“Playing with Liszt—­he was an intimate friend of my father—­is my most precious musical recollection of Budapest.  I enjoyed it a great deal more than my regular lesson work.  He would condescend to play with me some evenings and you can imagine what rare musical enjoyment, what happiness there was in playing with such a genius!  I was still a boy when with him I played the Grieg F major sonata, which had just come fresh from the press.  He played with me the D minor sonata of Schumann and introduced me to the mystic beauties of the Beethoven sonatas.  I can still recall how in the Beethoven C minor sonata, in the first movement, Liszt would bring out a certain broken chromatic passage in the left hand, with a mighty crescendo, an effect of melodious thunder, of enormous depth of tone, and yet with the most exquisite regard for the balance between the violin and his own instrument.  And there was not a trace of condescension in his attitude toward me; but always encouragement, a tender affectionate and paternal interest in a young boy, who at that moment was a brother artist.

“Through Liszt I came to know the great men of Hungarian music of that time:  Erkel, Hans Richter, Robert Volkmann, Count Geza Zichy, and eventually I secured a scholarship, which the King had founded for music, to study with Joachim in Berlin, where I remained nearly three years.  Hubay was my companion there; but afterward we separated, he going to Vieuxtemps, while I went to Leonard.

JOACHIM AS A TEACHER AND INTERPRETER

“Joachim was, perhaps, the most celebrated teacher of his time.  Yet it is one of the greatest ironies of fate that when he died there was not one of his pupils who was considered by the German authorities ‘great’ enough to take the place the Master had held.  Henri Marteau, who was not his pupil, and did not even exemplify his style in playing, was chosen to succeed him!  Henri Petri, a Vieuxtemps pupil who went to Joachim, played just as well when he came to him as when he left him.  The same might be said of Willy Burmester, Hess, Kes and Halir, the latter one of those Bohemian artists who had a tremendous ‘Kubelik-like’ execution.  Teaching is and always will be a special gift.  There are many minor artists who are wonderful ‘teachers,’ and vice versa!

“Yet if Joachim may be criticized as regards the way of imparting the secrets of technical phases in his violin teaching, as a teacher of interpretation he was incomparable!  As an interpreter of Beethoven and of Bach in particular, there has never been any one to equal Joachim.  Yet he never played the same Bach composition twice in the same way.  We were four in our class, and Hubay and I used to bring our copies of the sonatas with us, to make marginal notes while Joachim played to us, and these instantaneous musical ‘snapshots’ remain very interesting.  But no matter how Joachim played Bach, it was always with a big tone, broad chords of an organ-like effect.