Zoellner Quartet

• 1. Introduction

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  The Zoellner Quartet played music for Helen Keller in Oklahoma City, and she wept. Not from sentiment, but because she could feel it. She placed her fingertips on a resonant tabletop as the group played the andante cantabile from Tchaikovsky's String Quartet no. 1 in D Major, and she swayed in time, crying and then smiling. When she spoke afterward, she described each note as "a picture, a fragrance, the flash of a wing." She said the violins sang of woods and streams and sun-kissed hills. She said a thousand things came thronging through her soul when the Zoellner Quartet played.

  This was not a famous concert hall. This was a touring stop during the 1916-1917 season, in a city where Keller happened to be scheduled for a lecture of her own. That the encounter happened at all tells you something essential about the Zoellner Quartet: they were everywhere. They were four members of a single Brooklyn family who trained under the great Belgian pedagogue Cesar Thomson, billed themselves as a Brussels ensemble, and then spent decades crisscrossing North America by train, playing in towns that had never once hosted a string quartet. By the time their 500th concert arrived, they were in Winnipeg. By the time they passed 1,100 performances, they were back on the road within a week. What drove a family to that kind of relentless musical mission? And what did they leave behind?

• 2. Brooklyn to Brussels

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  Joseph Zoellner founded the quartet most likely in 1903, possibly 1904, in Brooklyn, where he ran a music school. Before that, he had served as first violinist of the Theodore Thomas Orchestra in New York, a position that marked him as an accomplished professional. When the group first formed, the members lived in Stockton, California, where Joseph had opened a similar school or music store.

  The decisive turn came through the patronage of Ethel Crocker, wife of San Francisco banking magnate William Henry Crocker. Under her sponsorship, the Zoellners traveled to Belgium to study with Cesar Thomson, one of the foremost string pedagogues of the era. Thomson had also taught three members of the Flonzaley Quartet, the Zoellners' celebrated contemporary. This Brussels connection became so central to the ensemble's identity that in publicity they often called themselves "The Zoellner Quartet of Brussels," despite all four members having been born in Brooklyn.

  All three of Joseph's children trained first with their father before continuing their studies in Belgium. Antoinette, the first violinist, studied with Thomson from 1907 to 1912. Joseph, Jr., the cellist, graduated from the Royal Conservatory of Brussels in 1910 with honors in piano, and took cello lessons from Jean Gerardy, harmony from Paul Gilson, and piano from Arthur de Greef. Their earliest European performances were at Thomson's private soirees, but the group soon moved outward into Paris and Berlin. Late in their European residency, the mother of King Albert I of Belgium presented them with a gold medal struck by goldsmith C.H. Samuels after they performed as royal guests in 1911.

• 3. A Family on the Road

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  When the quartet returned from Europe and launched its North American career in the 1912-1913 season, its configuration was genuinely unusual. Joseph, Sr., the most senior member by age and experience, played viola rather than leading from the first chair. That position belonged to his daughter Antoinette, making the ensemble what one 1917 article called "about the only string quartet in existence" to honor a woman with the first violinist's chair in an otherwise all-male group. After a concert in Quebec, a suffragette leapt to her feet and shouted that she never thought she'd live to see one woman leading three men.

  The schedule they maintained was extraordinary. Their first American performance on this leg was at Aeolian Hall in New York City on the 7th of January 1914. From there, coast-to-coast tours became an annual fixture, each one packed with engagements across major cities and small towns alike. In nine weeks ending in late March 1923 alone, the quartet gave 46 concerts during its twelfth tour of the eastern United States. Amandus was later said to have participated in more than 2,500 performances over his career with the group.

  The pace rarely relented. In 1921, Joseph, Jr. fell in Topeka, Kansas, and had to use a crutch for a few days, but the tours did not stop. The quartet prided itself on transcontinental schedules without letup or delays, even in an era before commercial air travel. When the group crossed paths with Mischa Elman and Ernestine Schumann-Heink, it was simply one famous act passing another on the road. Their cellist's brief absence at the end of World War I, when Joseph, Jr. served as a corporal in the United States Army, was the quartet's only real interruption. Robert Alter, a former Boston Symphony Orchestra player with chamber music credentials through his association with Kneisel Quartet cellist Alwin Schroeder, stepped in to cover the California tour dates in late 1918.

• 4. Towns No Quartet Had Visited

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  The Zoellner Quartet saw itself as missionaries for chamber music. They believed the form had a personal, intimate appeal even for listeners without formal musical training, and they acted on that belief by taking their programs into towns well off the regular concert circuit. Toward the end of the 1921 season, they had already committed to return engagements in Topeka and Wichita, Kansas; St. Joseph, Missouri; Dubuque, Iowa; Richmond, Indiana; and Peoria, Illinois. They performed on trains. They performed at an Illinois insane asylum.

  In 1916, the quartet presented Charles Sanford Skilton's Indian Dances to traditional audiences in Boston and also to five hundred Native Americans in Oklahoma. Both groups gave them a standing ovation. The programs they assembled for these scattered venues were catholic in the extreme. A single week in November 1917 took them from a performance at the North Dakota Agricultural College, where the program included Dvorak's American Quartet and a suite for two violins and piano by Emanuel Moor, to a Phi Mu Alpha concert at the University Auditorium in Columbia, Missouri, where they added Haydn's Quartet in C Major, op. 74, no. 1, and a quartet by Eduard Napravnik.

  Critics at both ends of the spectrum noticed the breadth. A review in The New York Times following their 1914 Aeolian Hall debut praised the group's tone, intonation, and ensemble. Three years later, the Lawrence, Kansas Lawrence Journal-World described the quartet as a great favorite because its programs suited the average concert-goer without including superficial music. From May to July 1919, the quartet ran a marathon series of ten weekly recitals at the Ebell Club Auditorium in Los Angeles, working through composers from Fasch and Handel to Debussy, Milhaud, and Eugene Goossens.

• 5. Premieres and Dedications

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  Charles Sanford Skilton dedicated his Two Indian Dances to the Zoellner Quartet, which premiered the works in January 1916. Carl Fischer Music published them a year later, by which time Skilton had orchestrated them; he later incorporated them into his Suite Primeval. The quartet's Edison recording of the second number, War Dance, survives.

  Arthur Farwell, acting at Joseph Zoellner's suggestion, wrote a string quartet titled The Hako in 1922 and dedicated it to the group, which then performed it in 1923 at the Ojai Music Festival in Ojai, California. Eugene Goossens wrote a quartet specifically for the Zoellners; they programmed it during their eastern United States tour in early 1919. During their 1923 tour of the eastern United States, the quartet gave the American premiere of Joseph Jongen's Serenade Tendre, and also the American premiere of Fantasie for String Quartet by Frances Marion Ralston.

  On the 15th of March 1926, the quartet premiered Impressions of a Rainy Day, a suite for quartet by Roy Harris, at the Biltmore Hotel in Los Angeles. This was after the group had formally retired the previous year, suggesting the family's musical involvement did not simply stop when touring did. Members continued to teach, to perform informally, and to compose and publish. Joseph, Sr. and Amandus together compiled The Zoellner Quartette Repertoire Album, published by Carl Fischer Music, and all three of the senior members contributed essays on quartet playing to a collective volume on string instruments.

• 6. Albert Einstein Visits

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  In January 1931, Albert Einstein was in California conducting research at the California Institute of Technology when he visited the Zoellner family's conservatory. He played violin with members of the quartet, working through music by Beethoven and Mozart. The meeting was informal enough that it left a personal trace: a few days before Einstein sailed for what would become his last visit to Germany, he gave Joseph Zoellner an autographed photograph as a memento.

  By then the quartet had already retired, in 1925, but the family remained at the center of Los Angeles musical life through the Zoellner Conservatory of Music. The conservatory eventually added branches in Hollywood and Burbank and was still operating as of 1942, when the Hollywood branch conferred an honorary Doctor of Music degree on bandmaster Earl Irons. Joseph, Jr. served as dean and head of the piano department. Amandus directed the violin department first at Pomona College in Claremont, California, and then at Occidental College in Los Angeles, where he also gave solo recitals. Joseph, Sr. headed the violin department at the University of Redlands in Redlands, California. A radio broadcast on station KHJ in Los Angeles was scheduled for the 24th of November 1927, evidence that the original members still occasionally performed together even after retirement.

  Amandus's daughter Ruth, who did not pursue a musical career herself, inherited the quartet's archives and arranged for their preservation, with the scores going to Scripps College in Claremont, California, and the memorabilia and scrapbooks to UCLA.

• 7. The Recording Legacy

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  The original Zoellner Quartet left six sides issued as Edison diamond discs and at least three more recorded for Columbia, all acoustic recordings. Like the Flonzaley Quartet's acoustic discography, these captured isolated movements, arrangements, and encore pieces rather than complete works. The earliest Columbia recordings date to November 1915; the Edison sessions ran from late 1920 through March 1922.

  The Edison catalogue included a minuet from Boccherini's Quintet in E, op. 13 no. 5; the adagio cantabile from Haydn's Lark Quartet; an intermezzo from Ippolitov-Ivanov's String Quartet No. 1; a berceuse from Ilyinsky's Orchestral Suite no. 3; and MacDowell's To a Wild Rose arranged by the Zoellners themselves. The Columbia sides included a Humoresque on Two American Folk Songs and Thern's Genius Loci, both from November 1915, and a recording of Dixie attributed to Emmett.

  Joseph, Jr. later followed his father's example and formed a second Zoellner Quartet in Chicago, where his wife's family was based. The other members were Charles Buckley and Michael Rill on first and second violin, and violist Jose Marones. Promotional literature cited a review from 1938, though a family account placed the founding in 1950. The group remained active through the 1950s, though it did not reach the breadth of recognition the original quartet had earned across four decades of touring and over 2,500 performances.