The Kneisel Quartet and Tastemaking in the Gilded Age

Document Type

Thesis

Publication Date

8-2025

Abstract

The establishment of the string quartet as a genre in American musical life can be traced to the work of the Kneisel Quartet (1885–1917), which gave the world premiere of Antonín Dvořák’s American Quartet (1893) and, with guests, the first U.S. performances of Johannes Brahms’s String Quintet No. 2 (1893), Maurice Ravel’s Piano Trio in A minor (1914) and Arnold Schoenberg’s Verklärte Nacht (1899). Although the Kneisel Quartet left only a tiny recorded legacy (a 15-minute test pressing of three quartet movements), its important place in Gilded Age musical culture can be judged in part by the contents of an archive at Yale University, the Love Family Papers. In these letters to three women who served over the years as secretaries and schedulers to the quartet and its founder, Franz Kneisel (1865–1926), some of the most eminent musical personalities of the late 19th and early 20th centuries give us a window into the building of a taste for chamber music in American concertgoing. The papers also disclose a century-old conversation that will be more than familiar to concert organizers today: Worries about audiences, disputes over programs, haggling over fees, venue scheduling conflicts, and entreaties from composers. By closely examining some of these documents, and drawing on the work of cultural historians such as Joseph Horowitz, I show that while pre-World War I predilections for certain composers (i.e., César Franck and Richard Wagner) have shifted with time, what has not changed is the belief that chamber music should be a part of American musical life. I will also assess the repertory choices of the Kneisel Quartet and demonstrate that the quartet offered a more varied, looser style of programming than we have today. It also prioritized the championing of new music, including a host of pieces by contemporary Americans. In so doing, and in its extensive educational work (the Kneisel was the first-ever string quartet in residence, at the new Institute of Musical Art in 1905), the quartet left a powerful legacy that established chamber music as a vital taste for American audiences.

Publisher

University of Miami

City/State

Coral Gables, FL

Department

Conservatory of Music

Comments

Submitted to the Faculty of the University of Miami in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Music

Degree name: Master of Music (MM) Degree program: Musicology Contributor: Marysol Quevedo David Ake Joel Nickels

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