As one of America’s great chamber music ensembles celebrates its 50th year of existence, there is no better time to acknowledge the artistry of the musician who more than anyone helped bring them to that golden anniversary.
The musician is Robert Mann, the founding first violinist and only remaining original member of the Juilliard String Quartet. For five decades the Juilliard has functioned as an extension of his musical personality. In fact, Mann’s style is so firmly a part of the quartet’s bloodstream that it’s hard to imagine the group, its distinctive volatile intensity and bite, without him. Together they have made a lasting contribution to the evolution of chamber music performance in the U.S.
But all good things must come to an end, or go through significant transitions. This summer Mann, 76, will leave the Juilliard Quartet to pursue other interests. Succeeding him in the Juilliard’s first chair will be Joel Smirnoff, currently the quartet’s second violinist. Ronald Copes, the violinist of the Dunsmuir Piano Quartet, will come aboard as the group’s new second violin, joining colleagues Samuel Rhodes, viola, and Joel Krosnick, cello.
Mann’s final tour of duty with the Juilliard this spring will bring him and his colleagues to Orchestra Hall for a concert at 7:30 p.m. Sunday that includes Mozart’s Clarinet Quintet, with Charles Neidich; Arnold Schoenberg’s very late-Romantic Quartet No. 1, and Contrapunctus I-IV from Bach’s “The Art of Fugue.”
(Ironically, although four cities on the Juilliard’s current Midwest tour will hear Chicago composer Ralph Shapey’s Eighth String Quartet, Shapey’s hometown will not enjoy the same privilege, since the Chicago Symphony management, which is presenting Sunday’s concert, begged off presenting it.)
The Juilliard’s longtime spokesman and resident sparkplug wants to make it perfectly clear he is not retiring from music, only from the quartet. Nor is he leaving for health reasons or because his playing has deteriorated.
“While the quartet is in great shape, I thought it might be fun to turn in a slightly different direction,” Mann says, the words spilling from him in a gravel voice that mirrors the group’s fabled tonal intensity and urgency. “Honest people are telling me that I’m still playing well.”
The violinist says he wants to perform as a guest with other chamber ensembles, play concertos with and conduct orchestras, write a book, continue teaching at New York’s Juilliard School and take on additional violin pupils from other East Coast conservatories. But mostly he hopes to return to composing, which the quartet’s touring schedule of 75 to 80 concerts a season has largely prevented him from pursuing. There are six unfinished original scores sitting in a desk drawer crying out for attention, Mann says, smiling.
“My family is horrified,” he exclaims. “They think I’m taking on too much, in what everybody but me is calling my retirement years.”
To be sure, there is nothing quite like Mann’s 51-year tenure in the musical life of America. The closest comparable longevity would be Adolph Herseth’s 48 years (and counting) as principal trumpet of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. Only the Austrian violinist Arnold Rose, who led the Rose Quartet from 1882 until its disbanding in 1938, has held the first chair of a major string quartet over a longer period. And Mann’s Juilliard colleagues still haven’t gotten over the shock of his retirement announcement.
“We knew it would have to come some day, but we never pressed Robert about it,” says violist Rhodes. “When he told us he was leaving, the effect was devastating, like losing our anchor to the past.
“Fortunately, with Joel (Smirnoff) moving over to first violin, the continuity is assured. Over the years the quartet has experienced several shifts of personnel and each new player has brought a different perspective. We have learned through the process of change.”
Yet, looking back over his five decades-plus with the Juilliard, Mann says he regards certain aspects of the quartet as constants. One constant is what the violinist calls a “fanatic” regard for the emotional and musical truth of a score, its meaningfulness for us as listeners in the late 20th Century.
The Juilliard plays everything — whether a Beethoven quartet it has performed innumerable times or a brand-new score — as if the ink were still wet on the page. Organic growth and re-examination are the yin and yang of its interpretations. And this has been Mann’s approach from the beginning. According to Rhodes, “A strong reason why the quartet has evolved is that Robert never wants to leave anything the way it was.”
A number of younger “period” musicians who are involved in today’s historically informed performance movement would like to imagine they pioneered the strict allegiance to Beethoven’s metronome markings. They are wrong: The Juilliard Quartet was observing the composer’s controversial tempo indications as early as the late 1940s, long before other chamber ensembles decided brisker, leaner and meaner were better.
“With our youthful enthusiasm, we trod paths we knew were imperfect for the time,” says Mann, “but we were so convinced that was the way to do it. We were convinced, and still are convinced, that Beethoven’s metronome marks were important. It didn’t matter that we broke our necks and sometimes didn’t play them so well. The important thing was that we got those tempi into our systems.
“In a funny way it worked to our advantage later on, because we never would have learned to handle faster tempi if we hadn’t gone through those birthing pains way back when.”
Many longtime Juilliard listeners have detected a new mellowness in the group’s playing, a new warmth, serenity and breadth of phrasing that have tempered the group’s famed driven tension and ferocity. For his part Mann admits his playing has changed, not least in taking a more flexible attitude toward the notes on the page. “I used to be much more of an Urtext fanatic than I am now,” he says, “because I have dealt enough with composers to see that they themselves change their music a lot over the years.”
Life in the old Juilliard Quartet was sometimes more like a tag-team wrestling match than a musical marriage, he recalls. During one particularly heated rehearsal Mann and Arthur Winograd, the quartet’s original cellist, threw music stands at each other. Nowadays the quartet members agree to live with different ideas about how a piece should go, according to Mann.
“We don’t try to argue the other person into our corner,” he says. “Because we play so many concerts, we have the luxury of being able to try ideas we may have rejected earlier.”
Despite offers from elsewhere, the Juilliard Quartet has been the consuming focus of Mann’s musical life since 1946, when he helped found the group at the Juilliard School at the suggestion of that institution’s president, composer William Schuman.
Over the last half-century the ensemble has undergone seven changes of personnel. The original second violinist, Robert Koff, was succeeded by Isidore Cohen in 1958. When Cohen left in 1966 to join the Beaux Arts Trio, he was replaced by Earl Carlyss, who was succeeded by Smirnoff in 1986. Rhodes took over from founding violist Raphael Hillyer in 1969. When Winograd left the quartet in 1955 to take up the baton, he was replaced by Claus Adam and, in 1974, by Krosnick.
Nobody, not even Mann, has kept exact statistics, but the raw figures from the Juilliard’s first 50 years reveal a great deal about its extraordinary effect as a catalyst for chamber music activity across the nation. At least a dozen string quartets owe their existence to tutelage and coaching they have received from Juilliard Quartet members, including the Tokyo, Emerson, LaSalle, Concord, Brentano, Mendelssohn and Colorado quartets.
The Juilliard has given more than 5,000 concerts and programmed no fewer than 500 works, more than half of them written in this century. Of these, more than 60 are by American composers, along with pieces by composers from a dozen countries on four continents. The ensemble’s many recordings, including three complete cycles of the Bartok string quartets, have faithfully documented the enormous breadth of its repertory, belieing its reputation as new music specialists.
Mann’s official farewell to the quartet will come July 2 at a concert by the Juilliard Quartet at the Tanglewood Music Festival in Lenox, Mass. For his Juilliard swan song his colleagues let him choose the program: Beethoven’s late quartets, Opp. 132 and 130, with the “Grosse Fuge.”
His choice of the Beethoven Opus 130 for this particular concert in this particular place was by no means accidental.
It was in 1949, during the Juilliard Quartet’s third summer, that the group was asked back to Tanglewood (where it had first appeared the previous year) to perform the quartets of the Second Viennese School composers Schoenberg, Alban Berg and Anton Webern. The group agreed but asked also if it could play something Classical — the Beethoven Opus 130 and “Great Fugue,” according to Mann.
“The Berkshire Eagle had in those days a curmudgeon critic named Jay Rosenfeld, who wrote the most terrible review of our Opus 130 you could ever imagine. He just ripped us apart!
“I recently tracked down the review on microfilm in the local library, and I’m going to have it reprinted in the program book for our farewell concert on the same Tanglewood stage where we played 48 years ago,” says Mann. His eyes brighten, and a sly smile crosses his face. The joke is pure Mann, the perfect final touch on a long and distinguished career.
SEVEN CDS RECAP 50 YEARS
Although the Juilliard String Quartet has committed to long-playing records the bulk of the standard quartet literature, plus a pioneering array of new music, the group’s label, Sony Classical, has been surprisingly lax in transferring those older recordings (originally released by Columbia Masterworks and Epic) to compact disc.
Particularly conspicuous is the absence of any of the three (!) complete cycles of the Bartok string quartets the Juilliard made at various stages of its 50-year existence. Also urgently due for reissue are its two Beethoven quartet cycles.
What Sony has done is issue a set of seven compilation CDs that amounts to a retrospective of the group in its various recorded incarnations.
Most of the material is old, but a few recordings are appearing for the first time, notably Haydn’s “Frog” Quartet (Opus 50, No. 6), coupled with quartets by Debussy and Verdi on Volume 4 of the series. Also recommendable are volumes 2 (Bach, Beethoven and Haydn) and 3 (Mozart and Schubert quartets).
New digital recordings also have appeared in recent months. The group’s first recordings of the two Janacek quartets are coupled with a re-recording of Berg’s “Lyric Suite” on a Sony CD. And the first CD of a projected cycle of the seven quartets by Paul Hindemith has been released on the Wergo label.
