Among the many portraits of Joseph Joachim in the public domain is a photograph from 1887 featuring a greeting from Joachim to Fauré: ‘A Monsieur Fauré / en souvenir du 30 Janvier et de Joseph Joachim / Paris, Janvier 1887’ (see Illustration 0.1).

The occasion was a concert in the French capital, where Joachim performed his Variations for Violin with Orchestral Accompaniment (1878– 79). The image shows a dignified gentleman with a full beard and a somewhat stern, deliberate look on his face. He is not holding his violin in this photograph, but has his hand inside his coat, a gesture that we would associate with paintings of Napoleon or statesmen of the time. This was the time when he was regarded as Germany's premier violinist, a ‘Geigerkönig’, or high priest of German music. The photograph on the cover of this book, in contrast, was taken nearly forty years before, and shows Joachim from a different side. Here we see a brooding, emotional adolescent, looking rather wild and eager. Of course, he was already a world-renowned violin star and also an up-and-coming composer with great promise. These two photographs reveal two different sides of the same man. Today the older, dignified violinist is the more famous. The younger, fiery composer is less well known – in fact, not well known at all.

In this monograph, the first full-length study of Joachim's music, the composer and his music take centre stage. Between the late 1840s and mid- 1860s, the main span of Joachim's compositional activity, he composed five overtures, three violin concertos, several little violin pieces, and variations. A small number of mostly occasional works were composed after 1864, and some earlier works were later revised for publication. Although the Hungarian Concerto in D minor Op. 11 is still performed today – in Hanslick's view, this ‘opus hungaricum’ secured Joachim's ‘excellent place among modern composers’ – Joachim's activity as a composer around the 1850s has largely passed unnoticed. His idiosyncratic, subjective musical language shines on its own merits. And in terms of influences, it is revealing on both the giving end (Bargiel, Brahms, Bruch, Dvořák, Fauré, Gade, Herzogenberg, Reinecke, Rudorff, Schumann, and Stanford) and the receiving end (Mendelssohn, Schumann, Liszt, Wagner, and Brahms, in that order).