“For all are born to the ideal”: Joseph Joachim and Bettina von Arnim
Joseph Joachim’s veiled autobiography, authored by his student Andreas Moser, gives a warm account of Joachim’s mentors: Stanisław Serwaczyński, Georg Hellmesberger, Joseph Böhm, Felix Mendelssohn, Moritz Hauptmann, George Macfarren, Robert Schumann, Franz Liszt, and others. Among them, however, barely a mention is made of women: as John Eliot Gardner said about Johann Sebastian’s chart of the Bach family Stammbaum, “they’re all blokes.” Disappointingly, Beatrix Borchard’s strongly feminist contemporary biography Stimme und Geige hardly does better.
Nevertheless, Bettina von Arnim’s influence on the young Joachim is difficult to overstate. A distinctive and powerful personality, a passionate free spirit, intelligent, energetic, and original, she easily exhausts and transcends the various connotations of the word that is regularly applied to her: geistreich. At one time an intimate friend of Goethe and Beethoven, Bettina was an ardent and knowledgeable music lover with outspoken aesthetic views. She was also a lover of gifted young men, reveling in her salonnière’s ability to mold and shape them. She was smitten with Joachim. She called him her “Benjamin” — “the first hero and Diomedes amongst the fiddlers.” She invited him to the Arnim estate in Wiepersdorf, and to the family home in Berlin. Over the course of three years, they would write hundreds of pages of letters to one another, using the familiar “Du,” in which Joachim poured out his conflicted feelings about life, love, and art. A central figure in literary Romanticism, Bettina introduced Joachim to great authors: Goethe, Tieck, Novalis, Jean Paul, Arnim, Brentano, Mörike, Keller, Groth and Storm. She introduced him to Rafael, Rembrandt, and Dürer. Importantly, she steered him away from Franz Liszt, with whom she had quarreled.
In my paper, I will for the first time explore the wide-ranging influence of this powerful personality in one of the central artists of the long 19th century.
Joseph Joachim’s veiled autobiography, authored by his student Andreas Moser, gives a warm account of Joachim’s mentors: Stanisław Serwaczyński, Georg Hellmesberger, Joseph Böhm, Felix Mendelssohn, Moritz Hauptmann, George Macfarren, Robert Schumann, Franz Liszt, and others. Among them, however, barely a mention is made of women: as John Eliot Gardner said about Johann Sebastian’s chart of the Bach family Stammbaum, “they’re all blokes.” Disappointingly, Beatrix Borchard’s strongly feminist contemporary biography Stimme und Geige hardly does better.
Nevertheless, Bettina von Arnim’s influence on the young Joachim is difficult to overstate. A distinctive and powerful personality, a passionate free spirit, intelligent, energetic, and original, she easily exhausts and transcends the various connotations of the word that is regularly applied to her: geistreich. At one time an intimate friend of Goethe and Beethoven, Bettina was an ardent and knowledgeable music lover with outspoken aesthetic views. She was also a lover of gifted young men, reveling in her salonnière’s ability to mold and shape them. She was smitten with Joachim. She called him her “Benjamin” — “the first hero and Diomedes amongst the fiddlers.” She invited him to the Arnim estate in Wiepersdorf, and to the family home in Berlin. Over the course of three years, they would write hundreds of pages of letters to one another, using the familiar “Du,” in which Joachim poured out his conflicted feelings about life, love, and art. A central figure in literary Romanticism, Bettina introduced Joachim to great authors: Goethe, Tieck, Novalis, Jean Paul, Arnim, Brentano, Mörike, Keller, Groth and Storm. She introduced him to Rafael, Rembrandt, and Dürer. Importantly, she steered him away from Franz Liszt, with whom she had quarreled.
In my paper, I will for the first time explore the wide-ranging influence of this powerful personality in one of the central artists of the long 19th century.