The Zoellner Quartet was a string quartet active during the first quarter of the 20th century. It was once described as "the most celebrated musical organization in the West which devotes its energies exclusively to the highest class of chamber music". After training in Europe, the group toured widely throughout the United States in its prime years. Although all members were natives of Brooklyn, New York, the ensemble formed a strong early association with Belgium and in publicity often billed itself as "The Zoellner Quartet of Brussels"; its ultimate base of operations was in California. With one brief interruption at the end of World War I, the membership remained constant throughout the quartet's existence: Joseph Zoellner and his children Antoinette; Amandus; and Joseph, Jr. A second "Zoellner Quartet" was later formed by Joseph, Jr. and three unrelated musicians.
Formation and European career
Joseph Zoellner founded the quartet, most likely in 1903 but possibly in 1904, in Brooklyn, where he operated a music school. From the group's founding until 1906 the members lived in Stockton, California, where he had opened a similar school or music store. Under sponsorship of Ethel Crocker, wife of San Francisco banking magnate William Henry Crocker, the Zoellners then went to Belgium for several years to hone their skills with the celebrated Belgian pedagogue César Thomson, who had also taught three members of the group's contemporary, the Flonzaley Quartet.
The Zoellner Quartet's first European appearances were at César Thomson's private soirees, but the group soon began performing more widely in Belgium and in Paris and Berlin. Of particular note, late in the period of its European residency, the mother of King Albert I of Belgium presented the quartet with a gold medal specially struck by goldsmith C.H. Samuels after the group performed as royal guests of the Belgian king and queen in 1911.
North American career
Following its journeyman years in Europe, the quartet in the 1912–1913 season embarked on what would be a constant round of activity in Canada and the United States, keeping to an intense schedule during annual coast-to-coast tours. During an early 1919 tour of western Canada starting in Victoria, British Columbia, in the final city of Winnipeg the quartet gave its 500th performance in six years of touring; by 1921, its total was reported to be 1,100 performances upon return from a tour of the US East and Midwest, within a week of which it was scheduled to perform yet again in Los Angeles. In nine weeks ending in late March 1923 alone, the quartet performed 46 concerts in connection with its twelfth tour of the US East. In later years, Amandus was said to have participated in more than 2,500 performances during his career with the quartet. The quartet prided itself on keeping to non-stop schedules in its numerous transcontinental tours without letup or delays, even when on one occasion in 1921 Joseph, Jr. fell in Topeka, Kansas, and was relegated to use of a crutch for a few days.
In its North American years, as its celebrity grew, the quartet's members naturally associated with notable musicians such as Ernestine Schumann-Heink, Mischa Elman, and—not surprisingly, given the quartet's Belgian connections—Eugène Ysaÿe. The group also, however, had less obvious associations with the famous of its day. In one colorful incident, as the quartet toured during the 1916–1917 season, it crossed paths with the famous deafblind author, activist, and lecturer Helen Keller and her teacher and companion Anne Sullivan in Oklahoma City, where Keller was scheduled for a lecture. Keller proposed as an experiment that the quartet should play for her, to determine whether she could sense music; readily acceding to her request, the quartet played music including the celebrated second movement, andante cantabile, from Tchaikovsky's String Quartet no. 1 in D Major, op. 11, as she held her fingertips lightly on a resonant tabletop. Keller quickly sensed the musical vibrations, swaying in time, alternately crying and smiling. Afterward, Keller reacted as follows:
For his part, Joseph Zoellner rather more prosaically stated that he and the rest of the quartet felt they had been playing to a "responsive instrument" and were impressed with Keller's ability to interpret the music. For instance, although no one had told her the Tchaikovsky work supposedly had its basis in an old fisherman's song, Keller described it as evoking the sea and the ocean breeze on her face.
More than a dozen years later, in January 1931, Albert Einstein, who was then engaged in research at the California Institute of Technology, visited the Zoellner family's conservatory and played violin with members of the quartet in music of Beethoven and Mozart. The following year, a few days before Einstein sailed for what would be his last visit to Germany, he presented Joseph Zoellner with an autographed photograph as a memento of the occasion.
In the United States, as in Europe, the quartet was no stranger to the major cultural centers. Upon its return to America it first performed in New York City at Aeolian Hall on January 7, 1914, when, demonstrating a recurrent predilection for adventurously mixing music old and new, the program featured Glazounov's Suite in C Major, op. 35; Haydn's Quartet in G Major, op. 76 no. 1; and the Romantische Serenade of Jan Brandts Buys, which had been heard in New York on only one prior occasion. The quartet's sixth transcontinental tour of the United States and Canada, announced in late 1917, included two performances in New York City and others in Brooklyn, Philadelphia, Boston, and Chicago.
The quartet saw its mission as broader than performing in such major venues, however; its aim was to widen the audience for chamber music, which the Zoellners considered an intimate form with personal appeal to the audience, even one lacking cultured appreciation of music. Thus, with missionary zeal, they consistently performed in towns well removed from the regular concert circuit, often ones that had never been visited by a string quartet. Toward the end of its 1921 season, for instance, the quartet had already committed to return engagements in Topeka and Wichita, Kansas; St. Joseph, Missouri; Dubuque, Iowa; Richmond, Indiana; and Peoria, Illinois. Pursuing this educational goal, the Zoellners performed in such unconventional surroundings as trains and 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, in each case receiving a standing ovation.
In parallel with this diversity of performance locales, the quartet appears to have cultivated qualities calculated to please both cosmopolitan and discerning but less urbanized audiences and critics. Following the 1914 Aeolian Hall performance, a review in The New York Times commended the group's tone, intonation, and ensemble, while, tellingly, the Lawrence, Kansas Lawrence Journal-World in 1917 described the quartet as follows: "The Zoellner Quartet is a great favorite with Lawrence audiences, as its programs suit the tastes of the average concert-goer, and this without the inclusion of superficial music."
Giving an idea of how the quartet assembled its programs and the widely scattered smaller venues in which it played on what were tight schedules in those days before air travel, some of its documented performances in 1917 were as follows:
The performance in Lawrence, scheduled for April 5, included the String Quartet no. 1 in B-Flat on Maori (New Zealand) Themes by Alfred Hill; the adagio from a Mozart quartet in B-Flat major; the scherzo from Alexander Glazunov's Quartet no. 4 in A Minor; a piano quintet by Edgar Stillman Kelley, with Carl Preyer, head of the piano department at the local School of Fine Arts, at the keyboard; and arrangements of "Cherry Ripe" by Frank Bridge and of a German folk song by Kaessmayer. Five days later, in Appleton, Wisconsin, the Quartet performed the same Hill quartet, Glazunov scherzo, and folk song arrangements, to which were added the nocturne from the Second Quartet by Alexander Borodin; the lullaby from a quartet by Skilton; and two works presented by subsets of the quartet: Sinding's Serenade for Two Violins and Piano, featuring Atoinette and Amandus on violins and Joseph, Jr. on piano, and Dvořák's Ballade in D Minor for Violin and Piano, performed by Amandus, presumably again with Joseph, Jr. as pianist. On November 5, the quartet performed at the North Dakota Agricultural College, now North Dakota State University. The program included the "American" Quartet of Antonín Dvořák; "Deep River" (arr. Burleigh and Kramer) and a Russian folksong (arr. Kaessmeyer); a suite for two violins and piano by Emánuel Moór, played by Antoinette and Amandus with Joseph, Jr. on the piano; and Károly Thern's "Genius Loci" and Skilton's "War Dance" as encores, both by request. A week later, on November 12, the quartet was in Columbia, Missouri, to present the season's second Phi Mu Alpha concert at the University Auditorium. The works on the program again included the "American" Quartet and also Haydn's Quartet in C Major, op. 74, no. 1; Two Sketches for String Quartet by Eugene Goossens; and Quartet no. 2 in A Major, op. 28 by Eduard Nápravník.
From the beginning of its US career, the quartet also performed under the auspices of various performing arts societies and series, academic and civic, scattered across the United States. Among these appearances were the following:
June 26, 1912, 24th annual convention of the New York State Music Teachers' Association at Columbia University. Marie Rappold and Frank Croxton also performed, and David Bispham and Reginald de Koven discussed presentation of opera in English. February 4, 1914, Saturday Morning Musical Club at the Temple of Music and Art in Tucson, Arizona. 1915–16 season, fourth formal season of the Tuesday Morning Musical Club Concert Series, now Tuesday Musical, in Omaha, Nebraska; the quartet made a return appearance in the 1919–1920 season. Between 1911 and 1920, performance series of the Schubert Club of St. Paul, Minnesota.
The performances noted above suggest the Zoellner Quartet's breadth of repertory. This musical catholicity did not escape critical notice, as, for example, in a review by Florence Lawrence in the Los Angeles Examiner of July 26, 1919: "[T]he brilliant closing concert of the Zoellner chamber music season last night ... proved the climax in this unusual course, in which modern and classical works have been especially well contrasted, and testified vividly to the fine artistry of the musicians. It was a great personal achievement for the artists." Occasioning that review was the conclusion of a marathon series of ten weekly recitals from May 23 to July 25, 1919, at the Ebell Club Auditorium in Los Angeles. Works presented over the course of this venture, ranging from Baroque to then-contemporary, were as follows:
Beethoven: Quartets no. 4 in C Minor, op. 18 no. 4; no. 6 in B-Flat Major, op. 18 no. 6; and no. 10 in E-Flat Major ("Harp") Borodin: Quartet No. 2 in D Major Brandts-Buys: Romantic Serenade, Op. 25 Bridge: Noveletten; (arr.) Two Old English Songs. The quartet had begun including the Noveletten in its programs during its 1916 tour of Canada and the United States. Debussy: Quartet in G Minor, op. 10 Dohnányi: Quartet no. 2 in D-Flat Major, op. 15 Dvořák: Quartet no. 12 in F, op. 96 ("American") Fasch: Sonate A Quatre Franck: Quartet in D Major Glazounov: Suite in C Major, Op. 35 Eugene Goossens: Two Sketches, op. 15 Handel: Sonata in G Minor for two violins and piano Haydn: Quartets op. 51 ("Seven Last Words of Christ"); in C Major, op. 74 no. 1; and in G Major, op. 76 no. 1 Hill: Quartet no. 1 in B-Flat