Thinking back to his student years, Otto Klemperer referred to the rehearsals of the Joachim Quartet in Berlin that he attended in 1905. What surprised him most was Joachim's unexpected performance style. He sums up his impression as follows:

In view of the fact that “a Hungarian musician” probably means a Hungarian Romani fiddler, Klemperer's astonishment is quite understandable, as most listeners would expect a more classically oriented approach from a “director of the music academy.” Accordingly, the kinship between Joachim's performance style and Hungarian “Gypsy music” bears looking into. In this essay I examine evidence of Joachim's knowledge of this style and consider how, and to what extent, the performance style of Romani musicians might have influenced his own playing.

Joseph Joachim's Connections to Hungarian Gypsy Music

Let us begin by confirming the fact: Joachim loved Hungarian Gypsy music. We do not know the circumstances of his first encounter with this music, but it is quite likely that Pepi Joachim was familiar with it from childhood, as Andreas Moser reported in his authorized biography of the violinist:

Gypsy music was enormously popular in Pest, as the German writer Georg Kohl (1808–78), who visited the city only a few years after Joachim's departure to Vienna, vividly described. During this period, a dance in fast duple meter, csárdás, arose as a new genre of Gypsy music.

It probably did not disturb Jewish families like Joachim's that Gypsy music was at that time a cultural icon of Hungarian national identity, for the Jews and Hungarians in Pest had a rather close relationship in the first half of the nineteenth century.