On Music

...By trying so hard for so many years, the Quartet has now exaggerated certain features of its style almost to the point of selfparody...

...For one thing, the invention of electrical recording in 1927 enlarged the scope of distinguished musical organizations like the Budapest by disseminating their work all over Europe and the United States...

...now, it is disconcertingly out of focus, like stage scenery in daylight...

...The combination of passionate, daring Slavic string playing with the solid scholarship and lofty musical idealism of Germany had produced players who brought to Beethoven the ideal balance of power and profundity...

...appearances, the Budapest was in some ways quite different from the organization now familiar to American listeners...

...Alex Schneider has said that when they could not decide whether a mark on the score was a dot or a speck of dirt, they played it as a dot just to be on the safe side...

...Every interpretation is inevitably an exaggeration or distortion of music...

...Years ago, one could not resist the Quartet's vision of Beethoven...

...Along with radio, records did more to establish the Quartet's reputation than would have any number of personal appearances...

...Purists have objected to this change in the Quartet's style, and certainly over the course of years something vital has been lost through the effort to transcend the traditional style of a string quartet...

...For, as one would expect, the ideal form of the Quartet has not been sustained over the years...

...After a few years' residence in this country, the Quartet's style began to change...

...On one occasion he played the Beethoven Violin Concerto in the first half of a program with the Berlin Philharmonic and then, in the second half, performed the taxing solo viola part in Berlioz's "Harold in Italy...

...The prospect of yet another Beethoven cycle at the Library of Congress or the 92nd Street "Y" brings no joy to those of us who have listened to similar performances for 20 years or more...

...But no string quartet was able to sustain itself by public performance alone...

...For another, the increasing sophistication of musical taste during the '30s established a congenial climate for fine performances of chamber music...

...Never before had any string quartet so completely mastered the technique of the late Beethoven— that elaborate and sophisticated part-writing demanding the skill of a virtuoso combined with the responsiveness of an ensemble musician...

...The strain of giving thousands of recitals all over the world and the inevitable decline in technique due to age is apparent in these later recordings, which lack much of the luster of the earlier ones...

...The life of the chamber musician was always a trying compromise between the exhausting demands of his art, daily practice, long rehearsals of difficult scores and intense study...

...Their Schubert was also very fine, not idiomatically Viennese, to be sure, but poignant and melodically lovely...

...No longer a mere string quartet, but a major musical institution with unrivalled authority, influence and prestige, the Budapest has established a new tradition for the performance of chamber music...

...One recalls from that period an incomparable performance of the "Dissonance" Quartet, with a superbly paced introduction and an incredibly brilliant finale...

...Beseiged with requests to play, the group has had to impose a limit of 100 performances a year at a standard fee of $1,000...

...More important, they were still a European quartet with an intimate style, a vivacious but relaxed attitude, and a beautiful spectrum of natural string colors...

...Thus, when the Budapest Quartet was first constituted in its present form, with Josef Roismann as first violin, Alexander Schneider as second, Boris Kroyt as violist, and Mischa Schneider as cellist, the prospects for success were small indeed: The Quartet would rehearse for days and then play a recital that earned each member the equivalent of one dollar...

...yet some distortions create the illusion of absolute fidelity...

...No string quartet has ever lavished such talent on the so-called inner voices...

...Their violist, Boris Kroyt, was a brilliant soloist who had given many memorable recitals with Schnabel in Berlin...

...Regrettably, all the great recorded performances of this period have been withdrawn and replaced with later and inferior versions...

...These recordings have sold remarkably well—in excess of two million copies...

...Their renditions of the Beethoven string quartets in this period have established a standard comparable to Arturo Toscanini's readings of the Beethoven symphonies and Artur Schnabel's interpretations of the sonatas and concertos...

...The players were very anxious in those days about correctness...

...Like most European musicians, they responded instinctively to the driving, hectic tempo of American life by sharpening their attack, enlarging their sonorities, and deepening and darkening their once-pellucid tone colors...

...This surface shell is flawless, brilliant, dazzling, but it is also cold, hard and, at times, repellent...

...There were, to be sure, a few famous ensembles in the 19th century—the Schuppanzigh Quartet, which was the first to perform the late quartets of Beethoven, and the ensemble led by the celebrated violin virtuoso, Josef Joachim...

...Its initial encounter with the States was not, admittedly, very pleasant: The four suspicious-looking foreigners, whose papers were not in order, were taken into custody the moment they arrived in the Port of New York and hustled off to Ellis Island...

...From the start, however, there were certain favorable conditions...

...Many of our greatest string players worked for years in the European equivalent of the Lester Lanin dance bands...

...But, after their first recital for the New Friends of Music, the Budapest was hailed as the greatest organization of its kind, and soon it was touring the country (on Greyhound buses), playing its austere repertoire in every city...

...In a period when the hero of a widely admired novel could die to the strains of a recording of Beethoven's A Minor Quartet, there was obviously some hope that the men who made that recording might live by it...

...The playing that was once informed by a restrained yet ecstatic inner energy has now been covered over with a hard shell of nervous tension...

...Their best work was in the Mozart quartets, which they played with coruscating brilliance at unheard-of tempos, with Roismann leading and at times dominating the ensemble...

...By now they have recorded almost all their extensive repertoire, some portions of it, like the Beethoven quartets, three times over...

...For the first time, too, I find myself questioning the validity of the Quartet's interpretations...

...In time, they began to sound like a small orchestra, and this was further enforced by the practice of performing in large halls seating more than a thousand people...

...and the equally imperative demands of making a living, usually satisfied by dull jobs in professional orchestras, teaching, or café work...

...Traditionally, Kammermusik was an art cultivated in the home, a serious recreation involving the impromptu collaboration of gifted amateurs and professional musicians...

...I now feel that the Budapest's hurtling energies, its powerfully distended phrasing, the harsh bark of its instruments rob Beethoven of his warmth, his humor, his Romantic humanity...

...But, in the early '40s, when they were first discovering their mature style, the Quartet achieved miracles of interpretive art...

...It was not, though, until 1938, when the Budapest came to America, that the Quartet found itself on the solid ground of wide popular success...

...ON MUSIC By Albert Goldman Back to Budapest IN the 1930s, when the Budapest String Quartet began to make its European reputation, the practice of performing chamber music in public recitals was not yet wellestablished, and it was very difficult to attract audiences large enough to support four musicians on even the most modest scale...

...1 wish they could go back to Budapest...

...Alexander Schneider, the second violin, made an impressive reputation for himself after 1947 playing the Bach unaccompanied violin sonatas and partitas...

...Today, in any case, the Budapest String Quartet lives in a world that seems like a fantasy inversion of its original circumstances...

...The Budapest was equally unique in its interpretive and stylistic achievements...

...Perhaps it is impossible to sustain for long the balance between a vigorous concern for musical purity—for accuracy, clarity, balance—and the welling passion of an inspired vision...

...And one does not like to see such great musicians exhausting themselves in the effort to bring alive for the thousandth time a work which they once performed much better and with far less effort...

...As an institution, though, the Quartet has lost much of its appeal to lovers of chamber music...

...Unlike the traditional quartet, composed of one violin virtuoso and three accompanists, the Budapest was made up of instrumentalists whose talents were all perfectly matched on the highest level of technique...

...At the time of its first U.S...