© Malcolm Tozer 2024

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Joachim’s Illustrated Address From Uppingham School
Malcolm Tozer

While browsing the market stalls in London’s Portobello Road in June 2004, Janet Snowman, the Collections Registrar at the Royal Academy of Music, found the item shown below among some drawings by the English illustrator, Leonard Leslie Brooke (1862-1940). Brooke was best known for his pen-and-ink line-drawings and water-colours for children’s books. Snowman knew of Joachim’s association with Uppingham School, so she bought the sheet and notified Jerry Rudman, the school’s archivist. He purchased it from her in August 2004.

The item is a design  – in ink and pencil on tissue paper, with a little gilding and some colour-wash – for an Uppingham School presentation to Josef Joachim. The dimensions are 355mm by 250mm.  There is an unfinished and indeterminate sketch in pencil, 50mm deep, along the top margin and a gilded and pink laureated design, 25mm deep, with the dates 1839 to 1899 along the left-hand margin.

Rudman was able to link the presentation to Joachim’s fifteenth appearance at one the school’s spring-term concerts, this one on 28 March 1899. (For details of all Joachim’s Uppingham concerts, see https://josephjoachim.com/2017/03/11/malcolm-tozer-josef-joachim-at-uppingham-school/). The programme included orchestral and choral items by pupils and their masters, a piano solo by a pupil, and three that included Joachim. The first, a Beethoven quartet; the second a Mozart concerto; and the third, two of his own Hungarian dances. In the quartet, Joachim played alongside Paul David (the school’s director of music; David and Joachim had been fellow pupils in Leipzig of Ferdinand David, Paul’s father), Joseph Ludwig (Joachim’s former pupil; now the host of an annual series of chamber concerts in London) and Paul Ludwig (a member of several London chamber groups).

The school magazine (USM, 1899, pp 91–94) recorded what happened in the interval after the Beethoven quartet.

‘The Quartett was warmly applauded, and was followed by an incident which, though not on the programme, was by no means the least interesting feature of the evening. This was the presentation to Dr. Joachim of an address congratulating him on the part of the School on the attainment of his Diamond Jubilee as an artist. The address – a charming piece of artistic illumination, appropriately and happily worded – took Dr. Joachim entirely by surprise, and the simple words of acknowledgment he uttered in reply came so obviously from the heart that they were far more enthusiastically greeted than any set speech, however eloquent, would have been. Then ensued a regular epidemic of cheering for the next few minutes.’

All was now clear. Snowman’s discovery was a draft of an illustrated address that was presented to Joachim by the school to mark the sixtieth year of his performing career.

Rudman mentioned to the author that he had Brooke’s draft of the illustrated address in 2018 after he had received a copy of the author’s essay, From Prussia with Love: Music at Uppingham School, 1853-1908, that was published in the Journal of Historical Research in Music Education (online 27 June 2018; in print vol 41, 2, April 2020, pp 105–131). The essay was the first to reveal the extent of Joachim’s association with the school.

Acting on advice from Snowman and Robert Eshbach, the hunt for the original document thus began in the autumn of 2018. Enquiries were made to archives, collections, galleries and museums in Edinburgh, Karlsruhe, London, Lübeck, Manchester, Oxford and New York, all without success. Snowman then discovered the first clue in The Musical Times, 1 April 1931, p 747. Under the heading ‘Musical Notes from Abroad’, Hugo Leichtentritt wrote from Germany to report on the celebrations in Berlin that year for the centenary of Joachim’s birth. The address was one of many ‘relics’ and ‘objects of interest’ that were displayed at a series of concerts and other events.

Enquiries from January 2019 were focused on Berlin, and especially to Julia Brembeck-Adler, professor of viola, viola d’amore and baroque viola at the University of the Arts. A month later, Antje Kalcher, a graduate archivist at the university, found the address in their collection and sent a photograph of it to the author. She added that the address was on parchment and mounted in a glazed wooden frame, with the imprint (James) Newman, Soho Square (London). News of the discovery was shared with Snowman and Eshbach.