Noted composer/violist, Otto Joachim passes away at ninety-nine
August 16, 2010
By Penny Johnson, Contributing Author
As founder of the Montréal String Quartet (1955-63), first violinist of the Montréal Symphony Orchestra, noteworthy composer, and a teacher at both the McGill Conservatory and the Conservatoire de musique du Québec à Montréal, Otto Joachim will long be remembered for his contribution to Canadian music. Joachim, who collaborated with Glenn Gould on a number of occasions in the 1950’s, passed away on July 30, 2010 at Montréal’s Jewish General Hospital. He was ninety-nine.
Born in Düsseldorf, Germany, in 1910, Joachim fled the Nazis during the 1930’s, thereafter spending fifteen years in Singapore and Shanghai where he worked as a musician. In 1949, Joachim arrived in Montréal, where, despite plans to continue on for Brazil, he stayed for the remainder of his life, becoming a naturalized citizen in 1957.
It was during the mid-1950’s that violist Joachim came to work with Glenn Gould. In 1956, Joachim and the newly-founded, Montréal String Quartet (established one year earlier in 1955, and whose players included violinists, Mildred Goodman and Hyman Bress, and cellist, Walter Joachim, Otto’s brother) gave the first performance of Gould’s String Quartet Op. 1. The performance took place in Montréal on May 21, as part of CBC’s French radio network series, Premières. In his book, Glenn Gould: A Life and Variations, Otto Friedrich writes that the performance “prompted Marvel Valois of La Presse to high praise: ‘Serious, of high inspiration, pensive rather than lively, bathed in a discreet and slightly saddened coloring, the work…is of extraordinary interest.’”
Gould’s relationship with Joachim and the Montréal String Quartet continued in August of 1957, when the two joined forces for a performance of the Piano Quintet in F-minor, Op. 34 by Brahms. The performance was given at the Montréal Festival, and later recorded by the CBC.
Throughout the next five decades Joachim focused his energies on composition, having established a respected place for himself as a composer of aleatoric and electroacoustic works. His music has been performed by the symphonies of Montréal, Toronto, Boston and Chicago, and he is remembered for such compositions as Katimavik (an electronic piece commissioned by the Canadian Pavilion at Expo 67), Stimulus à Goad (1973), Uraufführung (1977), and Stacheldraht (1994).
A recipient of the Prix de musique Calixa-Lavallée from La Société St-Jean-Baptiste in 1990, Joachim was named to the order of Québec in 1993. Montréal’s Concordia University has named both a composer’s residency and a commission for electronic music after Joachim.
