Joseph Joachim, that mighty Hungarian, was past his prime when I heard him in London. He played out of tune--some of his pupils have imitated his failing--but whether in a Beethoven quartet, concerto, sonata with piano, he always stamped on your consciousness that Joseph Joachim was the greatest violinist that had ever lived. This is, of course, absurd, this unfair comparison of one artist with another. Yet it is human to compare, and if a violinist can evoke such a vision of perfection, then he must be of uncommon powers. Maud Powell, a distinguished pupil of Joachim, has asserted that it took her three years before she could recover herself in the presence of Joachim's overwhelming personality. Yet he struck me as not at all assertive. He seemed an "objective" player, _i. e._, you thought only of Beethoven, of Brahms, as he calmly delivered himself of their Olympian measures. The grand manner is now out of fashion. We care more for exotic rhetoric than for simple and lofty measures. Sarasate and Dengremont charmed me more; Wieniawski set my blood coursing faster; but in Joachim's presence I felt as if near some old Grecian temple hallowed by the presence of oft-worshipped gods.
Remenyi was a puzzle. He could play divinely, and scratch diabolically. He belonged to that old romantic school in which pose and gesture, contortion and grimace occupied a prominent place. I had an opportunity to study Remenyi (whose Austrian name was Hoffman) (1830-1898), at close quarters. He brought to my father's house in the early eighties his favourite instruments, and such a wild night of music I never heard. He played hour after hour, everything from Bach to Brahms--and incidentally scolded Brahms for "stealing" some of his, Remenyi's, Hungarian dances! (Which is a joke, as Brahms only followed the examples of Liszt and Joachim in avowedly employing Hungarian folk melodies). He did such tricks as dashing off in impeccable tune his arrangement of the D Flat Valse of Chopin in double notes at a terrific tempo. Violinists will understand the feat when I tell them that the key was the original one--D flat. He made the walls shiver when he struck his bow clangorously in the opening chords of the Rackoczy March. What a hero then seemed this stout, little, prancing, baldheaded man with the face of an unfrocked priest. How he could talk in a half-dozen different languages; he had travelled enough and encountered enough celebrated people to fill a dozen volumes with his recollections. He was a violinist of unquestionable power; that he deteriorated in his later years was to have been expected. Liszt understood and appreciated Remenyi from the first; he nicknamed him "the Kossuth of the Fiddle."