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¹Chamber music started in the 1700s or even before. In the 1700s, 1800s and into the 20th century, playing chamber music was not considered a profession. Playing chamber music was a way that musicians enjoyed each other. They got together, even the greatest violinists, to play an evening of quartets. That was the way everyone experienced chamber music.

One of the first great performers was Josef Joachim, a friend of Brahms. He had a quartet in London and one in Berlin; the other members were colleagues or minor colleagues. He was not a dictator so much as a mentor and a leader. The music’s interpretation was how he felt about the phrasing and the way the piece was revealed through the performance was his doing. Everyone wanted to please Joachim.

In the early 1900s, concert venues were becoming more important and a few quartets began to appear and have big careers. The first one in the 1900s was the Flonzaley Quartet. The quartet’s first violinist, Adolfo Betti, came to the Mannes School in the 1940s and taught chamber music. In one of his groups he needed a violist and I killed myself to get into it. I took lessons with this great musician. The Flonzaley Quartet you could say was the first quartet that traveled the world playing concerts and earning a living as a chamber music group.

² “(Robert Mann) deserved the applause. His playing was technically secure. His intonation and the quality of his tone were good no matter how fast the music. There was a wide variety of color in his playing, . . . His final group revealed another talent, for it included ‘Song,’ a work of his own.” New York Times, Dec. 10, 1941

³ Ludwig van Beethoven, Letter to Bernhard Schotts Söhne, in The Letters of Beethoven, Vol. III, trans. and ed. Emily Anderson (New York: Norton, 1961, 1325).

⁴ Interestingly, there was a Swiss doctor who was an amateur cellist and had a lifelong hobby as a passionate researcher of all things Beethoven. His son printed a French memoranda that his father had found. He had a picture of the book that Prince Andrey Razumovsky had given to Beethoven. Razumovsky had commissioned the three Opus 59 quartets and had asked Beethoven to use a Russian tune in each of those works.

⁵ Isadore Cohen was asked to leave the quartet in 1988 because of his behavior during the Juilliard String Quartet’s tour of Russia.

⁶ Lehner wanted the Juilliard String Quartet to memorize all of our pieces the way the Kolisch Quartet had done. The Kolisch Quartet was famous for playing everything from memory. Finally, probably in our second year as a quartet, we decided to try it for one concert. I remember that Beethoven’s Opus 59, No. 2 was on the program. Hans Letts, who was Juilliard’s major quartet teacher, had a wealthy friend, a businessman who owned instruments. We played Opus 59, No. 2 at his home without music. Winograd and I were comfortable doing this, but our two inner voices—Koff and Hillyer—felt that if you’re playing classical repetoire, it’s hard to play without sheet music. Unlike the Kolish Quartet, we never played any concert again from memory.

⁷ Paul Hindemith, “Some Thoughts on Instruments” in A Composer’s World: Horizons and Limitations (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1952), 189-90.

** “Mechanical Music,” in Béla Bartók Essays, ed. Benjamin Suchoff (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1976), 290.

⁸ I remember when we played the Fourth Quartet we had a couple of problems in the realization, especially in the last movement. In the second movement there is a place where the main voice is played by the second violin. It is marked very softly, and the other parts are marked louder. We asked Schoenberg, “How will the main voice come through?” His answer was that it will come through if you play it with the right kind of tone. In another place he asks some of the instruments to play double artificial harmonics. To do this, you have to keep one finger down and then a fourth higher, and double, meaning two notes of harmonics on two different strings. It is possible. However, then Schoenberg said, “You should play it ponticello” That means you play really on the bridge and it sounds squeaky. Schoenberg liked playing on the bridge. Not near the bridge but on the bridge. Even that’s possible. On top of that, he wanted col legno tratto, which means not with the hair of the bow on the bridge, but with the wood of the bow and drawing it. We said, “We can’t make any sound out of this. How can we do it?” Kolisch was there and Schoenberg said to Kolisch, “Rudy, can we do this?” And, of course we did, and played it.

⁹ Robert Mann’s compositions are published by Peer Music.

¹⁰ Eleanor Roosevelt, “My Day” column

NEW YORK—Saturday night I heard a most delightful concert by the New York Philharmonic conducted by Dimitri Mitropoulos at Carnegie Hall. The soloist was a pianist, Mr. Jean Casadesus, and of course I confused him with his father and was surprised to see such a young man coming on the stage. He played beautifully and I enjoyed his performance very much. The orchestra played a Fantasy for Orchestra by Robert Mann. Mr. Mann is the leader of the Juilliard String Quartet but I had never heard one of his compositions before. I found it interesting but I am not sure that modern music is easy for me to understand on the first hearing . . .

Eleanor Roosevelt, “My Day, February 27, 1957,” The Eleanor Roosevelt Papers Digital Edition (2008), accessed 1/15/2017, https://www2.gwu.edu/∼erpapers/myday/displaydoc.cfm?_y=1957&_f=md003734a.