In three overtures composed in 1851–54, Joseph Joachim made his first forays into orchestral music without solo violin. The overtures to Shakespeare's Hamlet, begun in the circle of Franz Liszt in Weimar, Herman Grimm's Demetrius on the false Dmitri of Russian history, and Shakespeare's Henry IV explore the inner struggles of characters who are tested. Joachim conveys drama through skillful handling of thematic transformation, expanded harmonic resources, and colorful orchestration within sonata-related designs. Each overture presents a unique solution shaped by the dramatic requirements.

The Overture to Henry IV, which Joachim began in Göttingen in summer 1853 and finished in Berlin the following July, bears witness to his highly individual compositional voice, as well as his association with Liszt, Bettina von Arnim, and the Schumanns and Johannes Brahms. Although the overture received only a few public performances and remains unpublished, members of the Schumann-Brahms circle who heard it performed live and played it themselves in Brahms's arrangement for two pianos viewed it as a work of great depth and promise. Its construction and mixed reception afford insights into Joachim's self-image as a composer and the position of his programmatic orchestral music in the political and aesthetic debates of his time.

As Steven Vande Moortele describes, the overture was a prominent nineteenth- century genre, featured in operatic, theatrical, and concert performances, and—through piano arrangements—enjoyed in the home. The overtures of Felix Mendelssohn and Hector Berlioz helped to establish the genre as the “legitimate heir to the symphony” and served as models for younger composers who wished to create orchestral music on a smaller canvas. With less clearly defined conventions than had the symphony, the overture welcomed experimentation and offered a “potential way out of the post-Beethovenian crisis of orchestral music.” Overtures also were less expensive to publish and more easily programmed in concerts.

Although the formal plan of a symphony first movement without repeat of the exposition and with optional development section and coda was common for overtures, composers also adapted the sonata framework in other ways or set it aside. The existence of overtures with no introductory function prompted alternative generic labels, such as “tone picture” (Tonbild). Similarly, Joachim's earlier Hamlet Overture was heard as overstepping generic boundaries, to constitute a “free fantasy in a completely individual mold.”