In Andreas Moser's 1898 Joseph Joachim: Ein Lebensbild, co-written with Joseph Joachim, the authors asserted that in order to understand the violinist's significance to musical life in the 1890s, it was necessary to look back to the musical world that he had entered as a young musician. At that time, Paganini and Liszt had defined what it meant to be a virtuoso, and for Paganini, in particular, an identity as a sorcerer—a “Hexenmeister”—who could work the public into a state of ecstasy through his “magic arts” was crucial. An important measure of Joachim's influence, according to the biography, was that such virtuosic “magic”—along with other unsavory attributes of an earlier generation of virtuosi—had been virtually expunged from European concert culture by the end of the century. Virtuoso conjurers had been superseded by serious, responsible interpreters of music.

Moser and Joachim's biographical account is compatible with the standard historiography of nineteenth-century performance. By the end of the century, there were numerous reasons for insisting on performance as a form of expertise that maintained a respectable distance from virtuosic enchantments. These included the effect of a strong work concept on the role of the performer, the rise of a museum culture in music focused on the preservation of canonic works of the past, and the influence of bourgeois Protestant values of sobriety, reason, self-control, and service to a higher calling. Furthermore, over the course of Joachim's career, the new discipline of music analysis grew integral to performance pedagogy, instructive editions educated aspiring performers on the correct interpretation of masterworks, Musikwissenschaft attained a respected status in German universities, and professional training increasingly occurred in conservatories (some of them, such as Berlin's Hochschule für Musik, where Joachim served as director, state-affiliated) with standard curricula. In this way, the history of nineteenth-century musical performance may seem an apt illustration of Max Weber's concept of the progressive disenchantment of modernity, in which the “mysterious incalculable forces” of earlier times inexorably give way to rationalized modern epistemologies.