenth century: the age-old question of emotionality, or whether an actor should sincerely feel the pas-sions he or she portrays on stage. This issue was debated vigorously followingthe publication in 1830 of Denis Diderot’s Paradoxe sur le comédien (origi-nally written in 1773). While controversial, this essay quickly became the para-digmatic text in acting theory in the nineteenth century and single-handedlydefined many of the terms by which performance was—and often continuesto be—discussed.41 Diderot challenged conventional wisdom by arguing thatthe performance of a great actor was in fact predicated on his ability to detachhimself subjectively from the emotions he portrayed. Diderot celebrated thefamous English actor David Garrick for the same mercurial changeability of

is, the theatrical display of feelings that the “performer” in question does not in fact experience,leaving the “authentic” Cordelia in a difficult conundrum: “To pretend publicly to love, whereyou do not love, is easy; to pretend to love, where you really do love, is not obviously possible.”Cavell, “Avoidance of Love,” 338–41.

39. Sennett, Fall of Public Man, 37. Leonard B. Meyer also addressed this issue in Emotionand Meaning in Music through a distinction between undifferentiated felt emotion and emotionthat is “designated” or communicated via culturally sanctioned “conventional signs and symbols.”These conventions, Meyer argued, are a necessary component not only of musical expression, butof human communication in general. Meyer, Emotion and Meaning, 20–22. According to LynnVoskuil, some nineteenth-century theorists of theatrical performance, such as George Lewes, ac-tually emphasized the necessity of “convention” in acting, while cautioning against its frequentmisuse. Also see Voskuil, Acting Naturally, 42–50; and McClary, Conventional Wisdom.

40. Davis and Postlewait, Theatricality, 4.41. Roach, Player’s Passion, 158.


expression that Amy Fay had observed in Liszt, describing how the actorcould put his head between two folding doors, and at intervals of five or sixseconds contort his face into frighteningly realistic expressions representinganything from wild delight, to sorrow, to despair.42 Diderot argued thatGarrick’s soul could not possibly have “experienced all these feelings” while atthe same time playing “this kind of scale in concert with his face.”43 His funda-mental conclusion was that “in the complete absence of sensibility is the possi-bility of a sublime actor.”44

While Diderot was inclined to embrace this principle wholeheartedly, nineteenth-century reception of his theory of acting was more ambivalent, asthe uncomfortable questions Diderot raised about the sincerity and intentionsbehind expressive, communicative acts continued to plague critics’ responsesto various forms of performance. Perhaps most unsettlingly, Diderot raised the possibility of complete subjective emptiness in performance, the idea that a precondition for successful theatrical expression was that the performancecontain no self, no subject, and no “inside.” In Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe’swords, Diderot’s view of acting was based on the premise that “in order to do everything, to imitate everything—in order to (re)present or (re)produceeverything . . . one must oneself be nothing . . . only the ‘man without quali-ties,’ the being without properties . . . the subjectless subject (absent fromhimself, distracted from himself, deprived of self ) is able to present or producein general.”45

In musical performance, this represented a troubling possibility, and notonly in terms of what have often been described as quintessentially Romanticnotions of the unique, essential, and even sacred self. It also opened up a rangeof questions about music itself and its expressive powers. This was particularlytrue of instrumental music which, in the nineteenth-century Germanic tradi-tion, had long been assumed to possess a certain intangible spirit, “idea,” orcontent, with which a good performer should be able to identify.46 This connection between performance and musical composition begins to contex-tualize one of Hanslick’s key assertions in the above passage: that Brahms’smusic was particularly “truthful,” “sincere,” and “sovereign.” Brahms’s com-positions, like his approach to playing the piano, were all part of his authentic“artistic individuality,” and it was in his performances of these compositions,rather than the works of other composers, that Brahms’s Cordelian restraintwas most pronounced.

The idea that certain styles or types of music, like certain types of perfor-mance, could be more authentic and genuine than others was one that

42. Diderot, Paradox of Acting, 38.43. Ibid.44. Ibid., 17.45. Lacoue-Labarthe, “Diderot: Paradox and Mimesis,” 258–59.46. Bonds, “Idealism and the Aesthetics of Instrumental Music.” On the performer’s role in

accessing this ideal, see in Hunter, “ ‘To Play as if from the Soul.’ ”


occupied a number of critics and philosophers in the later nineteenth century.This was often apparent in assessments of some of Brahms’s musical antagonists such as Liszt and, especially, Wagner. When Joachim explained his public break with Liszt in the 1850s, he often did so in ways that conflatedthe virtuoso “actor” Liszt with his later programmatic and religious compo -sitions. Hence in Joachim and Moser’s account of the violinist’s break withLiszt, the Weimar master’s compositions were accused of an actor-like—or virtuoso-like—deception in their concealment of an absence of creativity orcontent through the employment of a rich arsenal of tricks and effects:

[Joachim] would have overlooked Liszt’s musical impotence, his poverty ofconception, and his total lack of the creative faculty, for these qualities are in-nate. . . . But the absence of these necessary gifts was concealed by a sophisti-cated expenditure of dazzling orchestral effects, and an unprecedentedlypretentious “mise-en-scène” was likely to lead the listener to mistake inner hol-lowness and emptiness of thought for higher artistic revelation. These were thequalities in Liszt’s compositions that repelled Joachim so violently.47

In this description of Liszt’s compositions, musical works are associated withone of the most morally suspect aspects of the actor’s art: the ability to fool anaudience into believing a false reality through the clever mastery of externalsigns and appearances. Similarly, in an 1855 letter to Clara Schumann,Joachim’s description of Liszt’s compositions imperceptibly transitioned into adescription of Liszt the virtuoso performer, in such a way that it is unclearwhere the border between Liszt’s compositions and Liszt’s virtuoso persona islocated:

For a long time I have not seen such bitter deception as in Liszt’s compositions;I must admit that the vulgar misuse of sacred forms, that a disgusting coquet-terie with the loftiest feelings in the service of effect was never intended—themood of despair, the emotion of sorrow, with which the truly devout man israised up to God, Liszt mixes with saccharine sentimentality and the look of amartyr at the conductor’s podium, so that one hears the falseness of every noteand sees the falseness of every action.48

47. “Über Liszts musikalische Impotenz, die Armut seiner Erfindung und den gänzlichenMangel an schöpferischer Kraft würde er schliesslich noch weggesehen haben, den Gedanken -reichtum, musikalische Erfindung und schöpferischer Gestaltungskraft müssen angeboren sein.. . . Dass aber das Nichtvorhandensein dieser notwendigen Eigenschaften durch den raffiniertes-ten Aufwand von blendenden Orchestereffekten verdeckt werden, eine unerhört prätenziöse miseen scène den Hörer anweisen sollte, innere Hohlheit und Gedankenlehre für höhere künstlerischeOffenbarungen zu nehmen, das war es, was Joachim so heftig von den Lisztschen Kompositionenzurückstiess.” Moser, Joseph Joachim: Ein Lebensbild, 95–96. Translation adapted in part fromMoser, Joseph Joachim, A Biography, trans. Lilla Durham, 106.

48. “Lange ist mir nicht so bittere Täuschung geworden, wie durch Liszts Compositionen;ich musste mir gestehen, dass ein gemeinerer Missbrauch heiliger Formen, eine eklereCoquetterie mit den erhabensten Empfindungen zu Gunsten des Effektes nie versucht wordenwar—die Stimmungen der Verzweiflung, die Regungen der Reue, mit denen der wirklich fromme


For Joachim, it seemed as though there was no separation between a visualimage of Liszt’s theatricality at the conductor’s podium (his look of a martyr)and his aural impression of Liszt’s music (its insincere simulation of the loftiestfeelings in the service of effect).

But critiques of theatrical music and music making did not come only fromwithin the Brahms circle. A longstanding critical tradition accuses Wagner’smusic of being overly theatrical due to the mimetic nature of its individual ges-tures.49 Famously, both Friedrich Nietzsche and Theodor W. Adorno focusedon these issues in their well-known critiques of Wagner.50 Both experienced atroubling lack of concordance between Wagner’s musical representations andwhat was being represented, or what seemed to be “true” in his music andwhat was actually true. Nietzsche wrote that Wagner was like an actor

. . . by virtue of being ahead of the rest of mankind in one insight: what ismeant to have the effect of truth must not be true. . . . [This proposition] con-tains the whole psychology of the actor; it also contains—we need not doubtit—his morality. Wagner’s music is never true. But it is taken for true; and thusit is in order.51

Similarly, Adorno insisted that the “mimetic impulse” had been “built into thewhole structure and reified” in Wagner’s music, which thus “degenerates intomere imitation and, ultimately, utter mendacity.”52 To these listeners, despiteits skillful simulacrum of content, depth, or expressivity, Wagner’s music—atheatrical music based on the actor’s mimesis—was fundamentally empty.Nietzsche acknowledged that the Wagnerian “believer” may allow himself tobe manipulated into feeling sated by Wagner’s music, but that “the rest of us,

Mensch einsam zu Gott flüchtet, kramt [Liszt] mit der süsslichsten Sentimentalität vermischt und einer Märtyrer-Miene am Dirigier-Pult aus, dass man die Lüge jeder Note anhört, jederBewegung ansieht.” Letter to Clara Schumann, ca. 10 December 1855, in Briefe von und anJoseph Joachim, ed. Moser, 1:298–99. The fact that sacred music was in question here adds an-other layer of significance to Joachim’s assertion, in that the “true content” at stake was more ex-plicitly defined as spiritual. While it is beyond the purview of this article to explore this issuefurther, it is worth noting that Joachim’s response was likely informed by his position as aLutheran convert reacting to Liszt’s Catholicism, with the different approaches to “internal” spir-itual experience vs. “external” ritual implied by these two traditions.

49. For more on the relationship between music, gesture, and mimesis, including a discussionof how these concepts were treated in Wagner’s own writings on opera, see Smart, Mimomania,esp. chap. 6.

50. Nietzsche’s attitudes to Wagner’s theatricality were anything but simple. While “TheCase of Wagner” maintains a resolutely polemical anti-theatrical stance, Nietzsche’s writings as awhole often embrace theatrical masks and “histrionics,” presenting them as a key to a more fluid,plural identity. As Morris points out, the very form of many of Nietzsche’s writings, with their inter-weaving of multiple authorial identities and voices, reinforces this view. See Morris, “ ‘Alienated from His Own Being.’ ”

51. Nietzsche, “Case of Wagner,” 62952. Adorno, In Search of Wagner, 27.


demanding substance above all else, in books as well as music, are scarcelytaken care of by merely ‘represented’ tables and hence are much worse off. Tosay it plainly: Wagner does not give us enough to chew on.”53

Both of these critics believed that the most important way Wagner’smimetic deception was achieved was through the use—or misuse—of musicalgestures. Adorno described Wagner’s musical characterization in his operas asspurred by an intent that “converts the musical gesture into the bearer of [specific] expression.” Thus Wagner’s singular success seemed to be that ofdeceiving his audience, convincing them that there was no separation betweengesture and content, or signifier and signified. But by converting musical ges-tures into the bearers of this kind of expression, Wagner inevitably imparted tothem an element of theatrical “reflection” or self-consciousness; they alwaysexisted with one eye on the audience.54

These critiques of Wagner’s alleged theatricality have been influential atleast partly due to their basis in a Western epistemological tradition that di-vides language into an exterior and interior, but also seeks a higher mode ofexpression in which that split is mended. As Susan Bernstein has noted, thislatter ideal has often been associated with music; music’s idealized position innineteenth-century aesthetic hierarchies was due in part to a crisis of languageprecipitated by the decline of lyric poetry and the rise of sensational journalismin the 1830s.55 As the apparent division between subject and expression in language came to be increasingly felt, “music” became a kind of utopia wherethis division was collapsed. Thus while language—like the actor’s mimesis—could only point to the relationship between itself and its essence, music inRomantic aesthetics showed no such limitation; in its ideal form “exterior”sound and “interior” essence were imagined to resonate as one.56

This connection between the potentially false theatricality of virtuoso per-formance and that of music itself begins to account for the appeal of Brahms’smusic and its affiliated aesthetic ideologies for performers concerned with es-tablishing a more “authentic” virtuosity.57 We do not have to take Nietzsche’sand Adorno’s assessments of Wagner’s theatricality at face value to realize thatthere may actually have been something about the aesthetics associated with

53. Nietzsche, “Case of Wagner,” 629–30.54. Adorno, In Search of Wagner, 28.55. Bernstein, Virtuosity of the Nineteenth Century, 60.56. Ibid., 1–2. Another approach to this shift in the valuation of instrumental music can be

found in Bonds, Music as Thought, 5–28. Bonds describes the replacement of a musical aestheticsbased on mimesis (in which music would imitate phenomena in order to communicate with lis-teners, inducing a corresponding reaction in their minds or spirits) with one based on idealism(which conceived of music as beyond the conceptual framework of language as communication, away in which the listener could imaginatively apprehend an ideal realm of the spiritual or infinite)around 1800.

57. On the struggle over ownership of the Austro-German symphonic tradition (and theconcomitant fear of “emptiness” in instrumental music) in the second half of the nineteenth cen-tury, see Hepokoski, “Beethoven Reception.”


Brahms’s music, as perceived by many of his contemporaries, that seemed tocircumvent some of the problems of musical theatricality described above. Inparticular, concerns about authentic subjectivity—in both composition andperformance—were relevant to Brahms’s association with what is sometimestermed “absolute music” in the conservative–progressive debate that polar-ized Germanic musical culture in the second half of the nineteenth century.

Caution is necessary when employing these terms and categories. “Abso -lute music,” as Sanna Pederson has demonstrated, was not a stable or compre-hensive concept during Brahms’s time.58 Furthermore, it would be naive toassert that Brahms’s music is actually devoid of “extramusical” content, as re-cent work on ciphers, allusion, and narrative in his instrumental works hasshown.59 Nevertheless, in his own time as well as ours, Brahms’s instrumentalmusic has been associated with the ideal of autonomy in its unwillingness torepresent nonmusical content to the larger public via programs, titles, andother “extrinsic” devices. It was this principle of nonrepresentation, translatedinto an aesthetic ideology by critics like Hanslick, that was significant in thecontext of debates about theatricality and authenticity in music. Take, for instance, Hanslick’s famously “hard-line” statement in Vom Musikalisch-Schönen: “A fully realized musical idea . . . is already something beautiful by itself, is its own purpose, and is in no way merely means or material for therepresentation of feelings and thoughts. . . . Tonally moving forms are the solecontent and object of music.”60 The merit of nonprogrammatic instrumentalmusic, as understood in these terms, was that by claiming to be nonrepresen-tational it was also avoiding the possibility of falseness. In Brahms’s case, in-strumental music that eschewed grand dramatic gestures in favor of denselywoven webs of interconnected motives and artfully concealed inner content,could claim to be the perfect antidote to the mimetic theatricality associatedwith more representational musical genres (for example, Wagner’s music dra-mas and Liszt’s tone poems). Simply stated, Brahms’s music, as the standard-bearer for “absolute” music, seemed to refuse to “act.”

For Brahms and his supporters, then, instrumental music could function asa metaphor for the authentic self. Musical compositions, according to this aes-thetic position, were self-contained, internally coherent, and resistant to the

58. Pederson, “Defining the Term,” and idem, “A. B. Marx.” Pederson shows that absolutemusic was not a “comprehensive concept,” but rather acquired various meanings depending onwho was using it and to what ends, as various institutions focused and perpetuated perceptions ofcertain types of music as “absolute.”

59. For example see Brodbeck, Brahms, Symphony No. 1, 39–50; Berry, “Old Love”;McClary, “Narrative Agendas”; and Fink, “Desire, Repression, and Brahms’s First Symphony.” Itis significant that these devices are, to a greater or lesser extent, secret or hidden, available only tobe deciphered, uncovered, or interpreted by the initiated. Crucially, they do not represent innermeanings to an audience via clear signs and gestures.

60. Hanslick, On the Musically Beautiful, 28–29. The translation quoted above is found inDahlhaus, Idea of Absolute Music, 109.


obvious communication of any meaning, idea, or narrative that lay outsidetheir own “circumference.” The close connection between the authentic vir-tuosity projected in performances by Brahms and Joachim and the “ideologyof absolute music” as described by Hanslick and others may well go a longway toward accounting for why the performers who cultivated this particulartype of performing self were so often affiliated with Brahms and his circle.Especially given the close connection between performances and the “spirit”of musical works in Werktreue performance, it would seem as though in thiscase the aesthetics of performance and musical composition were perfectlyaligned.

Critiques: Self-Restraint and Falseness

Performers like Joachim and Brahms were remarkably successful at promotingtheir restrained approach to performance as a kind of moral standard in musi-cal culture. Nevertheless, significant ambiguity remained attached to theirstance. First, as virtuoso performers, these musicians still needed to appear be-fore audiences and appeal to those audiences in order to succeed; they were, inother words, in the paradoxical position of being required to display an au-thentic self in their performances. Second, through their emphasis on disci-pline, self-control, and restraint, they were almost inevitably implicated in thelogic of what Max Weber called the “virtuoso ascetic.” A charismatic religiousfigure, the virtuoso ascetic comes by his exceptional virtue not only as a God-given gift, but also through a rigorous regimen of technical training and disci-pline, repeatedly encountering and overcoming the demands of the world orthe worldly.61 And yet the virtuoso ascetic ends up needing the world, how-ever much he seems to devalue it. He needs it not only to provide the tempta-tions that must be overcome, but also as a theater in which he continuallyproves—or performs—his asceticism to God and himself, and sees it reflectedback through the affirmation of an audience. In Weber’s words, “No matterhow much the ‘world’ as such is religiously devalued and rejected as beingcreatural and a vessel of sin, yet psychologically the world is all the more af-firmed as the theatre of God-willed activity in one’s worldly ‘calling.’ ”62

Weber’s central point was that there is a theatrical dimension to any socialidentity marked by unusually disciplined levels of restraint and asceticism. Theauthority to which an “ascetic virtuoso” aspired, then, was not autonomousbut fundamentally relational, existing in an unacknowledged but crucial rela-tionship to an audience.63

61. See Weber, Economy and Society.62. Idem, “The Social Psychology of the World Religions,” 290–91.63. Adams has explored the workings of this paradox in Victorian literary worlds in Dandies

and Desert Saints, esp. 1–42.


Despite their critical success as performers, then, basic tensions often ap-peared in accounts of musicians like Joachim and Brahms by both sympatheticand hostile critics; while they had established an influential model for authen-tic Werktreue performance, they did not have total control over the terms bywhich authenticity would be recognized and defined. Ambivalence was im-plied even in Hanslick’s otherwise positive review of Brahms as Cordelia in theobservation that “it may appear praiseworthy to Brahms that he plays morelike a composer than a virtuoso, but such praise is not altogether unquali-fied.”64 Brahms’s extreme restraint, in other words, could also have been away of seeking praise for his ideologically grounded performance choice. Thisreading of expressive reticence was increasingly plausible by the later decadesof the nineteenth century, a time in which the ideal of serious Werktreue per-formance, previously the more exclusive aspiration of a small and elite groupof composers and critics, became more widespread. Many late nineteenth-century audiences, it might be argued, were more inclined to reward austereperformances by ascetic virtuosos with acclaim, applause, and prestige thanthey were other, more theatrically expressive styles of performance.

Amalie Joachim noted a similar dynamic when remarking on the differencebetween Joachim’s playing in private and the priestly show of restraint that hewould put on for his public audiences:

I have often had the chance to compare his way of playing particular pieces withSarasate’s and others’, and have always found that he plays everything moregrandly, more boldly, and more fervidly than the others—even “Virtuosopieces” he plays more boldly and elegantly than the others, even if he achievesthis freely only when playing for himself alone in his study—because publicly hewants to show himself only as the priest of the most beautiful and elevated.65

While this description ostensibly defends her ex-husband’s performance style(presumably against charges of lacking boldness and fervor), it neverthelessraises the possibility of a calculated, theatrical form of self-representation inJoachim’s performances. This contrasts markedly with Fuller-Maitland’s asser-tion, noted earlier, that Joachim only unconsciously shows what kind of a man

64. Similarly, nineteenth-century observers sometimes tempered their admiration forCordelia with feelings of doubt or incredulity: Heinrich Heine, while praising her “silent tender-ness,” “warmth of feeling,” and “pure spirit” could not keep himself but wondering, “is she per-fectly pure?” See Heine, Shakespeare’s Mädchen, 116. Twentieth-century critics would latercomplain about her “self-righteousness,” “pride,” and her overwhelming intent to “prove hervirtue” that overrides other values, such as sympathy and charity toward her father. See Dreher,Domination and Defiance, 107.

65. “Ich habe oft genug ihn, seine Art einzelne Stellen zu spielen mit der Art Sarasate’s undAnderer vergleichen können und stets gefunden, dass er alles grösser, kühner und feurigervorträgt—auch ‘Virtuosenstückchen’ kühner und eleganter spielt, als die andern, wenn er diesfreilich nur für sich allein in seinem Studierzimmer vollbringt—weil er öffentlich sich nur alsPriester des Allerschönsten und Höchsten zeigen will.” Amalie Joachim, letter to Dr. A. Kohut(?), 13 May 1891; quoted in Borchard, Stimme und Geige, 502.


he is in his performances, and Moser’s description of how Joachim was such a“straightforward” character that he was unable to display himself other thanhow he actually was. Amalie’s description implies a level of forethought andcalculation (Joachim wants to show himself as a priest) that comes dangerouslyclose to suggesting that his public, priestly demeanor was in fact a role as-sumed for potentially self-glorifying ends.

Nevertheless, both Amalie and Hanslick were generally sympathetic to theoverall artistic goals of “ascetic” performances. Their critiques were troublingbut relatively mild: Joachim and Brahms, while great and noble-minded performers, were not as independent from their audiences and indifferent topublic acclaim as their austere demeanors might imply. Unsurprisingly, cri-tiques from less sympathetic camps were far more skeptical of the connectionbetween self-restraint and authenticity. This was certainly true of Wagner’s discussion of what he termed the pious “Musical Temperance Society”(“pietistische Musik-Mässigkeitsverein”) in his 1869 treatise, Über dasDirigiren.66 This “society,” which Wagner linked specifically with Brahms, theSchumanns, Mendelssohn, and the conservatories with which some of thesemusicians were affiliated, seemed to occupy an increasingly dominant positionin German musical culture.67 These musicians, he charged, had turned theprinciple of self-restraint and the avoidance of superficial “effects” on an audience, previously a “delicate, discrete rule,” into an “aggressive dogma”that had devastating consequences for public musical life.68

For Wagner, Brahms’s reticence as a performer rendered his playing “brit-tle” and “wooden,”69 and modern conductors who followed these principlesactually degraded the works they purported to serve: “Whatever is high, great,and deep is presented as natural, simply a ‘matter of course.’ ”70 Furthermore,in Wagner’s view, reticence itself was a purely negative value, brought on byfear, repression, and conformity rather than idealistic self-denial. Most damn-ing of all was Wagner’s charge that austere self-control was actually a way of

66. Wagner, Über das Dirigieren, 389. Translations are adapted from Wagner, On Con -ducting. (“Musical Temperance Society” is used on pp. 80 and 86.)

67. Mendelssohn’s involvement with the Leipzig Conservatory is well known. In addition,Clara Schumann taught at Frankfurt’s Hoch Conservatory from 1878 until her death in 1896, asdid Julius Stockhausen from 1878–80 and 1883–84. Joachim was invited to found and run thestate-funded Hochschule für Musik in Berlin in 1868, and he was to remain at the helm of that in-stitution for nearly forty years.

68. “Ist nun die . . . Maxime: ‘nur keinen Effekt!’ aus einer fast zartsinnigen Klugheits -maassregel zu einem wirklich aggressiven Dogma erhoben worden.” Wagner, Über dasDirigieren, 390.

69. “Ich hörte [Brahms] auch in einem Konzerte . . . auf dem Klaviere spielen . . . währendich die Technik des Herrn Brahms, dessen Vortrag mich seiner Sprödigkeit und Hölzernheit we-gen sehr peinlich berührte, so gern etwas mit dem Öle jener Schule befeuchtet gewünscht hätte.”Ibid., 392.

70. “Dabei wird das Grösste, Erhabenste und Innigste für etwas recht Natürliches, ganz‘Selbstverständliches’ . . . ausgegeben.” Ibid., 385.


concealing a fundamental inability to “feel” music. The new generation ofperformers, Wagner charged, could understand music only via articulatedmathematical and linguistic concepts, whereas “that which makes our greatmusic great is the very thing that confuses these people.”71 Wagner’s argu-ment deftly reversed the logic that cast suspicion on impassioned expressivityfor its potential to deceive or conceal. In Wagner’s quite offensive formula-tion, the conscious moderation of a performer’s behavior could actually be away of ensuring that signs of one’s inborn deficiency did not slip through tothe surface: “A large part of their education has . . . consisted in learning towatch their behavior, just as one who naturally lisps and stammers must avoidany indications of passion, lest he should be overcome by a fit of hissing andstammering.”72

Authenticity and Ideologies of Exclusion

Wagner’s rhetoric points toward some of the high social and cultural stakes at-tached to the ideal of authenticity in late nineteenth-century performance cul-ture. As Erving Goffman and others have noted, concerns about authenticityin performance often have as much to do with our attempts to understandwho is performing—whether they are “authorized to give the performance inquestion”—as with the means of the performance itself.73 If authenticity wasthe quality of being “true to oneself ” and uncompromised by any desire toperform a conscious construction of a self to others, the question became: trueto what self ? What kind of self, in other words, was authorized to curate themusical canon via public performance? Who possessed the necessary spiritualand subjective affinity with the Austro-German masters? Wagner describedthis affinity rather prosaically as an ability to feel the influence of true music,but other commentators were more expansive: Robert Hirschfeld, in a description of Joachim, called it a mysterious subjective “recognition”(“Anerkennung”) of the masters, and Hanslick described it as a “secret reso-nance of the spirit.”74 Joachim’s eulogist, on the occasion of his burial, would

71. “Gewiss macht sie von unserer grossen Musik nur eben Das gerade konfus, was diesegross macht, und was allerdings mit Wortbegriffen sich ebenso wenig leicht ausdrückt, als durchZahlen.” Ibid., 407–8.

72. “Ein grosser Theil ihrer Bildung bestand seither eben darin, auf ihr Gebahren mit derSorgfalt Acht zu haben, wie der mit dem Naturfehler des Stammelns oder Lispelns Behaftete, wel-cher in seiner Kundgebung alle Leidenschaftlichkeit vermeiden muss, um nicht etwa in das unge-bührlichste Stottern oder Sprudeln zu verfallen.” Ibid., 387.

73. Goffman, Presentation of Self, 59.74. Hirschfeld drew this concept from Goethe’s adage, “Die wahre Liberalität ist Aner ken -

nung.” Hirschfeld expanded on how this applied to Joachim’s playing: “Anerkennen im Vortrage,an dem man eben die Meister erkennt, ist Joachims Geheimniss, sein geheimstes Können.”Hirschfeld, “Quartett Joachim,” in Klavierlehrer 24 (1901): 50, cited in Borchard, Stimme undGeige, 547. Hanslick used a similar turn of phrase in a review of Carl Tausig’s pupil Rafael Joseffy


call it “this wonderful Something, without which the highest level of artisticachievement, as with all humanity, would remain an empty sound.”75 The un-spoken assumption behind the rhetoric of authenticity was that it would beonly those performers who lacked this secret affinity who would need to ma-nipulate their behavior falsely—whether that occurred through excessive the-atrical flamboyance or, as Wagner charged, through excessive self-restraint.76

In this context, it was only a short step from a preoccupation with whodoes, and who does not, possess an intangible “Something” to a moral as wellas artistic judgment based on social and political ideologies of exclusion. In hisdiscussion of “reticent” performers, Wagner was implicitly and deliberatelyevoking what Peter Gay has called the “central category” of difference in latenineteenth-century Germany: Jewishness. This was nothing new for Wagner,who had already linked an ability to “feel” or “speak” music to racial identityin his notorious Das Judentum in der Musik (1850/1869). In that essay,Wagner had maintained that the Jewish composer was defined by an alienatedrelationship to the German musical language and, as a result, could merelymimic its external gestures, hoping to pass for the “real thing.” Thus he ac-cused Mendelssohn and Meyerbeer of a stereotypically Semitic deceptiveness:while they experienced “no true passion” and would never be able to speak“the speech of Beethoven,” they were also incredibly adept at simulating au-thenticity through a skilled manipulation of music’s more external gesturesand conventions, which they used with “quite distressing accuracy and decep-tive likeness.”77

In performance, Wagner associated the Jew’s alienation from the Germanmusical tradition with self-restraint, as is clear from the anti-Semitic overtonesin his discussion of “reticent” performers. Tellingly, he described his “MusicalTemperance Society” as spiritually descended from Mendelssohn and the con-servatory system he had helped found.78 Furthermore, he linked the inabilityof these musicians to feel the influence of true music—an inability skillfully dis-

(who apparently lacked this “secret resonance”) in 1874: “Fehlt ihm die geheimnissvolleResonanz des Gemüths dafür, oder ist’s die Freude am bloss Virtuosen, was die jungen Künstlerzur Stunde noch bindet?” Hanslick, Concerte, 125.

75. Quoted in Borchard, Stimme und Geige, 59. The full quotation in the original German isgiven in note 84 below.

76. In addition to its similarity to the anthropological concept of religious charisma, this affinity resonates with Henry Kingsbury’s discussion of “talent” in modern-day conservatory systems. While Kingsbury’s “talent” seems to signify a more open-ended musicality, however, the affinity described above is defined by its cultural specificity. See Kingsbury, Music, Talent, andPerformance.

77. Wagner, Das Judenthum in der Musik, (1850), trans. by Ellis in Richard Wagner’s ProseWorks, 3:93, 95, 89.

78. For more on the practical and ideological differences between Mendelssohn and Wagneras conductors (despite their shared concern with fidelity to composers’ intentions) see Bowens,“Origins of the Ideology of Authenticity.”


guised by their studied self-restraint—to the a “new German-corrupting lawof the elegant second species.”79 Like Jews, Wagner held, these musicians hadacquired their culture artificially and therefore possessed only a superficial var-nish of what he called Gebildetheit (“cultured-ness” or “pseudo-culture”)rather than true Bildung: “Just as a banker needs capital, these [new conduc-tors] need Gebildetheit. I say Gebildetheit, as distinct from Bildung.”80 Inshort, he went on to say, “They prove true professionals; but, alongside ofthis, their Bildung—in spite of all efforts—is such as can pass muster in thecase of a musician only; so that if music were struck from the list of their at-tainments, there would be little left—least of all, a man of spirit and intel-lect.”81 To Wagner and many of his readers, it would not have mattered thatmany of the musicians in question (including Brahms) were not actuallyJewish. He was evoking a discourse in which Jewishness stood for inauthentic-ity, deception, and cultural alienation, and in which (in Steven Beller’s words)“anyone could be discredited by being associated with the Jews.”82

This discourse on Jewishness and cultural alienation forms an importantbackdrop to performers’ claims of authenticity. In Joseph Joachim’s case inparticular, one way of understanding the uncompromising emphasis on hisown truthfulness and authenticity would be in light of his complicated status

79. “. . . das deutschverderbliche neue Gesetz der eleganten zweiten Gattung.” Wagner,Über das Dirigieren, 382.

80. “Wie der Banquier das Kapital, so brachte dieser die Gebildetheit mit. Ich sage:Gebildetheit, nicht Bildung; denn wer diese wahrhaft besitzt, über den ist nicht zu spotten: er istAllen überlegen. Der Besitzer der Gebildetheit aber lässt über sich reden.” Ibid., 384.

81. “Kurz, sie erweisen sich als wahre Leute vom Fach; auch ist ihre Bildung—trotz Allem—von der Beschaffenheit, wie man sie eben doch nur einem Musiker hingehen lassen kann, so dass,wollte man diesen an ihnen leugnen, nichts übrig bliebe, am wenigsten etwa ein geistvollerMensch.” Ibid., 407. Wagner’s evocation of the concept of Bildung was also powerful and signifi-cant, especially as it pertained to Jewish musicians. Cultural historians have noted a change in theconcept of Bildung in the second half of the nineteenth century. This German humanistic ideal ofongoing moral, spiritual, intellectual, and aesthetic self-cultivation supposedly resulted not only inself-realization and self-knowledge, but also in a deep and ennobling affinity with the great classi-cal and Germanic cultural traditions. Earlier in the nineteenth century, Bildung—as taught byHumboldt, Goethe, Schiller, and others—had represented a democratic and universalizing idealof humanity. In its ideal form, it was, in Paul Mendes-Flohr’s words, “a quality of the spirit . . .that all individuals can attain, regardless of accidents of birth, nationality, and religion.” Mendes-Flohr, German Jews, 26. By the later nineteenth century, though, the Bildungsideal had becomeincreasingly nationalized and exclusive. The summit of moral and cultural self-realization that itrepresented was no longer something that could be attained by anyone. Instead, it became a mat-ter of deep and even unconscious identification with shared cultural memories. German Jews werenot only a group that had wholeheartedly identified with the Bildungsideal; they were also thegroup that was most systematically marginalized as the borders of cultural Germanness were re-drawn later in the century. For more on this process see Mendes-Flohr, German Jews, 16; Mosse,German Jews Beyond Judaism; and Gay, Freud, Jews, and Other Germans, esp. 98–99.

82. Beller, Vienna and the Jews, 200. Margaret Notley, in fact, has shown how Brahms was of-ten implicitly accused of Jewishness in the heated musico-political debates of fin-de-siècle Vienna.See Notley, Lateness and Brahms, 33–35.


as a converted Jew who occupied an increasingly authoritative position in theGerman musical establishment.83 It is clear that he and his supporters were of-ten at pains to emphasize his innate German-ness, despite his HungarianJewish background. The Joachim/Moser biography, for example, devotedsignificant space to establishing the Germanic cultural climate of Joachim’shometown, the Hungarian town of Kitsee:

Kitsee is now officially known by the Hungarian name Köpcsény. But that doesnot conceal the fact that the local inhabitants use the German language almostexclusively. They are after all industrious, hard-working Swabians, whose forefa-thers had migrated from their homeland to this new area in earlier centuries.Not only have they never forgotten the language, manners, and customs oftheir old homeland; they have understood how to preserve these things in sucha pure form that when one encounters these people one believes oneself to beback in Swabia.84

Similarly, the eulogy on the occasion of Joachim’s burial, mentioned above,made it explicit that Joachim’s “wonderful Something,” his ability to immersehimself in the spiritual depths of music, was not only a German, but also aChristian quality. Pastor W. Nithack-Stahn of Berlin’s Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gedächtniskirche quoted from the New Testament (First Corinthians 13:1)when explaining Joachim’s musical ability:

“If I speak in the tongues of men and angels, but have not LOVE, I am a noisygong or a clanging cymbal!” Yes, call it what you will, this wonderful Some -thing, without which the highest level of artistic achievement, as with all hu-manity, would remain an empty sound. Call it love of the Thing, love of theIdea—it is in its deepest sense a love of God. Therefore, he was a German artist. . . this complete immersion in the inner world is the German nature. He hadthis nature.85

83. Joachim’s complicated relationship to his Jewish identity is explored in detail in BeatrixBorchard’s biography of the violinist, Stimme und Geige, as well as in her article “Von JosephJoachim zurück zu Moses Mendelssohn.”

84. “Kitsee heisst heute offiziell ungarisch Köpcsény. Das hindert aber nicht, dass sich dieEinwohner im Ortsverkehr fast ausschliesslich der deutschen Sprache bedienen; sind es doch fleis-sige, arbeitstüchtige Schwaben, deren Vorfahren in früheren Jahrhunderten aus dem Reiche ein-gewandert waren. Sie haben die Sprache, Sitten und Gebräuche der alten Heimat nicht nur nichtvergessen, sondern in solcher Reinheit zu erhalten verstanden, dass man sich im Verkehr mit ih-nen in das Stammland versetzt glaubt.” Moser, Joseph Joachim, 1. Hanslick made a similar point ina review of Joachim from 1875: “Sie [Joachim and his father] kamen aus Kittsee, einem Dorfe beiPressburg, dem Geburtsort des Kleinen. Joachim ist somit ein Ungar, ein Ungar genau wie Liszt,welcher gleichfalls ausser ‘Eljen’ kein Wort ungarisch versteht. Die an Österreich grenzenden un-garischen Comitate, insbesondere aber ihre Hauptstädte Pressburg, Ödenburg, Raab waren nochvor 30 Jahren überwiegend deutsch, in den Kreisen des gebildeten Mittelstandes fast auss-chliesslich deutsch . . . . Joachim ist durch und durch Deutscher, vom Kerne aus bis in die klein-sten Äusserlichkeiten.” Hanslick, Concerte, 152.

85. “ ‘Wenn ich mit Menschen- und mit Engelszungen redete, und hätte der LIEBE nicht,so wäre ich ein tönendes Erz und eine klingende Schelle!’ Ja, nennt es, wie ihr wollt, dieses wun-derbare Etwas, ohne das auch die höchste Kunstfertigkeit, wie alles Menschenthum hohler Klang


The construction of Joachim’s persona in performance may well have beena strategy of maintaining a German identity in the face of anti-Semitic stereo-types. While Wagner’s association of reticence with Jewish inauthenticity was influential, social indicators of “Jewishness” in late nineteenth-centuryGerman areas were multifarious and complex. Joachim’s absorptive poses andexpressive self-restraint, while vulnerable to Wagnerian anti-Semitic critiques,were also an effective strategy of disarming another, older anti-Semitic stereo-type: the ghetto Jew. This well-known figure had initially been associated withJewish ghettoes within Germany itself, although by the later nineteenth cen-tury he was increasingly associated with Eastern European Jewry.86 Stereo -typed as excitable, histrionic, agitated, effeminate, and over-the-top in hisgesticulations, this stock character was dangerous precisely because these traitsallowed him to deceive and manipulate the unsuspecting. He was, in otherwords, a racialized caricature of Diderot’s theatrical actor: skilled at manipulat-ing (and even amplifying) external conventions that were completely detachedfrom an internal subjective reality. A performance style that evoked some ofthese characteristics could easily mark a musician as “Jewish” (and thereby implicitly “false” or “alienated”). K. M. Knittel, for example, has shown howGustav Mahler, like Joachim a high-profile musical figure and a converted Jew,was often caricatured and critiqued for the allegedly Semitic aspects of his con-ducting style, as his theatrical flamboyance opened him up to charges ofstereotypically Jewish jerky gesticulations, chin-jutting, larger-than-life physicalmovements, and nervous hysteria.87

Jewishness and Germanness, then, were important categories that could beweaponized in debates about what constituted authenticity in performance.Yet they were not the only social identities implicated in the project of per-forming authenticity via absorption and self-restraint. The assiduous control ofone’s emotions and physical movements was also important in constructionsof nineteenth-century bourgeois German masculinity. As George Mossenoted in his foundational study of the matter, a “true man” would know howto master his passions, just as the ideal male body would project both strengthand restraint.88 This tradition went at least as far back as Johann JoachimWinckel mann’s frequently quoted celebration of the “noble simplicity andquiet grandeur” observable in sculptures of Greek men and youths. InWinckelmann’s reading, the famous Laocoön sculpture showed a man experi-encing intense, unbearable pain—but while this pain was observable in thetension and strain of his muscles, it was unapparent in his facial expression orposture: “Just as the depth of the ocean remains tranquil even if a storm rages

bleibt, nennt es: Liebe zur Sache, Liebe zur Idee—es ist doch im tiefsten Grunde Gottesliebe.Darum: ein deutscher Künstler war’s. . . . diese völlige Versenkung in die innere welt ist deutscheArt. Er hatte sie.” Quoted in Borchard, Stimme und Geige, 59.

86. Aschheim, “Reflections on Theatricality,” 21.87. Knittel, “ ‘Ein hypermoderner Dirigent’ ”; also see Maier, “Mahler’s Theater.”88. Mosse, Image of Man, 6–15.


above, just so the [calm] expression of the Greeks in spite of their passions indicates a great and tranquil soul.”89

While such restraint could be analogized as feminine in accounts such asHanslick’s, in which Brahms was compared to Shakespeare’s pure and virginalCordelia, the Brahms circle clearly intended such self-control to evoke theseimportant components of masculine identity.90 Authenticity, in these terms,was not a socially neutral category; indeed, its construction as masculine oftenwent hand in hand with a tendency to question the ability of female musiciansto apprehend the content of great music. To Hans von Bülow, who by the1880s had firmly aligned himself with Brahmsian values, female pianists(whose professional ranks were increasing in the later decades of the century,due in part to the growing availability of conservatory training) were unable toexperience the depth of emotion found in late Beethoven. In his well-attendedmaster classes from 1884 to 1887 he often berated his female students:Beetho ven’s last sonatas, Bülow asserted, were “not written for the ladies,”and he advised his female students to “play things that are musically easier.”91

These sorts of assumptions led to some tension in accounts of female pianists,such as Clara Schumann, who seemed to embody both “masculine” under-standing and self-control and an authoritative connection to the musicalcanon.92 Hanslick found her to be “rarely qualified to grasp and identify her-self with [the composer’s] lofty intentions,” and “at home in the thoughts ofaugust composers.” He also concluded, however, that the “masculinity of herplaying” set her apart from other female pianists. When other female pianistsemployed “frequent small accents,” these were inauthentic mannerisms, amere “affectation of subjective feeling.” With Clara Schumann, on the otherhand, the same expressive devices arose from an intimate familiarity with themusical material; Hanslick heard in them a “careful highlighting of rhythmicor harmonic contrasts.”93

89. “So wie die Tiefe des Meers allezeit ruhig bleibt, die Oberfläche mag noch so wüten,eben so zeiget der Ausdruck in den Figuren der Griechen bei allen Leidenschaften eine grosseund gesetzte Seele.” Winckelmann, Gedanken über die Nachahmung, 24.

90. Laurie McManus has explored the often-contradictory characteristics that were associatedwith the categories “masculine” and “feminine” in musical rhetoric during Brahms’s time.“Mascu line” and “feminine” were not stable categories, and were often weaponized by both sidesin the musical debates surrounding Brahms and Wagner. See McManus, “Rhetoric of Sexuality,”1–91.

91. Criticizing a woman for what he felt to be an inadequate performance of a late BeethovenSonata, Bülow asked, “Miss, have you never felt longing? . . . Yes, yes, late Beethoven is not writ-ten for the ladies; play things that are musically easier.” On another occasion, he opined thatwomen should not play adagios, presumably also because they lack the necessary depth of feeling.Account by Theodor Pfeiffer in Piano Master Classes of Hans von Bülow, 30, 37. On nineteenth-century attitudes toward female pianists, see Ellis, “Female Pianists.”

92. By the later nineteenth century, Clara Schumann’s “authority” derived not only from thequality of her interpretations or her long history of “serious” programming, but also because sherepresented a living connection to past composers, and especially to her deceased husband’s music.

93. “Unsere Künstlerin ist übrigens weit entfernt, sich übermässige Forcestückeauszuwählen; sie beschämt lieber die Kraftvirtuosen der Neuzeit durch Männlichkeit des


The Musical Museum and the Politics of Performance

These are but a few examples of the charged and often exclusionary rhetoricsurrounding the idea of “authentic” performance in the later nineteenth cen-tury, and they indicate a situation in which authenticity itself was a hotly con-tested category. To establish one’s authenticity was to establish that one’srelationship to and experience of great works in performance was “true,”rather than false, alienated, and merely simulated for the sake of an audience.Performing authenticity, in other words, was also a way of performing author-ity over a highly valued musical tradition. In this context, connections be-tween performative characteristics associated with authenticity and thoseassociated with groups who possessed cultural authority became increasinglyimportant. This was especially true in a musical field in which numerous indi-viduals and factions struggled to establish an authoritative connection to theAustro-German musical canon. The urgency with which these questions ofauthenticity were posed—and their alignment with questions of race, national-ity, and gender—needs to be understood within this wider context.

The aesthetic disputes over the continuation of the Beethovenian traditionin the second half of the nineteenth century are well known. But it is worthemphasizing that this struggle occurred not only through disagreementsabout compositional aesthetics (as in the so-called conservative/New Germanfactionalism) but also in the concert halls, in which various musicians werecalled upon to “perform” their ownership of this tradition. Compounding theproblem was the widespread acceptance (and ideological ubiquity) of theWerktreue ideal itself. Earlier in the century, performers like Clara Schumann,Felix Mendelssohn, and Charles Hallé had been recognized as unusual andcontrary to the norm for their uncompromising programs of “serious” music.This had set them apart from the prevailing performance culture, especiallyduring what Carl Dahlhaus and others have described as the heyday of virtuosity between 1830 and 1848.94 With the growth of the culture of the“musical museum” in the later decades of the nineteenth century, however,the situation had changed dramatically. As a general rule, in Austro-German

Vortrages. Nichts Webisches, Zerflossenes, Gefühlsüberschwengliches herrschte in dem SpielClara Schumanns: es ist alles bestimmt, klar, scharf, wie eine Bleistiftzeichnung. Die häufigenkleinen Accente, die sie liebt, underscheiden sich merkwürdig von dem Nachdruck, mit welchemdie meisten Pianistinnen in jede einzelne Note ein eigenes Gefühl zu legen suchen; was hierAffectation der subjectiven Empfindung, ist dort stets nur sorgfältiges Beleuchten rhythmischeroder harmonischer Gegensätze.” Hanslick, review of Clara Schumann, 15 January 1856, inSämtliche Schriften, 1:202.

94. Dahlhaus, Nineteenth-Century Music, 134–41. Dahlhaus suggested that virtuosity’s highpoint in European concert culture began with Paganini’s tours of European capitals in the early1830s and ended with Liszt’s withdrawal from the concert stage in September 1847. His histori-ography echoes Hanslick’s division of the history of Viennese concert life into three distinct peri-ods, with the years between 1830 and 1848 labeled the “Virtuosenzeit”; see Hanslick, Geschichtedes Concertwesens in Wien.


concert halls famous virtuosos were no longer centering their programsaround potpourris, operatic fantasies, and guest appearances by supportingartists. Instead, “serious” programs drawn mostly from a celebrated canon of“classics” were becoming the new norm.95 This meant that increasingly, con-certs emphasized the interpretation of recognized masterworks, and it becamemore and more necessary to determine who was a “real” musician (with theright pedigree, credentials, and relationship to the Austro-German tradition)and who was not.96

Brahms, Joachim, and many of their associates represented a specific stancewithin this field. First, they were known for their “conservative” position inmusico-aesthetic debates, one which valued music that purported to present(as in “make present”) or envoice subjectivity while simultaneously refusing to publicly “represent” that subjective experience.97 This aesthetic view, as wehave seen, dovetailed with their restrained and anti-theatrical version of au-thentic performance. Second, they were strongly associated with whatMargaret Notley and others have described as Austro-German Liberal posi-tions, which played an important role both in Brahms’s musical attitudes andin his worldview.98 The emphasis on deliberate and rational self-control in per-formances by Brahms and Joachim spoke strongly to Liberal values, and theconstruction of masculinity and Germanness encoded in their performancesalso aligned with Liberal conceptions of these categories.99 These affiliationsaccounted not only for the success of these musicians’ version of authenticperformance, but also for the ambiguity and heated criticism it faced. The mu-sical values associated with Brahms were never universally accepted, and cer-tainly by the end of the century they were beginning to seem outdated, evenanachronistic, to many progressive-minded members of a new generation.100

95. Weber, Great Transformation, Samson, Virtuosity and the Musical Work. Also see RichardTaruskin’s discussion of the work-based “museum culture” that dominated late nineteenth-century concert life in Brahms’s Vienna and elsewhere; Taruskin, Oxford History, 3:676–82. Seealso Burkholder, “Brahms and Twentieth-Century Classical Music.”

96. Weber, for example, cites the amazement of a Viennese critic from 1860 that, “as com-pared to the 1840s, classics had become standard repertory in virtuoso programs, every pianist offering something by Beethoven, and every singer some Schubert.” Weber, Great Transforma -tion, 239.

97. For more on nineteenth-century music as a discursant of subjectivity that eschews deliber-ate representation, see Steinberg, Listening to Reason, 1–17.

98. Notley, Lateness and Brahms, and idem, “Brahms as Liberal.” The classic description ofan embattled Viennese Liberalism remains Schorske, Fin-de-siècle Vienna.

99. Judson, in “Rethinking the Liberal Legacy,” points out that while self-discipline and rea-son were two of the most highly valued markers of Liberal identity, these qualities were explicitlycoded as masculine, German, and middle-class qualities; women as well as those regarded as theLiberals’ racial and class inferiors were generally thought to be incapable of demonstrating thesecharacter traits.

100. Notley, for example, has described how in his later years Brahms “embodied the waningculture” in Vienna’s changing cultural and political landscape, and was increasingly subject toanti-Liberal attacks in the press at the time; Lateness and Brahms, 8, 32–35.


Similarly, the Liberals themselves were in an increasingly embattled positionbeginning in the 1880s, as the radical factions that successfully challengedtheir political dominance espoused a more theatrical cultural politics celebrat-ing unfettered instinct and emotion.101

Yet despite the aesthetic, political, and cultural specificity of the Brahms–Joachim position, it was and perhaps remains one of the most influential conceptions of Werktreue performance. Indeed, while the critical fortunes ofBrahms’s music have waxed and waned since his death, the approach to per-formance associated with him and his circle has never entirely gone out ofstyle. In 1924, long after their deaths, Ferruccio Busoni was still complainingabout the undying influence of “that bloody gang who invented ‘being musical’: Clara Schumann, Joachim, and Brahms.”102 From a more positiveperspective, Artur Schnabel, a pianist who received his training in Brahms’slate nineteenth-century Vienna and was later to position himself as the torch-bearer for “Brahmsian” values of performance in the twentieth century, wouldbe celebrated by Edward Crankshaw in 1961 in terms remarkably similar tothose used for “authentic” performance by the Brahms circle. Schnabel,Crankshaw wrote, was “a man who was totally wrapt away from all the world,oblivious to the world, engaged in the most intimate dialogues with the deadman whose poetry it was his calling to express.”103 His appearance on the con-cert platform was “subdued to the music” and he would “face the audience,unsmiling, bow formally, a little curtly, and sit down at the piano.”104 As withJoachim and Brahms, Schnabel’s serious and restrained stage demeanor waspresented as springing from an essentially authentic personality: he was “oneof those who, in any company, went on being himself.”105 And the list goeson: to this day it is not difficult to find examples of performers celebrated fortheir serious, anti-theatrical, and abstemious performance style (and the self-less devotion to the musical canon that it implies).

With this in mind, it is worth closing with a consideration of the more generalimplications of this stance for the ideal of musical performance with which it has been most closely associated: Werktreue performance—that is, perfor-mance whose primary objective is to present a “true” rendition of a musicalwork. In fact, some of the most extreme formulations of this ideal resonate in unexpected ways with Diderot’s description of the actor as someone who

101. Ibid., 27–32; and Schorske, Fin-de-siècle Vienna, 3–24.102. “Diese verdammte Bande, von der das ‘Musikalisch-sein’ stammt, diese Clara Schu -

mann, der Joachim und der Brahms, welches Unheil haben sie in Deutschland angerichtet, wasfür ein Stickluft haben sie verbreitet mit ihrer Duckmäuserei, Mesquinerie, Gehässigkeit und ihrenjesuitischen Heucheleien—ich hasse dieses Pack.” Quoted in Klassen, “Virtuosität und Verant -wortung,” 139.

103. Crankshaw, Introduction, xii.104. Ibid., xi.105. Ibid., ix.


possesses no self, no qualities, and no subjectivity.106 Lydia Goehr has de-scribed the ideal of the “perfect performance of music” as a performance that“successfully negates its own presence,” and we might add that the ideal per-former in this tradition is the one who is able to successfully negate his or herown subjecthood; Goehr illustrates this point with E. T. A. Hoffmann’s fa-mous axiom that “performers should not make their personalities count in anyway.”107 These notions of the performer’s role engage what Lacoue-Labarthehas described as a higher form of mimesis, involving a deliberate and noblekind of kenosis or self-emptying, almost akin to “compassion” in that this self-emptying occurs in order to take on the passion of another.108 Thus theWerktreue performer, in this most stringent and idealized formulation, mustachieve a kind of absence from himself or herself in order to take on thethoughts, feelings, and ideas of the composer or composition in question.

And yet, far from demanding the absence of the performer as a subject, theemphasis on authenticity that I have explored vis-à-vis the Brahms circle seemsto demonstrate an intense, deliberate preoccupation with the performer as aparticipating subject who is fully present. This concern, as we have seen, ex-tended not only to what the performer was actually feeling, thinking, and ex-periencing during a performance of music, but also to who this subject on theconcert stage was. What is the nature of the performer’s experience (are theytruly inhabiting the music)? And what is the nature of the performer’s rela-tionship to the subjectivity encapsulated within that music (can they trulyidentify with and understand the point of view enclosed therein)? These ques-tions appear insistently in accounts of performances that make claims ofWerktreue status, and while some of the social resonances of such questionshave changed since Brahms’s time, we might well consider their continuedimplications in performance culture today.

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Abstract

Joseph Joachim, Johannes Brahms, and other members of their circle wereimportant figures in the ascendancy of the Werktreue paradigm of perfor-mance in the second half of the nineteenth century. This article explores theways in which their approach to Werktreue intersected with a broader ideal of“authentic” subjectivity. An authentic performer, according to this ideal,would be true to himself or herself, absorbed in the music, oblivious of the au-dience, and restrained in gestures and overall expressivity. I examine how thesemusicians performed authenticity in different types of self-representation, in-cluding autobiographical writings, portraits, and musical performances.Furthermore, I explore the connection between the subjectivity modeled in


their performances and the aesthetic ideology of nonprogrammatic instru-mental music. Concerns about authenticity played an important role in thestruggle over the ownership of the Austro-German musical tradition; debatesabout which performers were “authentic” often hinged on the question ofwho could claim the cultural and spiritual aptitude necessary to inhabit thethoughts of master composers. In this context, the performative strategies as-sociated with authenticity also evoked social codes associated with gender, nationality, and race during a period in which participation in Germanic cul-ture was being conceived of in increasingly exclusive terms.

Keywords: Joseph Joachim; Johannes Brahms; Werktreue; authenticity;Austro-German canon.

Staging Authenticity: Joachim, Brahms, and the Politics of Werktreue Performance

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