DEATH OF JOACHIM.

Auckland Star, Volume XXXVIII, Issue 195, 16 August 1907, Page 5

DEATH OF JOACHIM.

(Received 8.36 ajn.)

BERLIN, August 15.

The death is announced of Herr Joseph Joachim, the famous violinist, at the age of seventy-six.

[Herr Joachim, who was announced to be dying last Wednesday, celebrated his 76th birthday in June, and the occasion was marked by enthusiastic recognition in musical circles in London. A brief summary of the career of the great violinist has already appeared in these columns. It may be interesting to add that Joachim emerged, not as a child violinist, but a player of the guitar, on which he was somewhat of a prodigy. While still with his master, Joachim made his first public appearance on March 17, 1839, when with Szervaczinski he played a double concerto by Eck, a long-forgotten musician, who was also an eminent violinist in his day. He came to England in 1844, armed with letters galore from Mendelssohn and others, the " little fat boy, with blooming cheeks and' short jacket," as Piatti once described his friend. The English critics were by no means behind their Continental colleagues in their appreciation, and they became rapturous over the playing (from memory) of Beethoven's Concerto at the Philharmonic Concert in May of the same year. Since then the great player's career has been the continuous triumph that makes dull reading. But one story is worth telling. In order to prove that the public were musical, Joachim laid a wager that, disguised as an itinerant fiddler, he would gather together by his own unaided efforts a definite sum of money by merely playing as he wandered through the streets of one of the poorest districts of London; and he won his bet. To Joachim (eaye a recent writer) music and musicians in England owe a debt of very great weight. A pioneer in classical chamber music, he has helped materially In the education of two generations of