What is one Russian? An anarchist. Two Russians? A chess match. Three Russians? A Communist cell. Four Russians? The Budapest String Quartet.
For years, that was one of the music world's favorite jokes. Alas, no one will tell it any more: the Budapest String Quartet has apparently decided to call it a career. Its three oldest members—First Violinist Josef Roisman, 68, Violist Boris Kroyt, 71, and Cellist Mischa Schneider, 64—are in poor health. Although there has been no formal announcement, they have agreed not to perform in public any more. Mischa's brother Alexander, 60, the second violinist, thinks that that is probably just as well. "Most artists play past their prime," he says. "How long could we have gone on without realizing that it was too late?"
The Budapest probably went on longer than any quartet in musical history, maintaining a continuity of style despite changes in personnel. It was a first-rate group when, in 1917, four string players from the Budapest Opera gave their first concert in Kolozsvar, Rumania. But it was the present members, all Russian-born, joining forces and talents in the late 1920s and early '30s, who made the Budapest the century's most popular string quartet—and the best.
The group's "bread and butter," as Alexander Schneider put it, was the complete cycle of Beethoven's 16 quartets and the Grosse Fuge, which it performed almost every year. It also recorded the cycle three times—once in the 78-r.p.m. era, a second time in the early days of LP and a third for stereo. Haydn, Schubert and Brahms were staples as well, and moderns like Bartok, Milhaud and Hindemith were regularly included. To everything they played, the foursome brought a Toscanini-like elegance of outline within which the music pulsed with expressive passion. Says Violist Walter Trampler, their "fifth man" in quintet performances since 1955: "They had temperament and fire. Some people have lots of that, but they get carried away. The Budapest players were always in control."
One reason for their longevity as a group is that when not rehearsing or performing, they pursued separate lives, even refusing to travel together. Whenever they ate at Manhattan's Russian Tea Room, they sat at separate tables. "We'd talked enough at rehearsal—politics, human nature, the whole world situation," says Alexander Schneider. "It was important to separate as much as we could, so that we kept entirely separate personalities. Homogeneity is the worst thing in music."
Roisman, a fastidious man who always kept a hairbrush and a box of Sen Sen in his violin case, was fond of detective novels and long walks. The gregarious Alexander frequently went off to organize a party, or a concert, of his own. Kroyt loved nothing better than a fishing trip. Mischa, the unflappable perfectionist, had a weakness for gambling parlors.
It took 22 years before Roisman and Mischa addressed each other by their first names, and Alexander to this day has never attempted such informality with his colleagues Roisman or Kroyt. Says Seattle Symphony Conductor Milton Katims, who preceded Trampler as the group's extra violist: "It was like four married people trying to keep their relationship fresh and spontaneous."