The Master(ed) Violinist: Carl Flesch’s Pedagogical Treatise and Memoirs

The article is a critical study of two books by the German-Hungarian violinist Carl Flesch (1873–1944), a pedagogical treatise entitled Die Kunst des Violinspiels (1923; second volume published in 1928) and Memoirs (1957), later published in the original German as Erinnerungen eines Geigers (1960). It contrasts the two texts in order to frame Flesch’s outlook as an accomplished and well-connected violinist by profession but who also produced an unusually prolific and searching body of writings. The pedagogical treatise champions the dominant model of the high-art performer in the early twentieth century, but the memoirs betray a tentative search for an alternative model of performance. Like Joseph Joachim and Andreas Moser’s Violinschule (1905) and Leopold Auer’s Violin Playing as I Teach It (1921), Die Kunst des Violinspiels uses notions of mind and vitality to build a model of the performer as an original genius. The violinist manifests this vitality in the form of a singing tone, which essentially entails a negotiation of music’s continuous or modulatory elements (i.e. legato tone and dynamics) and pattern-forming elements (i.e metre and rhythm). In the memoirs, however, Flesch confesses that original genius tends to be invasive when it comes into contact with pupils/audiences/other performers, and he repeatedly compares the deceased Joseph Joachim, the most revered emblem of violin mastery in the early twentieth century, to a vampire who both erotically and violently sucks out the lifeblood of those exposed to his playing. In response, Flesch tries to articulate a new model of performance as fundamentally collaborative and powered by open-ended desire. The article presents two central texts from Flesch’s literary corpus as rich sources of information on the early twentieth-century culture of high-art performance and its performative practices.