Life in a string quartet

As seen from reasonably close range, that is to say by one Sonia Simmenauer, an agent who worked with a lot of string quartets over many years. The book is at reference 1, what was her agency before she retired is at reference 2, while at reference 3 we have the Endellion Quartet, now retired, whom we probably heard more than any other quartet. Also snapped above.

I think the Endellions chose to manage themselves, which I think is reasonably unusual, but a lot of the quarters we have come across over the years at the Wigmore Hall and elsewhere have come from the Simmenauer family. The Artemis Quartet, the Hagen Quartet, the Jerusalem Quartet and the Pavel Haas Quartet to name but four.

I have often wondered about the life of a string quartet, four people who spend a great deal of time shut up with each other over many years and this book, brought to me by an advertisement in either the TLS or the NYRB, seemed to fill the bill. A short, easy read book of 160 short pages which I am very glad to have come across.

Neither an easy nor a particularly well paid life and the members of the quartet have to put up with a lot to make their music. They really have to have a passion for string quartets - coupled with a gift for getting along with three other, equally passionate people. A marriage is the closest that most of us are going to come to this, and that is not very close. Marriages are for two and are often held together by their asymmetry and while the different members of a quartet may bring different skills to the party, a quartet is very democratic. There might be a first violin, the first violin may have given his or her name to the quartet, but a quartet works by consensus not by direction. Which means that there is a lot of talk, a lot of tension and a fair number of rows. 

I close this advertisement with what remains for me something of a puzzle. There have been a lot of well known quartets which have lasted for most of the working life of their members - something which did not happen at the time Haydn and Beethoven were writing their quartets, some at least of which are still likely to be the core of a quartet's repertoire. At which time there was also a lot of private and semi-private playing of quartets. The people that bought the scores that put the composers' food on their tables. While now, the audience for string quartets is getting old and is shrinking - despite which there are still plenty of young people out there prepared to give it a go. I suppose most of them are not going to go the distance: a risk that one hopes they take with their eyes open. 

A risk not so different than that taken, for example, by footballers. You devote the first twenty years of your life to something in the not quite forlorn hope that you turn out to be good enough to make your living out of it.

A good read for anyone with an interest in such things.

PS: somewhere along the way it is pointed out that a string quartet might have four parts, perhaps emerging after a fashion from part singing for the four human voices - treble/soprano, alto/contralto, tenor and bass - but there is no sex. The four parts are not, for example, sexed. Different plane of being altogether. See reference 4.

References

Reference 1: Two violins, one viola, a cello and me - Sonia Simmenauer - 2008/2021/2023. First German, second German and first English editions.

Reference 2: https://www.impresariat-simmenauer.de/en/.

Reference 3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endellion_Quartet.

Reference 4: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four-part_harmony.