My notes – significant excerpts an article I read on Joseph Joachim in the New York Times, 8.12.07 (http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/12/arts/music/12scho.html?_r=0)

“Joachim came from a different planet: Jupiter perhaps. More than any other performer, he personified an era that understood Great Music as religion.

“He stood up to for Jews even after he stopped being one. He read Goethe.

“His life coincided with the rediscovery of Bach, living memory of Beethoven, and the career of his friend and very frequent collaborator Brahms. 

“He was a walking show-and-tell for the trade-offs of Jewish Emancipation. Like Heine, Marx and generations of Mendelssohns, who were his friends and patrons (Mendelssohn took him to play for Queen Victoria when he was 12), he resolved them by joining the Lutheran Church. He then rooted for Prussia against France in 1870 and proudly declared himself a German, notwithstanding his Austro-Hungarian birth.

“In 1933 the Nazis threw out Joachim’s busts and portraits. A few years later they dismantled his monument in the entrance and renamed Joachim Street. The propaganda ministry hired the musicologist Hans-Joachim Moser to expunge “Jewish” traces like Joachim’s cadenzas from German masterpieces.

“