Playing in a string quartet is commonly likened to being in a marriage. However, ask any quartet musician and he or she will tell you it’s much harder, more intense, more demanding, more fraught with sublime highs and devastating lows.
Instead of arguing over who will paint the lawn chairs or drive the kids to karate practice, you fight over how to articulate the staccato passages in the scherzo of Beethoven’s F-Major Quartet, Opus 59. In a marriage, you only have two strong points of view; in a quartet, there are four. Resolving them, as in any democracy, often involves arduous personal confrontation. It’s no sport for the faint-hearted, which is another reason why there have never been many string quartets, relatively speaking, at the top international level.
The most recent example is the Chicago String Quartet, one of the city’s premier chamber ensembles, which will soon lose one of its original members, second violinist Stefan Hersh. The split appears to be amicable. Hersh, according to quartet founder and first violinist Joseph Genualdi, “doesn’t have the same appetite for what we do as the other three of us.” For his part, Hersh says he is leaving with “very mixed” feelings. He says he will miss the music but not miss “the daily grind of coming up this hard against three other people.” The violinist, who will remain on the DePaul University faculty along with his CSQ colleagues, plans to explore various solo projects. (The other quartet members are Rami Solomonow, viola, and Christopher Costanza, cello.)
Personnel shifts of this sort are hardly unknown in the chamber music world. String quartets, after all, are organic beings; like those sinister, slimy creatures in science-fiction movies, they can and do alter their shape.
The members of the legendary Budapest Quartet, which flourished for a half-century until it disbanded in 1967, were almost as famous for their fierce arguments at rehearsals and recording sessions as for their music-making. Witnesses would recall the fiery Hungarians furiously squabbling, then making heavenly music afterwards.
Most players in string quartets are a good deal milder of disposition, more willing to subsume their individual egos and temperaments to the artistic needs of the group. Precisely how they go about producing a unified conception in the music they play is, however, a complex process that varies from ensemble to ensemble, performance to performance. Still, most musicians agree that a string quartet will not make it over the long haul if its players cannot sustain a consistent degree of internal harmony, both personal and musical. Think of a rowing team with no coordinated sense of rhythm; it would capsize in confusion.
Although the Budapest underwent remarkably few changes of personnel since its inception in 1918, the second violinist’s chair was occupied at various times by six different musicians: Alfred Indig, Imre Pogany, Joseph Roisman, Edgar Ortenberg, Jac Gorodetzky and Alexander Schneider, who served two tenures with the quartet. Other quartets go on for many seasons with no subtractions or additions. Consider the Guarneri String Quartet, one of America’s finest, which flourishes with the same four members it had when it was founded 36 years ago. Think of the Amadeus, Europe’s foremost string quartet since its inception in 1947, which kept its original roster intact into the 1980s.
Different musicians have different reasons for leaving quartets. Some retire, like Robert Mann, the Juilliard Quartet’s veteran first violinist and paterfamilias. Some die, like Pierre Menard, second violin of Chicago’s Vermeer Quartet, who was replaced by Matthias Tacke. Some, like Schneider or Jerry Grossman (the original cellist of the CSQ), go off to pursue solo careers.
Hersh appears to be one of a different category of artists who find themselves no longer able to make music successfully under the often painfully intense conditions under which string quartets must operate. Sometimes they are in deep denial and the painful truth has to be pointed out to them by their colleagues. One musician I know compares rehearsing in a string quartet to “being impaneled all day in a locked jury room with a bunch of strong-minded maniacs.” I wouldn’t be surprised if Hersh feels the same way.
Strife happens. And so instrumentalists resign from string quartets and each side goes its separate way. If they are able to do so without acrimony, they are doing better than the majority of divorced couples in America.
What makes playing string quartets such hard work? When does the work become too much for some musicians? The writer Samuel Johnson once said that playing any string instrument is the toughest of human learnings. Making beautiful, refined, coherent, meaningful music, when it is just the four of you up there on stage in front of a few thousand ears, is incomparably more difficult. Performance tradition sets the interpretative bar very high. The likelihood of something going awry, of something breaking down, is great. There is nowhere to hide, as you can when playing in a symphony orchestra of 80 to 100 musicians.
The overwhelming majority of musicians would contend that there is no greater joy than in exploring and performing string quartets–the richest, most profound body of works in the chamber music repertory. But these same musicians would be the first to point out that no more difficult or more unforgiving music exists. To do it justice requires a special kind of skill and dedication and selflessness and ego, from every member of the ensemble.
Michael Tree, the violist of the Guarneri Quartet, once said that, although he has played in various quartets for many years, it wasn’t until he joined the Guarneri that he realized how great the sense of commitment must be from every player. “You come to realize you’re responsible for other people’s reputations and livelihoods as well as your own,” he said.
Not every instrumentalist, talented though he might be, has that kind of commitment. Sometimes it requires years of playing together in a quartet before one or more members realize they simply aren’t cracked up for that kind of work. Given the close interdependency under which quartets function, it’s vitally important to diagnose the problem early, before it gets out of hand and the group, as well as the musicmaking, suffer. Sad are the quartets that, whether consciously or unconsciously, allow the deficiencies of one or more members to bring down the ensemble.
One such quartet was the Fine Arts Quartet, a fixture of Chicago’s musical life for nearly 50 years. By the late 1970s, the failing intonation of founder and first violinist Leonard Sorkin had become a painfully sensitive issue both inside and outside the group. With each review, local music critics were forced to find new adjectives to describe his out-of-tune playing. Finally, after each member of the quartet except the first violinist left the group, he mercifully retired. The Fine Arts lives on, with an entirely different roster of players, at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee.
The final years before the Budapest disbanded also were sorry ones. The group was playing as if on automatic pilot–and badly, at that. Always stand-offish toward each other socially (the members invariably traveled separately and sat at separate tables in the same restaurant), now they barely spoke and seldom saw one another.
The only exception to this was when the quartet gave one of its dwindling number of concerts or took time to work with young musicians at the Marlboro Music Festival in Vermont. “No artist can do what we are doing–it’s dangerous,” lamented cellist Mischa Schneider during the mid-’60s. “Soon it’s going to be the end.” Sadly, he was right.
The Chicago String Quartet, founded only five years ago, is one of the lucky ones. It has been performing at a high level throughout the period of self-examination, collective and individual, that led to Hersh’s resignation. It has made a course correction of the sort many quartets have been forced to make. Not only will the ensemble survive, but it is already busy scouring the musical landscape for candidates to succeed Hersh. A replacement is expected to be on board before the start of the academic year this fall.
Replacing him won’t be easy, since he is a fine fiddle player. Also, many violinists who have reached a certain level don’t want to play second fiddle in a quartet–not even one as good as the CSQ. Yet the second violinist must be just as gifted and have the same skills as the other three players, as Arnold Steinhardt, first violinist of the Guarneri Quartet, once said. “It needs a special kind of personality to take on the role of second violin–someone with no less of an ego but a different kind of ego, who appreciates the inner workings of a clock as well as its exterior,” he said.
Good luck in your search, CSQ and DePaul. As for all you dauntless wannabe-quartet-fiddlers, the line forms to the left.
