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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.

The pedagogical treatise is generally understood to be a manual of singing or instrumental techniques that is largely practical in approach, yet a critique of violin tutor books dating from the early twentieth century, especially those written by the renowned violinists Joseph Joachim (writing in conjunction with Andreas Moser), Leopold Auer, and Carl Flesch, reveals an extensive engagement with a range of wider ideologies. In a bid to trump the supposedly deadening effects of both a historicism resulting from the availability of earlier treatises, as well as the overly scientific approach taken by contemporaneous treatises, these violinist-authors embrace metaphysical ideals of mind or vitality, and the result is a model of violin playing founded on the concept of “singing tone,” an idea developed out of nineteenth-century notions of song/melody as embodying a vital essence. As did Wagner, in his 1869 essay Über das Dirigiren, writers play with the idea that theoretical and performative categories, such as tempo, phrasing, dynamics, vibrato, and types of bow stroke, both conflict with each other and find a deeper unity in a subjectivist ideal of tone. The approach of these texts is not explorative, however, so much as a rather defensive championing of the idea of mind or vitality: ideologies of self, health, and nationalism ultimately prevail over an engagement with historical evidence in Moser's discussion of ornaments, and Auer's intolerance of any mitigating influence that might qualify the artist's final word on aesthetic matters is reminiscent of a reductive, Nietzschean ideal of vitality. Nevertheless, writers struggle to reconcile it with the messier realities of performing, as an embodied and collaborative activity, and subsequently what speaks louder in their texts are anxieties over affronts to notions of self, expressed using pathological notions common to the era. Whereas at times writers encourage students of the violin to share in their lauding of vitalistic ideals, more often than not they try to impose disciplinary measures as a means of inculcating them.