Big Four

The high, delicate, exacting art of chamber music has no finer practitioners today than the Budapest String Quartet. Last week, deep in one of their busiest seasons, the Quartet was in Manhattan, giving the kind of performances that excite the perfectionist audience of the New Friends of Music. Within a few weeks they would be on the road again, following a schedule that calls for more than 90 concerts this year, 24 of them in the Library of Congress, four for the New Friends, twelve at a summer engagement at California's Mills College, and the rest in U.S. towns from Portland, Ore. to Annapolis, Md.

In about 30 such towns, audiences of 200 to 1,000 will pay from $400 to $1,500 to hear the Budapest, confident that the great quartet music of Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert will be exquisitely interpreted. The Budapest four play with the warmest understanding of their scores, the subtlest of teamwork and an almost incredible matching of tone. Their splendid recorded performances for Victor and Columbia have recently sold to the lively tune of about 300,000 records a year.

De 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 Esterhazy 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.

The 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 amazing.

De 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.

The 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 Perole.

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.

The original Budapest Quartet, which toured Europe and the U.S. in the 1920s, was as 100% Hungarian as goulash. By 1927 its second fiddler left and a Russian took his place. By 1932 there was not a Hungarian left. Today the four are 43-year-old first violinist Josef Roismann from Odessa; 35-year-old second violinist Alexander Schneider from Vilna; 43-year-old violist Boris Kroyt from Odessa; 39-year-old cellist Mischa Schneider, brother of Alexander.

The Russian Budapesters are all German-trained and have spent most of their professional lives in such German cities as Berlin, Leipzig and Hamburg. Long since exiled from the Third Reich (all are Jewish), they make their headquarters in Washington, D.C. They practice three hours a day with religious regularity, pausing occasionally for tea (see cut). All disputes about interpretation are put to a majority vote. On their long Pullman hops they are incessant poker and bridge players, winning and losing substantial sums among themselves. Their drinking habits, not nearly as blended as their tone, are: Roismann, tomato juice; Alexander Schneider, Burgundy; Kroyt, vodka; Mischa Schneider, milk.

Two of the four, Roismann and Kroyt, are married; three have homes in Washington. The fourth, Alexander Schneider, keeps a bachelor apartment on Manhattan's swank Beekman Place. He cooks, makes pottery and prefers blondes.

Kroyt's English is strictly from Odessa. Once in Australia, a noted critic was introduced to the Quartet. Said the critic to Kroyt: "I have just met your wife." Said Kroyt: "Thank you very much." Kroyt fishes from a motorboat on the Potomac. Like the others, he sees very little of his colleagues socially. Each has his own set of friends.

*The Flonzaley Quartet was disbanded in 1929.

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