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 Esterházy 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 Perolé.