And he showed me the second book of the studies, in ms., containing exercises in every variety of scale, and trill, bowing, nuance, etc., combined in a single musical movement.  This volume also contains his own cadenza to the Beethoven violin concerto.  In conclusion Mr. Kneisel laid stress on the importance of the student’s hearing the best music at concert and recital as often as possible, and on the value and incentive supplied by a musical atmosphere in the home and, on leaving him, I could not help but feel that what he had said in our interview, his reflections and observations based on an artistry beyond cavil, and an authoritative experience, would be well worth pondering by every serious student of the instrument.  For Franz Kneisel speaks of what he knows.

XI

ADOLFO BETTI

THE TECHNIC OF THE MODERN QUARTET

What lover of chamber music in its more perfect dispensations is not familiar with the figure of Adolfo Betti, the guiding brain and bow of the Flonzaley Quartet?  Born in Florence, he played his first public concert at the age of six, yet as a youth found it hard to choose between literature, for which he had decided aptitude,[A] and music.  Fortunately for American concert audiences of to-day, he finally inclined to the latter.  An exponent of what many consider the greatest of all violinistic schools, the Belgian, he studied for four years with Cesar Thomson at Liege, spent four more concertizing in Vienna and elsewhere, and returned to Thomson as the latter’s assistant in the Brussels Conservatory, three years before he joined the Flonzaleys, in 1903.  With pleasant recollections of earlier meetings with this gifted artist, the writer sought him out, and found him amiably willing to talk about the modern quartet and its ideals, ideals which he personally has done so much to realize.

[Footnote A:  M. Betti has published a number of critical articles in the Guide Musical of Brussels, the Rivista Musicale of Turin, etc.]

THE MODERN QUARTET

“You ask me how the modern quartet differs from its predecessors?” said Mr. Betti.  “It differs in many ways.  For one thing the modern quartet has developed in a way that makes its inner voices—­second violin and viola—­much more important than they used to be.  Originally, as in Haydn’s early quartets, we have a violin solo with three accompanying instruments.  In Beethoven’s last quartets the intermediate voices have already gained a freedom and individuality which before him had not even been suspected.  In these last quartets Beethoven has already set forth the principle which was to become the basis of modern polyphony:  ’first of all to allow each voice to express itself freely and fully, and afterward to see what the relations were of one to the other.’  In fact, no one has exercised a more revolutionary effect on the quartet than Beethoven—­no one has made it attain so great a degree of progress.