The Kneisel Quartet was a string quartet founded in 1885 by violinist Franz Kneisel, then concertmaster of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. It continued to perform until 1917, and was generally considered the leading string quartet of its time in the United States.
The Kneisel Quartet was founded in 1885, soon after Franz Kneisel arrived in Boston as concertmaster of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. [1] The original members of the quartet were all members of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, and this remained true, in spite of changes in personnel, until 1903, when the players resigned from the orchestra in order to devote their time and energy exclusively to chamber music. [1] [2] In 1905 they moved from Boston to New York City, where Kneisel had accepted a position at the recently created Institute of Musical Art (now the Juilliard School of Music). [2] The quartet gave its final performance on 3 April 1917 in New York. In a statement announcing their retirement, Kneisel explained that henceforth he planned to devote himself to teaching and he wanted to avoid any decline in the quality of their performances. [3]
First Violin:
Second violin:
Viola:
Cello:
The Kneisel Quartet played an important role in the growth of appreciation for chamber music in the United States, and in the spread of European standards of performance and programming. [4] [5] The quartet adopted an uncompromisingly serious approach in their playing and choice of repertoire, making "no concessions to public ignorance". [5] In place of the popular selections and excerpts from larger works that many audiences were familiar with, they regularly played complete quartets by Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven, and they introduced to American audiences many compositions that are now part of the classical repertoire, but were then new and unfamiliar, including works by Brahms, Dvořák, Smetana, Franck, Debussy, Ravel, and Schoenberg. [1] They also played many contemporary works by American composers, such as Edward MacDowell, [6] [7] Arthur Foote, [8] and George Chadwick, [9] and were exceptionally supportive of the work of women composers and musicians, such as Amy Beach [10] and Bertha Tapper, [11] [12] [13] [14] with whom they sometimes performed. The quartet toured widely and gave concerts in small towns across North America that had rarely, if ever, heard a professional instrumental ensemble playing serious works from the chamber repertoire. [4] It was occasionally criticized for not playing more accessible music, [5] and even in Boston and New York its concerts were not always well attended, [4] [15] but by the time of its retirement the Kneisel Quartet was widely credited with having created a more educated and appreciative audience for chamber music in the United States. [5] [4] As the New York critic Richard Aldrich wrote in 1917,
The interest in chamber music, the appreciation of the highest possibilities of its performance, the knowledge of many of the greatest compositions in this form of art were cultivated to the highest point by the Kneisel Quartet. There were earlier workers in the field, pioneers to whom honor and credit are due, and who shall not be forgotten. But the Kneisel Quartet reached a higher level than was attained by any of them, and has exercised a correspondingly greater influence. It has been one of the greatest forces for good in the musical history of this country. [15]
Antonín Leopold Dvořák was a Czech composer. Dvořák frequently employed rhythms and other aspects of the folk music of Moravia and his native Bohemia, following the Romantic-era nationalist example of his predecessor Bedřich Smetana. Dvořák's style has been described as "the fullest recreation of a national idiom with that of the symphonic tradition, absorbing folk influences and finding effective ways of using them."
Amy Marcy Cheney Beach was an American composer and pianist. She was the first successful American female composer of large-scale art music. Her "Gaelic" Symphony, premiered by the Boston Symphony Orchestra in 1896, was the first symphony composed and published by an American woman. She was one of the first American composers to succeed without the benefit of European training, and one of the most respected and acclaimed American composers of her era. As a pianist, she was acclaimed for concerts she gave featuring her own music in the United States and in Germany.
Roger Huntington Sessions was an American composer, teacher, and writer on music. He had initially started his career writing in a neoclassical style, but gradually moved further towards more complex harmonies and postromanticism, and finally the twelve-tone serialism of the Second Viennese School. Sessions' friendship with Arnold Schoenberg influenced this, but he would modify the technique to develop a unique style involving rows to supply melodic thematic material, while composing the subsidiary parts in a free and dissonant manner.
George Whitefield Chadwick was an American composer. Along with John Knowles Paine, Horatio Parker, Amy Beach, Arthur Foote, and Edward MacDowell, he was a representative composer of what is called the Second New England School of American composers of the late 19th century—the generation before Charles Ives. Chadwick's works are influenced by the Realist movement in the arts, characterized by a down-to-earth depiction of people's lives.
Egon Joseph Wellesz, CBE, FBA was an Austrian, later British composer, teacher and musicologist, notable particularly in the field of Byzantine music.
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The String Quartet No. 12 in F major, Op. 96, nicknamed the American Quartet, is the 12th string quartet composed by Antonín Dvořák. It was written in 1893, during Dvořák's time in the United States. The quartet is one of the most popular in the chamber music repertoire.
Wallingford Constantine Riegger was an American modernist composer and pianist, best known for his orchestral and modern dance music. He was born in Albany, Georgia, but spent most of his career in New York City, helping elevate the status of other American composers such as Charles Ives and Henry Cowell. Riegger is noted for being one of the first American composers to use a form of serialism and the twelve-tone technique.
Arthur William Foote was an American classical composer, and a member of the "Boston Six." The other five were George Whitefield Chadwick, Amy Beach, Edward MacDowell, John Knowles Paine, and Horatio Parker.
William Kroll was an American violinist and composer. His most famous composition is Banjo and Fiddle for violin and piano.
Rudolf Kolisch was a Viennese violinist and leader of string quartets, including the Kolisch Quartet and the Pro Arte Quartet.
Johannes Francis Anton Hekking was a Netherlands-born cellist and teacher.
Kenneth Slowik is an American cellist, viol player, and conductor. Curator of Musical Instrument Collection at the National Museum of American History and Artistic Director of the Smithsonian Chamber Music Society. He took an interest in music and organology from an early age. He studied at the University of Chicago, the Chicago Musical College, the Peabody Conservatory, the Salzburg Mozarteum and, as a Fulbright Scholar, the Vienna Hochschule für Musik, guided by Howard Mayer Brown, Nikolaus Harnoncourt, Antonio Janigro, Edward Lowinsky, and Frederik Prausnitz.
Samuel Gardner was an American composer and violinist of Russian Jewish origin. He won a Pulitzer prize with a string quartet in 1918. He was a student of Franz Kneisel and Percy Goetschius, and began his career as a concert violinist; among his compositions is a violin concerto. He wrote a number of other chamber works, and a handful of things for orchestra, including Broadway, which was performed by the Boston Symphony in the 1929-30 season.
Jean Robert Talbot was a Canadian conductor, violinist, violist, composer, and music educator. For more than 25 years, he was the conductor of the Société symphonique de Québec. A member of the Société française de musicologie, the International Musicological Society, the Musical Association of London, and the Diocesan Commission for Sacred Music, he was the author of several books on music theory. He also contributed music articles to a variety of periodicals.
Arnold Elston was an American composer and educator. Though he studied with Anton Webern, he did not himself use the twelve-tone technique.
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Olive Mead (1874–1946) was an American classical violinist. She was a successful soloist and chamber player, performing with Amy Beach, among many others. She formed her own well-regarded string-quartet, the Olive Mead Quartet (1903–1917), which featured only women. Its members were Vera Fonaroff, Gladys North, and Lillian Littlehales. She was a student of Julius Eichberg and Franz Kneisel.
Franz Kneisel was a violinist and music teacher.
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