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Previous Post in Series: Kittsee, 1831

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Family

The Joachim family is said to have been happy. Joseph’s mother, Fanny (Franziska) Figdor Joachim, was the daughter of a prominent Kittsee wool wholesaler, then residing in Vienna. Joseph’s father, Julius Friedrich Joachim, born 20 miles to the south in the town of Frauenkirchen (Boldogasszony), on the eastern edge of the shallow, sprawling Lake Neusiedl, was also a wool merchant. Julius was a hard-working, serious and somewhat reserved father. His few surviving letters show him to be thoughtful and literate, a practical man concerned with his business and his family’s welfare. Fanny, we are told on Joachim’s own authority, was a “loving and tender mother, whose simplicity of character was an important factor in the harmony of the family circle.” ¹

The fair-haired, blue-eyed Joseph — after the local fashion called “Pepi” — was the Joachims’ seventh child. Nineteen years separated him from his eldest sibling, Friedrich ² As an infant, he survived troubled times. Beginning in July of 1831, the region was struck by the European cholera pandemic. Pressburg was placed under quarantine, and most travel in the region was halted until November. By year’s end, more than a thousand fell ill in Pressburg and its surrounds. Nearly 400 died. ³

Joseph was a delicate, anxious child, who held himself aloof from his brothers’ wild games. ⁴ Nevertheless, the Joachim children were an amicable company; despite the distances that would come to separate them, they would remain on intimate terms for life. In later years, Joseph grew particularly close to his older brother Heinrich, who entered the family wool trade, and, as “Henry” Joachim, settled in London. There, in 1863, Henry married the “kind and amiable” Ellen Margaret Smart, a member of one of Britain’s most prominent musical families. ⁵

Another of Joseph’s siblings, Johanna, married Lajos György Arányi (1812-1877), a prominent physician and university professor in Pest who, in 1844, founded one of the world’s first institutes of pathology. Their son, Taksony Arányi de Hunyadvar (1858-1930), was Budapest’s Superintendant of Police, and the father of the distinguished violinists Adila (Arányi) Fachiri (1886-1962) and Jelly d’Arányi (1893-1966). Both were violin students Joachim’s protégé, of the eminent Jenö Hubay. Adila could also claim to be a student of her great-uncle “Jo,” having taken some lessons with him shortly before his death.

The Joachims’ home was one of the largest, most attractive houses in Kittsee. By local standards, the Joachims were evidently well to do. ⁶ In the 1830’s the Hungarian wool business was flourishing. Since the late 18^th-century, England had imported wool from Spain to feed the insatiable maw of her ever-expanding mills. Austrian and Hungarian merchants were quick to set up an effective competition with their Spanish rivals, however, and by the second quarter of the 19^th-century they were providing fully two thirds of England’s wool imports. ⁷

Since there were no banks in Hungary at the time, prominent merchants like the Figdors also served as bankers, lending money and extending credit to producers. In pre-capitalist, agrarian Hungary, this practice was greeted with widespread misapprehension and resentment. “In Hungary,” wrote John Paget in 1835, “the greater part of the trade is carried on by means of Jews, who, from their command of ready money in a country where that commodity is scarce, enjoy peculiar facilities. The Jew early in spring makes his tour round the country, and bargains beforehand with the gentry for their wool, their wine, their corn, or whatever other produce they may have to dispose of. The temptation of a part, or sometimes the whole, of the cash down, to men who are ever ready to anticipate their incomes, generally assures the Jew an advantageous bargain.” ⁸ “We cannot feel astonished,” Paget continued, in a statement characteristic of the time, “at the sentiment of hatred and contempt with which the Hungarian, whether noble or peasant regards the Jew who fawns on him, submits to his insults, and panders to his vices, that he may the more securely make him his prey; but we cannot help feeling how richly the Christian has deserved this at the Hebrew’s hands; for, by depriving him of the right of citizenship, of the power of enjoying landed property, and even of the feeling of personal security, he has prevented his taking an interest in the welfare of the state he lives in, has obliged him to retain the fruits of his industry in a portable and easily convertible form, has forced, him, in short, to be a money-lender whose greatest profit springs from the misery of his neighbours,  a merciless oppression, and indeed a merciless retribution.” ⁹ The literature of the time is rife with anti-Semitic remarks concerning “Jewish nature.” So, for example, this 1832 reference to the Jews of Pressburg, Kittsee and neighboring communities: “Impatient with every heavy labor and every hard task, the Jew would rather go hungry and roam about in the dubious hope of momentary gain than to earn his bread by the sweat of his brow. ¹⁰ Erratic of mind and ambition, rambling, wily, cunning, villainous and servile, he would sooner tolerate all insults and all misery than steady and hard work.” ¹¹ Contrary to such commonly voiced stereotypes, an account by the prominent and respected Baron Frigyes Podmaniczky (1824-1907) ¹² places a certain Figdor, likely Joseph’s grandfather, in a very different light: “While my father was still alive, Figdor was the wholesaler who regularly bought wool from us, and took upon himself the role of the house banker. In later times, I had the opportunity to come to know him better, and I can say this: he was the most honorable and decent man that I have ever known.” ¹³

Baron Frigyes Podmaniczky ¹⁴

© Robert W. Eshbach, 2013.

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Next Post in Series: The Kittsee Kehilla

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1. Moser/JOACHIM 1901, p. 2. ↩︎
2. The siblings were: 1. Friedrich (*ca. 1812 Kittsee — †1882 Vienna), m. Regine Just (*1825 Brno — †1883 Vienna); 2. M. Josephine (Pessel) (*1816 — †1883) m. Otto Naftali Rosenthal Thali Ronay (*1810 — †after 1866); 3. Julie (*1821 Kittsee — †1901 Vienna) m. Joseph Singer (*ca. 1818 — †1870); 4. Heinrich (*1825 Kittsee — †1897 London) m. Ellen Margaret Smart (*ca. 1844 — †1925), 5. Regina (*ca. 1827 Kittsee — †1862 Pest) m. William Östereicher (*ca. 1817), and later Wilhelm Joachim, (*ca. 1812 — †1858); 6. Johanna (*1829 Kittsee — †1883) m. Lajos György Arányi (*1812 — †1877), and later Dr. Johann W. Rechnitz (*ca. 1812); and 7. Joseph  (*1831 Kittsee — †1907 Berlin) m. Amalie Marie Schneeweiss (*1839 — †1899). An 1898 interview with Joachim [Musical Times, April 1, 1898, p. 225] claims that Joachim was “the youngest of seven children.” In his authorized biography, however, Moser claims that Joseph was “the seventh of Julius and Fanny Joachim’s eight children.” The name and fate of the eighth and last sibling is unknown. ↩︎
3. Presburg und Seine Umgebung, Presburg: Wigand, 1865, pp. 65 ff. ↩︎
4. Moser/NEUJAHRSBLATT, p. 5. ↩︎
5. On their wedding certificate, Henry listed his father’s profession as “gentleman.” Henry and Ellen’ son, Harold Henry Joachim (1868-1938), Wykeham Professor of Logic at Oxford University until his retirement in 1935, eventually married Joseph’s youngest daughter Elizabeth (1881-1968). A leading Spinoza scholar, Harold Henry Joachim is remembered today for his A Study of the Ethics of Spinoza (1901), The Nature of Truth(1906), and for his translations of Aristotle’s De lineis insecabilibus and De generatione et corruptione. Harold Joachim was a talented amateur violinist and an eminent intellectual, educated at Harrow School and Balliol College, Oxford. In his distinguished academic career, he lectured on moral philosophy and logic at St. Andrews University and later Oxford. Shortly after his death, his student, T. S. Eliot, wrote: ‘to his criticism of my papers I owe an appreciation of the fact that good writing is impossible without clear and distinct ideas’ [letter in The Times, August 4, 1938]. Henry and Ellen Joachim’s daughter Gertrude married Francis Albert Rollo Russell, the son of British Prime Minister John Russell, and uncle of the philosopher Bertrand Russell. ↩︎
6. According to the Hungarian census of 1821 (Köptseny, page 201), the Joachim household (household 40) employed a servant. Hungarian census records for 1830/31 (Köpcseny, page 249, record 73) list Julius Joachim (household 73) as having a wife, 3 sons (18 yrs. or younger) and 4 daughters (18 yrs. or younger). In the 1848 census, household 73, presumably the house currently at #7 Joseph Joachim Platz, was occupied by Henrik Figdor, 54, and his wife Juli, 50 (film # 719825) [JewishGen Hungary Database, http:// www.jewishgen.org/databases/Hungary/, accessed November 4, 2010.]. ↩︎
7. The Esterházy family maintained substantial flocks in Kittsee. Adam Liszt, the pianist’s father, was local to the area, and had lived as a child in Kittsee (several of Adam Liszt’s siblings were born there, including a brother named Franz). At the time of Franz Liszt’s birth, Adam was employed as intendant of the Esterházy sheepfolds (Ovium Rationista Principis Esterházy) in nearby Raiding. [Ludwig Ritter von Heufler, Österreich und Seine Kronländer, Vienna: Leopold Grund, 1854, p. 53; Walker/LISZT I, p. 55; Zaluski/LISZT, p. 15.] ↩︎
8. Paget/HUNGARY I p. 132. ↩︎
9. Paget/HUNGARY I, p. 135. ↩︎
10. In these and numerous similar expressions, we hear a precursor of Wagner’s slanderous, anti-capitalist rants against Jewish musicians, as being both controlling of the professional network, and at the same time being themselves incapable of authentic production — a viewpoint concisely summed up by his disciple Hans von Bülow in an 1854 letter to Liszt, in which he referred to the powers-that-be at the Leipzig Gewandhaus as “bâtards de mercantilisme et de judaisme musical.” [Letter of Hans von Bülow to Franz Liszt, Hanover, 9 January 1854; original in Goethe- und Schiller-Archiv, Klassik Stiftung Weimar.] Wagner’s screed, Judaism in Music (1850), had a particularly noxious consequence, in that it applied such widely-voiced and apparently non-controversial bromides to the realm of creative endeavor. The Jew, it seems, was incapable of heavy-lifting, even when it came to the hard work of musical composition. “From that turning-point in our social evolution where Money, with less and less disguise, was raised to the virtual patent of nobility,” wrote Wagner, “the Jews — to whom money-making without actual labor, i.e. Usury, had been left as their only trade — the Jews not merely could no longer be denied the diploma of a new society that needed nothing but gold, but they brought it with them in their pockets.” In his article, Wagner portrayed Jews as facile imitators, incapable of authentic, productive creativity. For him, Jews were mere dealers in musical wares, trading in goods that others had created. In the end, he claimed, even Mendelssohn “lost all formalproductive-facility,” and “was obliged quite openly to snatch at every formal detail that had served as characteristic token of the individuality of this or that forerunner whom he chose for his model.” [Richard Wagner, Das Judenthum in der Musik, 1850] Joachim was clearly pained by Wagner’s attack, and by its implication that Jews qua Jews could not function as authentic creators. We have Wagner’s own word for it that Joachim, then a young composer in his twenties, “in presenting Bülow with one of his compositions for perusal… asked him whether I might possibly find anything “Jewish” in it.” Whether Joachim asked this sincerely or sarcastically cannot be known. Wagner took it as a sincere question. [Wagner/LIFE, pp. 500-502.] ↩︎
11. Pál Magda, Neueste statistisch-geographische Beschreibung des Königreichs Ungarn, Croatien, Slavonien und der ungarischen Militär-Grenze, Leipzig: Weygand’sche Buchhandlung, 1832, pp. 51-52n. ↩︎
12. Baron Frigyes Podmaniczky (*1824 — †1907) was a leading Hungarian magnate. In 1884, he was the first intendant of the newly-built Budapest Opera House — a building of such stunning beauty that it made the Austrian Emperor envious. Podmaniczky’s Budapest palace is currently the Azerbaijani embassy. ↩︎
13. Frigyes Podmaniczky, Memoiren Eines Alten Kavaliers: Eine Auswahl aus den Tagebuchfragmente 1824-1844, Ferenc Tibor Tóth (ed.), unpub. p. 133. ↩︎
14. Public Domain, Wikimedia Commons. ↩︎

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Previous Post in Series: Of Rivers and Highways: The Perilous Journey into the Future 

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Pesth

miratur molem Aeneas, magalia quondam,
miratur portas strepitumque et strata viarum. [1]

                        — Virgil, Aeneid Book I

 

Buda and Pest from the South [i]

            The contrast between the two shores, linked together by a bridge of boats upwards of twelve hundred feet in length, is peculiarly striking; on one side Imperial Buda, the original and ancient capital, spreads stern and still, clasping the dark heights with houses and convents, clothing their sides with habitations, and cresting them with lordly palaces and bristling fortresses: while right and left along the river bank stretch its long faubourgs, where you may distinguish at intervals an old Turkish tower, a remnant of the times when the Moslem held sway in the chief city of the Magyars, or a stately monastery, upon whose spire the cross now glitters in the sunlight, unprofaned by the vicinity of the crescent.

            There is a strange stillness about Buda; a sort of calm regality; and you ever find your thoughts flung back upon the past as you climb its abrupt acclivities, or wander among its giant-looking houses. But you have only to repass the bridge, and the present, the active, ambitious, energetic present is at once before you. Tall, handsome, Italian-seeming terraces face the river, from which they are only separated by a wide quay, the line occasionally broken by a noble portico, a stately frieze, or the towers of a church; all is so fresh, so bright, and so indicative of growing prosperity, that you feel at once that Pesth, though now regarded as a garish intruder on the metropolitan pretensions of time-hallowed Buda, will one day become the capital of a country which is even now like a giant slowly awakening from a deep death-sleep; and that while Ofen [Buda] remains a monument of warfare and subjugation, rife with memories of strife and struggle, and of the days when Hungary was unconscious of her moral strength, Pesth will grow into splendour, and her quays and warehouses be heaped with the riches of this teeming land. [ii]

                                                                                    Julia Pardoe, 1840

            That was the way Miss Pardoe described the twin cities in 1840. Considerably less charming, yet somehow vulgarly evocative, was the German writer “Spiritus Asper’s” over-the-top description of Pest, published in 1833, the year of the Joachim’s arrival: “If the damsel Europe can, not infelicitously, be compared with a female body, and the various countries be made to pass as acceptable images of her limbs, why should my imagination not be permitted to picture Pest as an attractively adorned maiden in a reclining position with her feet bent backward, while one arm extends toward her head, and the left (as in the Medici Venus) modestly attempts to cover the front part of her body down as far as the hip. The graceful countenance (the New Town) observes itself in the clear mirror of the Danube, and the splendid, symmetrically arranged masses of the casino and theater, outstanding by virtue of their surprisingly pleasing forms, may be regarded as the maiden’s breasts. We may just as appropriately describe the crooked, angular alleys of the Old Town as her bowels, hence, the lower half of the body, and this simile gains strength through the circumstance that the waterfront that makes up the outer end of the Old Town on the left bank of the Danube mostly consists of the foul-smelling dwellings of tanners.[2] The backside of the body is made up by Theresienstadt, where the hosts of rag dealers from the tribe of David nest in great numbers.” [iii]

Having journeyed a hundred miles through wasteland, forest and vineyard, beside the ancient baths, Gül Baba’s tomb and other picturesque reminders of Hungary’s Turkish past, the Joachims took up residence in the maiden’s backside, at the edge of Pest’s Jewish quarter Theresienstadt (Terézváros), [3] happily up-wind from the stinking butt-end of town. It had been 50 years since Joseph II’s Toleranzpatent had opened the door for the first Jews to settle in Pest and the other royal free cities. The door would have slammed shut again a mere seven years later, with the Emperor’s deathbed renunciation of his decrees, had not the Hungarian Diet passed legislation preventing royal free cities from carrying out their intended indiscriminate expulsion of Jews. That statute (Law 38 of 1791) nevertheless allowed the eviction any Jew who had not been a lawful resident before January 1, 1790. Though unenforced, the act was technically still in effect when the Joachims settled in Theresienstadt. It remained on the books until 1840, when the National Assembly passed Law 29, permitting all indigenous and naturalized Hungarian Jews to settle in the royal free cities. [iv]

Despite this legal ban on immigration, the Jewish population of Pest swelled from 114 in 1787 to approximately 8,000 in 1840, the most rapid rate of increase in Europe. [4] When the Joachims arrived, there were 1,356 Jewish families in Pest — a total Jewish population of 6,983. [v] Of these, only 530 families enjoyed “tolerated” status or were Commoranten (“Sojourners” — i.e. Jews who had the right of temporary residence). [vi] Put another way, nearly two-thirds of these residents were illegal aliens whose status the government found it expedient to ignore, partly because they were engaged in what the ruling nobility considered economically beneficial or otherwise vital activities, and partly because the local authorities lacked the resources to enforce the law. [vii] During their first years in Pest, “Productenhändler” (merchant) Joachim and his family were apparently among the city’s illicit inhabitants. Julius may have benefitted from the fact that his father-in-law, Isaac Figdor, who enjoyed a rare and coveted “tolerated” status in Vienna, also had temporary residential privileges in Pest. [viii] It also seems likely that Julius had family of his own in Pest: Isac Joachim, born in Frauenkirchen (Boldogasszony), and almost certainly a relative—possibly Julius’s father or brother—had been living there since 1817. [ix]

Legal or not, the temptation to relocate to Pest may have been too great for an ambitious wool merchant to resist. The “youthfully blossoming queen of domestic commerce and gateway to the Orient” [x] was a major center of the European wool trade. Wool was one of Hungary’s principal articles of commerce and a major source of capital for the Hungarian economy, primarily because it was one of the few export commodities that the Austrian government did not tax. [5] Due to improved farming methods and the introduction of Spanish merino sheep to the region, Hungarian wool was of exceptional quality and highly prized by English woolen manufacturers. [6] Each year, nearly 9 million pounds of wool were offered for sale at the spring trade fair in Pest, most of it bought by German merchants for resale in England. [xi] This trade in wool was largely carried on by strategically networked Jewish families, many of whom, like the Figdors, had relatives placed in each of the wool-trading capitals of Europe.

Proximity to this enormous source of material wealth helped to make Pest the fastest-growing city in Europe. “Situated nearly in the centre of one of the richest countries in the world, on the banks of a river which traverses more than half of Europe, surrounded by a population requiring a supply of almost every article of luxury from abroad, chosen by fashion as the metropolis, with a good climate, and capable of unlimited extent on every side,” wrote John Paget ungrammatically, “it requires but little sagacity to foresee a brilliant future for Buda-Pest.” [xii]

 

Buda and Pest, ca. 1840

            Visitors to Pest were captivated by the city’s bright appearance, its bustle, and its forward-looking optimism. Pest’s pretty houses reminded Viennese writer and salonière Caroline Pichler of Vienna’s Leopoldstadt and of the many dainty villages that surrounded the Imperial capital. Strolling the city streets, she was charmed by the fresh breath of life that permeated the town: the cheerful, friendly faces of its inhabitants, the brisk activity of its newly awakening industry, and the busy throngs of workers that milled about, engaged in new construction. [xiii]

Pest’s rapidly constructed houses were mostly built of an insubstantial, unburnt brick, a kind of adobe, manufactured using the fine local Flugsand (“fly-sand”). Though this sand was plentiful and cheap, it was also a nuisance. During the warm months, huge heaps of it blew in from the city’s treeless surroundings, hissing through the streets, seeping into houses through cracks in window frames and door sills, choking and blinding their inhabitants and leaving a thin abrasive coating over clothing, floors and furniture. “Pest must be close to heaven,” one wit claimed. “Like the gods, we live among the clouds.”

 

Rudolf von Alt: The Coffee-house König von Ungarn

[xiv]

            Like Paris and Vienna, Pest was noted for its ubiquitous coffee houses, where, amid billows of Turkish tobacco smoke, patrons could find cups of strong Turkish coffee, abundant newspapers, billiards, free heat and endless glasses of water to provide entertainment or refuge for an hour or a day. Each had his favorite Stammlokal—among the best known were the gleaming marble Kemnitzer; the Kaffeequelle, known for its prompt service; zum schwarzen Adler, the student hangout; das weiße Schiff, the most popular coffeehouse, with the widest selection of newspapers  (the wireless internet of the day); the König von Ungarn, home to the theatre crowd; zu den sieben Kurfürsten whose bel étage served in the absence of a suitable alternative as a concert venue for local musical academies, concerts by visiting virtuosi and occasional dramatic readings; the Kaffeehaus zur Krone where the Greek merchants met; and Bartels Kaffeehaus, jocularly known as the “Jewish exchange.” “Although [Széchenyi’s] newly-built Casino provides the Pesters with the service of an exchange,” wrote “Spiritus Asper,” “nevertheless the coffee houses are to be regarded as the actual places in which the success of a trade fair is determined, for here the most important trade agreements and transactions take place.” [xv] In the evening, the shimmer of countless lamps was reflected in mirrors, marble walls and polished table tops, as the citizens of Pest gathered in their favored locales — over coffee or a traditional meal of Rindsuppe mit Griesnockerl, Heißabgesottener Karpfen, Paprikahendl, and Gurkensalat — to discuss the news of the Diet, haggle over the price of potash, catch up on the Potpourri aus Paris or the Pêle-mêle aus London, or to gossip about the fate of such scandalous low-lifes as Arthur Lowell, the man from Boston who reportedly married ten wives of six colors: white, black, brown, red, nutmeg and mulatto.

Orczy House

Jewish life in Pest centered on the Orczy House, a massive structure with three large courtyards, occupying an entire block beside the Jewish Market (Zsidók piacra). [7] Constructed and reconstructed over the course of the 18^th century by the philo-Semitic Orczy family, it functioned as a kind of “metropolitan stetl,” a welcoming point and refuge within the larger city. Among the buildings in old Pest, this “Jewish caravansary” was the second in size only to the Károly Barracks, encompassing 142 rooms with kitchens and 37 vaulted storerooms for the adjacent market place. Orczy House was said to offer everything that a traditional Jew may ever have required in life: two synagogues (one Orthodox and one Neolog), ritual baths, a ritual slaughterer, several restaurants, numerous shops, a Jewish bookstore and a bank. [xvi]

Pest, Street Scene

To the northeast of Orczy House lay the rapidly expanding and poorly regulated Theresienstadt district, consisting almost entirely of three- and four-story buildings, with apartments above, and shops on the ground floor. With very few exceptions, the residents of Theresienstadt were the families of Jewish merchants, among whom there were, roughly speaking, three classes. At the top of the pyramid were the Großhändler, or wholesalers, a number of whom amassed considerable fortunes, and whose appearance and lifestyle did not differ noticeably from that of the city’s Christian population. [xvii] At the bottom were the Trödelvolk (hawkers and peddlers), the “rag dealers from the tribe of David” whom a writer for the Hungarian Miscellany described as crowding the area near Orczy House, swarming together like bees, trafficking amongst themselves, or fixing themselves upon any passer-by who appeared likely to trade with them. [xviii]

A third class of traders were the Händler and Sensale (retailers and brokers), who, lacking the means of the Großhändler, were nevertheless able to carve out a substantial living for themselves as middlemen. Available sources suggest that Julius Joachim was occupied at the upper end of this middle level, and that he was able to provide his family with a comfortable living. Many, including Joseph Joachim himself, attest that Julius traded in wool — he is, however, enrolled in the 1837 census (incongruously) as a grain merchant. By 1845, he was enrolled as a retailer with an annual income of 160 forints: toward the lower end of what a wholesaler might expect to earn, but well above the typical income for a Jewish retailer, which was between 30 and 90 forints per year. [xix]

[xx]

The Fair at Pest

             Joseph spent his first years in the company of merchants, not musicians. We can imagine him as a child in the marketplace, amongst the traders and shopkeepers, amidst the victuals and wares, listening to the Babel of languages and observing all the diversity of custom and costume that life in Pest had to offer.

Pest’s most impressive market events were the trade fairs that were held four times a year in Pest: on St. Joseph’s Day (March 19), Medardus (June 8), St. John’s Day (August 29) and on St. Leopold’s Day (November 15). [xxi] On those occasions, the entire city teemed for a long fortnight with Slovaks and Magyars, Germans and Greeks, Turks, Gypsies and Jews, who, from stores and open air booths, boats and wagons, offered up hats and shoes, leather and linens, pottery, woodenware, iron and glass, large heaps of tallow, flax, hemp, wool, grain, and, for two or three kreutzers each, refreshing watermelons in season. Flocks of sheep and herds of cattle, numbering in the tens of thousands, were gathered for sale on the outskirts of town, as were horses, broken and unbroken, 30 or 40 to a corral. [xxii] More than 14,000 wagons and 8,000 ships are said to have been employed in conveying goods to and from the fairs. [xxiii]

Though Pest was a thriving center of commerce, it was not yet a musical capital. All Western musical activity had ceased under the rule of the Turks (1541-1686), and it was only in the late 18^th century that Buda-Pest began to establish a modest reputation for itself as a provincial outpost on the southeastern edge of the German Kulturbereich. During the Classical era, the most important performances took place in Buda: stagings of French operas by Grétry, Monsigny and Dalayrac, and early performances of Mozart’s Abduction from the Seraglio, Magic Flute, Marriage of Figaro and Don Giovanni. The first instrumental soloist of stature to appear there was Joseph Haydn’s concertmaster, Luigi Tomasini, who made the journey from Eisenstadt in 1789. Both Haydn and Beethoven visited Buda in 1800 — Haydn for a performance at the royal castle of The Creation; Beethoven to accompany a horn player called Giovanni Punto, whose real name was Wenzel Stich. “Who is this Bethover?” asked the critic for the Ofener und Pester Theatertaschenbuch. “The history of German music is not acquainted with such a name. Punto of course is very well known.” [xxiv]

[xxv]

Buda from Pest, Showing the Palatine’s Castle and the Pontoon Bridge

            Beethoven returned in February, 1812 for the opening of the Municipal Theatre (Városi Színház) in Pest, having written incidental music for Kotzebue’s dramatic prologue and epilogue on subjects from Hungarian history — King Stephen and The Ruins of Athens — with which the new house was to be inaugurated. [8] The Pest Opera, with its excellent orchestra (mostly Bohemians), fine soloists and mediocre chorus, continued to present a series of contemporary opera productions, including works by Weber, Rossini, Auber, Bellini, Donizetti, Meyerbeer and Marschner, until the Municipal Theatre burned in 1847. Among the noteworthy performances was one in the year of the Joachims’ arrival: an imaginative production of Der Freischütz, using live trees, the local cavalry and a real waterfall. It turned out poorly when the imported forest interfered with scene changes, and the clatter of hooves and splashing of water overpowered the singers. No matter: it sold out the house.

Regular concert seasons did not begin in Pest until 1834, when Sechényi’s National Casino began hosting a series of chamber concerts. Early orchestral and concerto performances date from this period as well. The founder of the Hungarian opera, Ferenc Erkel, gave an early performance of Chopin’s E minor concerto in November of 1835. The English violinist Antonio James Oury, accompanied by Erkel, performed a concerto by de Bériot that same year. [xxvi] Most concerts in Pesth were given by local musicians; the difficulty and danger of travel conspired to keep Pest off the tour for traveling virtuosi. “Before the revolution of 1848, the policy of Austria was to shut [Hungary] off from all communication with the rest of Europe,” wrote D. T. Ansted in 1862. “All the usual passport and police regulations, troublesome enough in any case, were doubled when Hungary was the point to be reached; and few travellers cared to undergo the certain trouble for a very uncertain return of instruction and amusement.” [xxvii] It was only in the late thirties that a trickle of foreign artists, including the 17-year old Henri Vieuxtemps in 1837 and Ole Bull in 1839, began to take advantage of steamboat travel to début in Pest. Still, travel was arduous. [9] As Ansted reported: “Very uncomfortable steamers conveyed the determined voyager down the Danube to Pesth, and he must trust to the far-famed Peasant’s Post to gallop back to Vienna in an open cart as well as he could, taking some forty hours for the journey. […] The roads were impassable in wet weather, and enveloped in clouds of choking dust in dry seasons. Inns were places in which dirt and discomfort were the only things that could reasonably be expected. […] Bad speed, bad accommodation, bad food, very uncertain progress, and very certain delays, combined to limit the passenger traffic to a very small amount.” [xxviii] Traveling musicians evidently expected less in the way of luxury than English gentlemen. By the mid-forties, conditions had improved to the point that Pesth became a tour destination for such established artists as Molique, Ernst, Thalberg, David, Berlioz and Liszt. [xxix]

© Robert W. Eshbach, 2013.

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Next Post in Series: First Lessons

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Of Rivers and Highways: The Perilous Journey into the Future

Pressburg, Hungary, ca. 1835

             The cries of the captain in foreign English, “Back her!” “Ease her!” “Let her go!” warned us that we were already off; and, almost before we could look round, we were in the middle of the Danube:  — another moment, and Presburg was running away from us:  — yet another, and nothing but the castle could be seen, peering over the thick woods which come down to the water’s edge on either side. For many miles no object of interest meets the traveller’s expectant eye: the country all round is flat and sandy, sometimes wooded, sometimes spread out in rich meadows, looking everywhere as if it had at one period formed the bed of the river itself, which, even now, frequently changes its course. The immense arms, which the Danube in this part sends off at every half-mile or less, are many of them wider than the parent stream itself, if that term can be applied to any part of it; for it is often uncertain which course the steersman should prefer, the height of the water, and the appearance of the stream, guiding him in his choice. This, and a very undulating course, are the natural effects of the flatness of its bed; and it is to remedy these defects that the commissioners for the regulation of the Danube direct their chief efforts. [i]

                                                                                    John Paget, 1835

There were no steam railroads on the European continent in 1833, when the Joachim family left their Kittsee home to settle a hundred miles away in Pest. [1] English-style trains were introduced to Belgium in 1835, and to Germany a few years thereafter; the first Hungarian rail connection, between Buda and Vác, would not open until 1846. From Vienna to Pest, the chuffing of steam engines was first heard upon the waters. When Englishman John Paget made his voyage down the Danube on a vessel of the Kaiserliche-Königliche-Österreichische-privilegirte-Donau-Dampfschiffahrts-Gesellschaft , [2] its skipper sizing up the shifting currents in an effort to avoid grounding on the untamed river’s numerous sand bars, Hungarian industry and commerce were still in their infancy. Steamships, built in Trieste, using 60 horsepower English engines manufactured by the Birmingham firm of Boulton & Watt, had been plying the river for a mere four years. Julius and Fanny, having packed up their Lares et Penates and set off with young children in tow, doubtless travelled by land. We can imagine them in “the kind of travelling equipage common to the middle and lower classes in Hungary” that John Paget encountered so frequently on his journey in 1835. “It is a low four-wheeled waggon, exceedingly light, sometimes furnished with a seat hung on leathern springs, at others stuffed only with a heap of straw, on which the master sits with an air of considerable dignity, and always smoking. The hinder part of the waggon is commonly filled with hay for provender on the journey. The number of these waggons with two or four horses, which one meets in a day’s drive is really astonishing. Every peasant seems to possess one.” [ii] With hay for provender in the rear of the vehicle, young Joseph no doubt rode comfortably amid the fuel.

The land through which they traveled, under Habsburg rule since the defeat of the Turks, was still a feudal state, with power resting jointly in the hands of the Imperial Austrian government and a small caste of wealthy estate owners who paid no taxes, and spent much of their time abroad in Vienna and other fashionable locales. Early nineteenth-century Hungary was poor, virtually without infrastructure, industry, or trade — a puzzle of secluded villages and feudal demesnes — a hodgepodge of cultures, ethnicities and languages. “Let no one be induced to figure to his imagination a scene of rural delight,” Dr. Richard Bright wrote of this landscape in 1818. “The plain is unenlivened by trees, unintersected by hedges, and thinly inhabited by human beings; — a waste of arable land, badly cultivated, and yielding imperfect crops to proprietors who are scarcely conscious of the extent of territory they possess. [iii] “The mixture of languages in Hungary itself is so great, that scarcely one third of the inhabitants speak the Hungarian,” wrote Bright; “and thus, every one who hopes to travel beyond the village in which he was born, is compelled to learn some other language or dialect. Hence probably it is that Latin has been retained as a common medium of communication. All the older writings are in this language, and, at the present moment, Hungary presents in miniature the picture of the whole continent of Europe, before each country, to the great benefit of works of imagination, and to the unspeakable advantage of national spirit and improvement, adopted its own language, as best suited to convey its own associations and feelings.” [iv] Imagine a land in which even the beggars speak “tolerable Latin,” and respond to a handout with a warm “do gratias, Illustrissime!” [v]

The road to Pest was poorly maintained by the corvée labor of the local serfs — referred to, even in official chancery documents, as the misera plebs contribuens  (“miserable tax-paying plebeians”) — who were often little better than slaves. “It is for some branch of the families of Esterhazy or Palfy, known to them only by name, that the Sclavonian peasants who inhabit these regions are employed,” Bright observed. “Their appearance bespeaks no fostering care from the superior. […] It is easy to perceive, that all stimulus to invention, all incitement to extraordinary exertion, is wanting. No one peasant has proceded in the arts of life and civilization a step farther than his neighbour. When you have seen one you have seen all.” [vi]

Throughout Hungary, only nobles, about five percent of the population, were permitted to own land. Peasants were assigned a portion of land, called a session, which they were allowed to cultivate, in exchange for the payment of tithes and taxes, and their corvée, the compulsory labor that was due their lord. “The landlord looks on … [the serf] as a tool necessary to cultivate his lands and as a chattel which he inherited from his parents, or purchased, or acquired as a reward,” wrote the liberal intellectual Gergely Berzeviczy. [vii] “…it often appeared to us that they spoke of them, and to them, as though they belonged to a different class of creation from themselves…” wrote Paget. [viii] The peasants responded to insult by working to rule, insolently sending the feeblest members of their families, their weakest draft animals and worst tools to satisfy the letter of their obligations. [ix] “The compulsory labour of the peasant, setting aside its tyranny and injustice, becomes a perfect blot on the landscape,” observed another English traveler, Miss Julia Pardoe. “Every individual flings down upon the road the portion of rubbish, (for it is often nothing better), which he is forced to contribute; […] and thus the line of the road generally resembles a piece of rude patch-work, without method or continuity.” [x]

 

[xi]

Vác on the Danube, looking southward toward Pest

In the foreground is a pair of Zackelschäfe, (Ovis strepsiceros), the native Eastern European Sheep. The vehicle is the traditional light wicker wagon, ubiquitous throughout Hungary in the 1830s.

Feudal entail, tithes and corvée would remain in force in Hungary until the 1848 revolution, after which many peasants became freehold proprietors of their own land. By that time, however, the condition of the Hungarian serfs had sunk to such a low point that a mere 40 percent of the peasant population had any land left to work. [xii]

If the roads bore witness to the harsh and dreary realities of everyday peasant existence, English-style steamships on the Danube were harbingers of coming times. Steam navigation on the Danube was a pet project of Hungary’s early, visionary leader in the movement toward modernity and national independence, a bright-eyed, energetic Anglophile nobleman named István Széchenyi, who was just then earning his wings as the “Greatest Hungarian.” [3] The scion of a distinguished family of magnates [4] and priests, Széchenyi sought to raise his country out of its feudal backwardness through a mixture of Romantic literary conceit, shrewd understanding of human nature, political savvy, enlightened ideals and modern industrial and commercial thinking. After a 17-year service in the Austrian cavalry, he spent his newfound leisure time in travel abroad, particularly in England, where he came to understand the nature and importance of Western constitutional government, economic thought and technological innovation. [5] He returned to his native land determined to improve its standard of living, and to liberate it from its subservience to a conservative, repressive Austrian monarchy that was all too happy to prevent its Hungarian subjects from discovering a cohesive voice and purpose. “Totus mundus stultisat, et relictis antiquis suis legibus constitutiones imaginarias quaerit” wrote the gaunt-faced Emperor Francis I in 1820 — “The whole world is idiotic and, having abandoned its ancient laws, is yearning for imaginary constitutions.” [xiii] Széchenyi, by contrast, wrote: “I cannot, like many of my countrymen, please myself with contemplating what is past. I must look forward. It troubles me but little to know what we once were; but it is of vital interest to me to know what with time we might, and what we probably shall become. The past is beyond our control; the future is still within our grasp. Away, then, with fruitless reminiscences! It is time that we bestir ourselves, and open a more glorious future to our fatherland. Many contend that Hungary has been; I love to think she yet will be.” [xiv]

István Széchenyi

Széchenyi pursued his mission in a brilliant and at times seemingly innocuous way, initiating a series of projects aimed at building the Hungarian infrastructure, increasing the use of capital and credit, [6] improving livestock, promoting trade, endorsing the use of the Magyar language and encouraging dialogue among the ruling nobles while at the same time limiting their exclusive tax-exempt status. At a time when fewer than half of the Hungarian people spoke Magyar (Széchenyi himself spoke it only poorly), and debates among the nobility in the rarely-convened Diet were conducted in Latin, Széchenyi shocked his peers by addressing the upper house in the vernacular — a language that the nobility typically used only when speaking with servants or peasants. To promote the use of the Hungarian language, he donated a year’s income toward the founding of a National Academy (1825). The next year, Széchenyi, who revered Benjamin Franklin, took part in founding the first Hungarian fire insurance company. [xv] At the same time, he introduced horse racing and English racehorses to Buda-Pest and Pressburg. His alleged reason for doing so — to improve the breeding-stock of Hungarian horses (a subject of great interest among the country’s nobles) — veiled a deeper motive: to foster solidarity and dialogue among the magnates, by providing them a motive and pretext for gathering.

On St. Stephen’s day, 1827, Széchenyi inaugurated the National Casino (Nemzeti Casino) in Pest, as a venue for social gathering, entertainment and discussion of public issues. A nineteenth-century German or Hungarian “casino” was not a gambling house, but the equivalent of a London club. Though the Nemzeti Casino was also called the Adelskasino (the casino of the nobility), the club was in principle also open to a limited class of non-nobles who could afford to pay the rather steep dues. [7] The casino movement caught on quickly: by 1833, there were 23 in Hungary, closely watched by Metternich and his secret police as liberal, and potentially subversive, organizations.

Széchenyi was among the first to recognize the potential economic benefits of steam navigation on the Danube. Having seen steamboats at work in England, he hired English engineers to study the practicality of steam travel on the Danube, with the goal of establishing regular steamship service between Vienna and Constantinople. Budapest — as Széchenyi called the sister cities, perhaps for the first time — would naturally be centrally positioned on this line. In 1830, he joined with some of the leading Viennese banking firms to form a company that was granted exclusive steam navigation rights on all rivers within the Austrian dominions for 15 years. [xvi] In the year of Joseph Joachim’s birth, the steam vessel Francis I made its first journey from Vienna to Semlin (Zemun, Serbia), with stops in Raab (Gyor) and Pest.

Throughout Hungary, it was becoming apparent that life would presently be transformed by powerful, invisible engines of change: the scientific and technical advances of the Industrial Revolution, the spread of capitalism, and the continuing political and philosophical repercussions of the Atlantic Revolutionary Era. “Almost all of Europe is surprised by the intellectual revival that Hungary has undergone in the last decade or so,” wrote J. G. Elsner in 1840. “Many go so far as to say that the country has slumbered for a few centuries and is suddenly awakening, aroused as by a miracle.” [xvii] With the opening of the Danube to steam travel, it must have been clear to Julius that the future of Hungarian commerce would not be found on the plains surrounding Kittsee or in the narrow streets of Pressburg, but in the markets and quays of Pest. At the same time, he recognized that his children’s brightest prospects could not unfold in closed communities beside rural byways, but only in the progressive mainstream of contemporary European culture. And so, Julius and Fanny ventured forth — at the relatively advanced age of 43 — on a hopeful, yet uncertain new life course, negotiating the swift currents and testing the shifting sands of a new way of life whose torrents and diversions, like those of the Danube, could be treacherous, and might well lead to a sorry end.

Pesth and Ofen (Buda)

© Robert W. Eshbach, 2013.

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CHAPTER I — HUNGARY

Kittsee, 1831

 temptanda via est, qua me quoque possim
tollere humo victorque virum volitare per ora [1]

                                    Virgil, Georgics Book III

 

Pressburg, Hungary

ca. 1839 [i]

As far as the eye can reach into Hungary, extends a vast wooded plain, through which the gigantic Danube spreads itself wild and uncontrolled. Sometimes dividing into several branches, nearly as wide as the parent stream, it forms large islands of several miles in extent; then collecting its scattered forces, it moves forward in one vast mass of irresistible power, till division again impairs its strength. [ii]

                                                                                     John Paget, 1835

oseph Joachim’s birthplace lies on a sunny, fertile alluvial plain in the Austrian province of Burgenland, in a landscape reminiscent of the American mid-west. Close at hand, the Danube forms a majestic thoroughfare from Vienna to Budapest as it pursues its tortuous, 1,776-mile passage from the Black Forest to the Black Sea. On the far side of the river, five miles as the crow flies, or a scant eight-minute’s journey on the “weasel train,” stands the Slovakian city of Bratislava — the former Hungarian capital city of Pressburg, where from the year 1536 the Hungarian kings were crowned and the diets met — its large, square fortress commanding a rocky eminence where the eastward-flowing Mississippi of Central Europe wends its course to the south-southeast.

On the Austrian side of the river, along the road to the nearby Haydn-town of Eisenstadt, long, low hills rise in the west, while to the east the land is flat. There, great fields of corn, grain and sunflowers stretch to the horizon. This is the breadbasket of Austria. It is fruit and wine country as well, planted with 30,000 apricot trees, and long sun-drenched rows of Welschriesling, Sauvignon Blanc, Neuburger and Blaufränkisch vines. Acres of brilliant yellow rapeseed blanket the earth, sown to slake contemporary Austria’s growing demand for bio-diesel fuel. On a June day, gentle breezes ply the fields, and animate the whispering legions of sleek, trefoil windmills that pierce the vast, placid sky. It is an idyllic scene, beautiful and serene. Yet, if one could stand, like Housman on Wenlock Edge, and imagine the progress of this landscape from Roman times to the present, it would tell a tale of troubled weather. The tree of man was never quiet. The name Burgenland (“land of castles”) hints at a turbulent past. [2]

Until 1921, this region belonged to Hungary, and Joachim is considered to be Hungarian. From earliest times, the plains of Hungary have been swept by successive waves of invasion and immigration, and the resident population bears the impress of many cultures, from ancient Celts and Romans to modern Magyars, Slovaks, Germans, Roma, Turks and Jews. Joachim’s native village, the little German-speaking town of Kittsee (Hung.: Köpcsény), is located at what was once an important trans-Danubian ford, along the ancient Amber Road that originated on the Baltic coast and stretched from St. Petersburg to Venice, and from there along the Silk Road to Asia. Baltic amber found in the tomb of Tutankhamun and North Sea gems sent as an offering to the temple of Apollo at Delphi likely passed through Kittsee. In the 1830s, Kittsee was a thriving market town, and a stopping-place along the coach route from Vienna to Buda and Pest. In those days, many of Kittsee’s residents were immigrant Swabians, who, like expatriate Germans elsewhere, retained the accents and customs of their native land. Living side-by-side with them was a community of some 800 Austrian Jews who, for a century and a half, had been permitted to settle in this country crossroads and call it home.

Esterházy Schloss, Kittsee

Today, Kittsee is a quiet village, where a visitor can linger in the street at mid-day and overhear the crowing of a rooster or the lowing of cattle; where the snarl of a motorcycle or the rumble of a passing car are only occasional jarring intrusions upon the peaceful rural soundscape. At the outskirts of the town, an elegant Baroque Schloss, or manor house, gives evidence that Kittsee once belonged to the immense Esterházy land holdings in western Hungary. In the town center, the main road divides to encompass a large open area encircled by modest one- and two-story dwellings and shops. There, on a grassy island, stands a Pestsäule, or plague column, dated 1727, a prayer in stone to Saints Rochus and Sebastian, the Madonna and the Holy Trinity, commemorating Kittsee’s deliverance from the Black Death. In the town, nearly all evidence of the once-thriving Jewish community is gone.

Several blocks from the town center, around a corner, down a lane called Am Schanzl (“by the little entrenchment”), looms the imposing brick and stone ruin of the former Wasserburg, or moated castle, a 12^th-Century Hungarian border defense against Austrian invasion. Today, the fortress is guarded by tall columnar poplars and fenced in against intruders, its windowless walls and caved-in floors home to a myriad of swallows.

The Wasserburg, Kittsee

On the far side of the Burg lies the Jewish cemetery — the “good place” — a sky-blue Star of David emblazoned above its stucco, iron and chain-link gate. Vine-covered stone and brick walls shaded by a dense chestnut wood enclose the small raised yard, where neglected stones protrude above the wall’s crest, or hide in the tall brown grass, like ships partially visible in a fog. Singer, Mauthner, Figdor…  A funeral in this small cemetery was movingly portrayed in Otto Abeles’s 1927 article, Intermezzo in Kitsee. [iii]

Jewish cemetery, Kittsee

Between the cemetery and the main road, near the town center, a small square bears the name Joseph Joachim Platz, after Kittsee’s most famous native son. The house at No. 7, a large, square, two-story dwelling, fourteen meters from side to side, bears a plaque placed on the centennial of Joseph Joachim’s birth.

Joseph Joachim’s Birthplace, 7 Joseph Joachim Platz, Kittsee

Joseph Joachim’s Birthplace, 7 Joseph Joachim Platz, Kittsee

Memorial tablet, 7 Joseph Joachim Platz, Kittsee

In diesem Hause erblickte am 28 Juni 1831 der Geigenkünstler
Joseph Joachim
Direktor der Staatlichen Akademischen Hochschule für Musik in Berlin
(1869-1907)
das Licht der Welt
Burgenländische Landesregierung im Verein mit
Gesangverein “Liedertafel” Kittsee und
Ortsbevölkerung von Kittsee
1931 [3]

This German tablet replaced a Hungarian plaque, commissioned two decades earlier and melted down after Kittsee became Austrian. The 1911 plaque was a more elegant affair, a bronze bas-relief depicting a bearded, garlanded, middle-aged Joachim József, his face thrust forward in intimate proximity to a sensuous, violin-playing muse.

Kittsee Bürgermeister Johann Werner unveiling the Hungarian plaque, July, 1911 [iv]

Whether cast in bronze, or carved in stone, the facts of Joachim’s birth have proven difficult to establish with certainty. Joachim himself was unsure of his birth date. For the first 23 years of his life, he believed he had been born in July — either the 15^th or the 24^th. [4] Joachim’s boyhood friend Edmund (Ödön) Singer (b. 14 October 1831, Totis, Hungary — d. 1912) also calls into question the year of Joachim’s birth. “All reference books gave 1831 as Joachim’s birth year, as well as the birth-year of my humble self. […] Joachim himself asked me one day: ‘How does it happen that we are always mentioned as having been born in the same year?  I am at least a year older than you!’ — I, myself, finally established my glorious birth-year after many years, while Joachim tacitly allowed the wrong date to persist.”[5] Though June 28, 1831 — a beautiful early summer day that ended ominously, with a thunderstorm toward midnight [v] — is emblazoned on his birthplace and engraved on his tombstone, no records have yet surfaced to verify the date of Joachim’s birth.

A more recent picture of the Joachim house (2013)

© Robert W. Eshbach, 2013.

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After the London Debut 

Back in Leipzig, the Wittgensteins, under prodding from Joseph’s parents, were intent upon capitalizing on his English successes. On June 17, Ferdinand David wrote to Mendelssohn “It has pleased me greatly that Joachim has made such a good impression. If Heaven gives him stamina and health, he shall become a really brilliant musician. But his relatives should be somewhat less careful and reasonable. It seems to me somewhat excessive the way they worry about what may be best for him now, and though one has said to them a hundred times that they should let him quietly continue his studies, they apparently still would rather hear that he should be sent, the sooner the better, to Paris [1] and all over the world.” [i] 

Boating in Tharandt, ca. 1840

To help him recuperate from his London sojourn, Fanny took Joseph and her children the village of Tharandt, eight and a half miles southwest of Dresden. A tiny, 13^th-century Saxon settlement, Tharandt clings to the precipitous winding banks of a swift-flowing wooded stream, the Wilde Weißeritz. With its cool forest air and its clear spring-water baths, it was an ideal recreational destination for the dog days of summer. Today, it looks much as it did then: simple, yet elegant houses line its main street, and steep walks lead to an ancient, ruined castle, abandoned since the 16^th century, that, together with the Mountain Church of the Holy Cross, forms a historic and picturesque gateway to the world’s first botanical forest — the former Royal Saxon Forest Academy, established by Heinrich Cotta in 1811.

A half-century before Joseph’s visit, Tharandt had been the refuge of such literary giants as Friedrich Schiller and Heinrich von Kleist. Now, it would provide a peaceful, pleasant environment in which a 13-year-old boy might grow in sympathy and self-confidence, make new friends, stretch his muscles and improve his vision.

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Boating in Tharandt, ca. 1890 [iii]

Tharandt today

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