How unique was the Joachim Quartet?
When I started this blog about seven years ago, I was fired with enthusiasm for the Joachim Quartet (and I still am). But there is so little research available about other quartet groups, so it is impossible to know how historic this ensemble was. In some earlier posts, I documented the quartets in Berlin that paved the way for the Joachim Quartet, starting in the 1820s. These included the pioneer Carl Möser, his student August Zimmermann, and the virtuoso Ferdinand Laub. It turns out that at least one concert series was always in existence in the decades leading up to Joachim’s arrival.
Still, I assumed there must be a reason, quantitative and/or qualitative, why the Joachim Quartet is known today and the others aren’t. If there were any other quartets already active in Germany, they must not have been comparable. Perhaps there were other places where the same members of a quartet gave regular concerts with a repertoire centered around Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven–in Leipzig, perhaps, but not other cities. And Joachim’s austere programming of three string quartets per concert, with none of the variety of works with assisting artists–that seemed unlikely to be the case elsewhere. Even with Mahaim’s evidence staring me in the face, I didn’t question the received wisdom.
But now I have found that for the 1868-69 concert season (one year before the founding of Joachim’s series), there were at least ten German cities with an established quartet series. None of them adhered so strictly to a format of three quartets. But their repertoire was largely the same; it was “classical,” meaning centered on the string quartets of Haydn, Mozart and especially Beethoven, including the late quartets.
If this is new information to me and most others, it is because the documentation of nineteenth-century string quartets is scanty, vague and inaccurate. The current versions of the article “String Quartet” in Grove Music Online and “String Quartet Ensemble” in MGG online are not very helpful. In both, Leipzig, Dresden, and Riga (?!) are the only German cities mentioned as having quartets for this time period in the nineteenth century, with no names or dates given.1 My list includes Leipzig, Dresden, Cologne, Hamburg, Frankfurt, Stuttgart, Munich, Breslau, Wiesbaden, Cassel and others.
There were also quartets outside of Germany that need to be discussed, especially those in St. Petersburg and Moscow, Vienna and Paris. But relatively speaking they are better known than the German groups.
There are reasons why we are so uninformed. Before the digitization of historical sources, the idea of going through the tiny print in countless periodicals to track down notices of concerts given was too daunting. Also, the notion that performers are worthy of “serious” musicological study is fairly recent.
Das Streichquartett in Wort und Bild (1898) is the best resource for the German quartets groups active in the late nineteenth century, but it is vague about earlier ensembles and dates in general. I have found by far the most information from Mahaim’s monumental documentation of performances of the late Beethoven quartets, but of course he lists programs containing those works only. To supplement Mahaim, I’ve searched for mentions of chamber music concerts in music periodicals. I was able to take advantage of a convenient concert calendar the Signale maintained in 1869. Additional information comes from reading a lot of fine print in the AMZ, NBM, Süddeutsche Musik-Zeitung and other music journals.
1. Leipzig
The 1868-69 season included Beethoven on every concert that I’ve found so far. The Grosse Fuge, Op. 133, was paired not with Op. 130 but with the Schubert C major Quintet D. 956 (!). The non-quartet works programmed included a Beethoven piano sonata, the Schubert Piano Trio in E-flat, the Mozart G minor Quintet, K. 516, and the Schumann Piano Quintet.2
Leipzig was the first German city to offer public chamber music concerts, when Heinrich August Matthäi (1781-1835), the concertmaster of the Gewandhaus Orchestra, began giving chamber concerts in 1809. It took some time before these concerts were conceptualized as the performances of a stable ensemble, however, and it seems that the only rule for programs was that the pieces were not orchestral. A relatively flexible, pragmatic approach to programming was maintained over the decades. Virtuosos who were in town as soloists could include quartets on their solo program and/or join in for a chamber music performance. To give an example: the two programs below show the virtuoso Heinrich Ernst first giving his own concert on 10 November 1844, with a program that included two quartets. A month later, he participated in the “first musical entertainment” at the Gewandhaus, comprised of quartets by Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven.3
From 1835 onward, the Gewandhaus quartet members came from the strings section of the orchestra. Ferdinand David, student of Louis Spohr and concertmaster of the Gewandhaus Orchestra, was first violinist until his death in 1873. Other longtime members included Engelbert Röntgen, who was second violin (1854-73), and then led the quartet from 1873-82. Friedrich Hermann (1828-1907), was violist from 1854-73. There was less stability with the cellist position. Carl Wittmann (1814-1860) died prematurely; then Emil Hegar (1843-1921) suffered a hand injury and left in 1875. But when Julius Klengel arrived in 1881, he stayed until his death in 1933.
Ferdinand David was also important because he taught many students who ended up populating quartet groups, including his own. Students who became leaders of quartets include Georg Haenflein (Hanover), Robert Heckmann (Cologne and traveling), August Kömpel (Weimar), Otto von Königslöw (Cologne and Bonn), Johann Naret-Koning (Mannheim), J. W. Pickel (St. Petersburg), E. Röntgen (Leipzig), Henry Schradieck (various), and August Wilhelmj (Wiesbaden and elsewhere).
In the next post I will report on the important but practically forgotten musicians who maintained a strong chamber music presence in Dresden for the entire second half of the 19th century.
- According to Mahaim’s research, there was a string quartet in Riga for one year, in 1854. Why it is included in two authoritative reference sources and other more important ones are not is a mystery. ↩︎
- Joachim did include the Schubert and Mozart quintets on his programs. ↩︎
- Programme der Konzerte im Gewandhaus zu Leipzig, Leipzig: Städtische Bibliotheken; Dresden: SLUB, 2018. Ole Bull also performed in chamber music groups during his visit in 1841. ↩︎
