Word: quartetting
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Coppet's Team. The league of which the Budapesters are now the practically undisputed champions is a large one. Its impressive history goes back to the 18th Century day when Hungary's Prince Esterházy hired Franz Joseph Haydn to write and play quartets and symphonies for him. Quartet playing has been one of the chief private pleasures of almost every accomplished string player who ever lived-and the public profession of scores of them. Many wealthy European amateurs have spent their space time playing second fiddle in a quartet with three professionals, supported for the purpose...
...history of modern string quartet playing might be said to have begun in 1902. That year, partially deaf Edward J. de Coppet, senior partner of the Manhattan brokerage house of De Coppet & Doremus, decided to subsidize a group of four players who would make quartet playing their exclusive and full-time occupation. De Coppet, a fanatical music lover, gathered his quartet to practice in peace on his Swiss estate which he called Villa Flonzaley, after a small brook that flowed through the grounds. When they came out of hiding as the Flonzaley Quartet, the musical world soon found their playing...
...Coppet's Flonzaley Quartet was, in a sense, the first strictly professional chamber music team, wholly concentrated on the intricate music that the greatest composers in history had written for just four strands of tone. Today quartet playing has become so distinct a profession that no one but a specialist with years of experience would think of competing for big-league honors. Few quartet players ever even attempt to excel as soloists, and very few of the world's top-rank soloists make good quartet players...
...Budapest Quartet holds its rank today in probably the most competitive field in quartet history.* Runners-up include the Busch Quartet, the Lener, the Curtis, the Gordon, the Coolidge, the Pro Arte, the Kolisch, the Roth and the Perol...
Little Men Who Weren't There. None of the Budapest Quartet comes from Budapest. Only one of the four (first violinist Josef Roismann) has ever even visited the city. All are Russians. To the Quartet, this fact has become a continual embarrassment. Wherever they go, they are likely to be welcomed in fluent Magyar by effusive groups of Hungarians. The Quartet knows plenty of Hungarian music, but no Magyar...