Dr. Sanna Pederson, University of Oklahoma
My knowledge of the last years of the Joachim Quartet is much more extensive than of their first concerts. When I think of the year of their first season, 1869, images of Berlin in an impoverished state came to mind. For instance, when Amy Fay arrived that year from Boston to study piano, she pronounced … Read more
Performing all the Beethoven Quartets <p style=”text-align: left;”>One of the Joachim Quartet’s most significant achievements was their performances of the complete Beethoven quartets as a five-day cycle. The first time was in May of 1903 at the Bonn Beethoven Haus Festival, and it took place despite strong objections by the organizers. The quartet performed the … Read more
Did Johann Kruse really stand out that much among the other violinists Joachim taught, making him the obvious choice for preferential treatment?While he was giving in concerts in London, a number of other Joachim students were also making a living in the biggest city in the world. Several were exactly his age and had been … Read more
In her book Muss es sein?: Leben im Quartett, Sonia Simmenauer, a concert agent who managed many famous quartet ensembles, described the second violinist as the most problematic of the four players: three–a triangle–is more stable. With two violinists, the relationship between the two is always in question. Karl Halir (1859-1909) was fated to have … Read more
In the final year of the Joachim Quartet’s concerts, they were as popular as ever. However, they had plenty of local competition, mostly from members of their own Quartet. These were the new Klingler Quartet, the Halir Quartet, which had been playing since 1893, the relatively new Schumann-Halir-Dechert Trio, and the Barth-Wirth-Hausmann Trio, which had been … Read more
Although the quartet concerts in 19th-century Berlin have similarities to our own today, of course there were differences. Quartets with Names Terminology, for instance: today all quartets have a name by which they are known, but back then most quartet groups lacked a name to identify them. In the Berlin papers, many of the local … Read more
As a Berlin institution, the Joachim Quartet was always sold out and every seat was always taken. But as their group entered the twentieth century, new quartet groups were on the scene performing the same classical repertoire and more. In their final years reviewers described them collectively as graybeards, grizzled old men–even though Wirth was … Read more