Robert Mann

1/3/2018 Robert Mann, a Founder of the Juilliard Quartet, Dies at 97 - The New York Times https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/02/obituaries/robert-mann-dead-juil...… 1/6 https://nyti.ms/2DR4mSA

OBITUARIES Robert Mann, a Founder of the Juilliard Quartet, Dies at 97

By MARGALIT FOX JAN. 2, 2018 Robert Mann, the founding first violinist of the Juilliard String Quartet, the internationally renowned ensemble that at midcentury helped engender a chamber music revival throughout the United States, died on Monday at his home in Manhattan. He was 97.

His death was announced by Debra Kinzler, associate director of the Walter W. Naumburg Foundation, of which he was president from 1971 to 2015. Conceived in 1946, the Juilliard quartet gave its first official performance the next year. Besides Mr. Mann, the original roster included the second violinist Robert Koff, the violist Raphael Hillyer and the cellist Arthur Winograd.

Mr. Mann — for decades the quartet’s de facto spokesman, institutional memory and “resident spark plug,” as The Chicago Tribune called him in 1997 — remained with the ensemble for 51 years. By the time he retired in 1997 he had outlasted the entire original lineup, as well several subsequent permutations, to become one of the longest-serving members of any chamber group in the world.

From the beginning, the Juilliard Quartet was known for its probing musicality (the group once devoted two full rehearsals to a single measure from Elliott Carter’s Third String Quartet); hard-driving style, which for all its passionate intensity was considered refreshingly unsentimental; and deep commitment to contemporary music.

Over the years, the quartet gave thousands of concerts worldwide, recorded extensively and performed repertoire ranging from the complete Beethoven quartets to the work of Bartok, Schoenberg, Lukas Foss, Milton Babbitt and Roger Sessions. “The Juilliard Quartet remains one of the wonders of the music world,”

Newsweek wrote in 1981, going on to praise the ensemble for “music that is marvelously alive and varied — music that breathes, not something that sounds as if it were put together by a precision drill team.” Mr. Mann was perennially singled out by critics for his impeccable technique and equally impeccable musical taste.

“Robert Mann,” Donal Henahan wrote in The New York Times in 1980, “has been largely responsible for the ensemble’s continuity of style and the maintenance of its stature in international chamber music circles.” He had cheerfully forsaken a promising solo career for a life in chamber music and — because that life entails as much — diplomacy. (A string quartet is nothing short of a quadrilateral marriage in which the spouses rarely see eye to eye on interpretive matters.)

It was a decidedly unexpected calling for a boy who had wanted only to be a forest ranger.

Robert Nathaniel Mann was born in Portland, Ore., on July 19, 1920, into what he later described as a “very poor” family. Both of his parents were immigrants: His father, Charles, a tailor, had come from England; his mother, Anna Schnitzer, from Poland.

“My father knew nothing about music, but he used sense in going to the concertmaster of the Portland Symphony for advice,” Mr. Mann told The Toronto Star in 1995. “It was the greatest break of my life. He told my father, ‘Your son is no wunderkind, but if he practices hard, he can make a living.’ ”

When he was 9, Robert began lessons, at $1.50 each, with a teacher he recalled as an alcoholic. Two years later, the teacher was shot and killed — an actuarially unorthodox end for a classical musician. Robert was 13 before another teacher was found, but the new teacher proved transformative.

“Up to then, I was going to be a forest ranger, hopefully in a national park,” Mr. Mann, recalling a boyhood lesson, said in “Speak the Music: Robert Mann and the Mysteries of Chamber Music,” a 2013 documentary. “But that day, I thought, ‘You know, music is very interesting.’ ”

At 18, the young Mr. Mann took up a scholarship at the Institute of Musical Art, a forerunner of the Juilliard School, in New York. The next year, he transferred to the Juilliard Graduate School (likewise a forebear of today’s Juilliard School). There, he studied composition with Stefan Wolpe and violin with Édouard Dethier, a passionate lover of chamber music.

In 1941, Mr. Mann won the violin competition of the Naumburg Foundation, which carried as its prize a debut recital at Town Hall in New York. As things fell out, the recital could scarcely have been booked for a more inopportune date: Dec. 9, 1941, two days after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.

“Just before the concert the city’s emergency alarm went off,” Mr. Mann told The New York Post in 2001. Concertgoers fled, he said, “but we still drew about half the hall.” The critics stayed, and commended the debut.

In 1946, after Army service, Mr. Mann joined the Juilliard faculty. At the time, the country had few homegrown quartets of stature. American concertgoers were inclined to prefer the sonic grandeur of symphony orchestras; the handful of quartets booked regularly in United States concert halls tended to be imports like the Budapest String Quartet.

By this time, Mr. Mann had resolved to abandon his solo career and devote himself to chamber music.

“I could not conceive of myself playing those old chestnuts and getting pleasure from them again and again,” he told The Times in 1981. “I had not been a wunderkind. I could not play Paganini before I could read Shakespeare and I wasn’t interested in developing a virtuoso technique. The virtuoso looks for two things: those vehicles that allow him or her to display absolute wizardry on the instrument, and capturing that psychology of communication that knocks an audience dead.” He added, “Those things were not as meaningful to me as the social phenomenon of making music among equals and the fact that, in chamber music, the composer was not interested in knocking anybody dead but in giving expression to his most subtle and complicated thoughts.”

And so Mr. Mann began to dream of creating a resident quartet at Juilliard, American to its core, whose members would both perform and teach. Providentially, the composer William Schuman, who had become Juilliard’s president in 1945, was dreaming the same thing.

Mr. Schuman appointed Mr. Mann first violinist and deputized him to select the remaining players.

“He said, ‘Is yours going to be the best quartet in the world?’ ” Mr. Mann recalled on “CBS Sunday Morning” in 1996. “I can’t guarantee that,” Mr. Mann replied, “but I can guarantee it will be one of the best.”

The Juilliard String Quartet made its formal debut at Town Hall on Dec. 23, 1947, in a program of Haydn, Beethoven and Alban Berg.

Reviewing the concert, The Times called it “a debut of unusual distinction,” going on to praise the group’s “ensemble playing of the highest order.” In the quartet’s early years, however, its bookings were so scarce, and its coffers so shallow, that when it traveled out of town by train, the players slept sitting up in coach to avoid paying for berths in the Pullman car.

Its fortunes had changed considerably by the 1960s, when Mr. Schuman conceived the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center and asked Mr. Mann to be its inaugural director. Already laden with quartet engagements, he declined.

Over the years, the Juilliard’s muscular style ran afoul of some critics. “We didn’t want to have smooth chamber music,” Mr. Mann replied, in a 1997 interview with The Los Angeles Times. “If Bartok wrote ‘ruvido’ — ‘rough’ — we wanted to sound ruvido.”

But far more often the quartet drew praise. The groundswell of interest in chamber music in late-20th-century America, it is widely agreed, is in no small part traceable to the Juilliard.

The group has also seeded the world with other distinguished quartets that it helped train, among them the Tokyo, Emerson, Concord, Brentano and LaSalle. Mr. Mann occasionally slipped the quartet’s confines to play with others. In 1980, with the pianist Emanuel Ax, he gave a highly regarded series of performances of the complete Beethoven sonatas at the 92nd Street Y in New York. With the pianist Stephen Hough, he recorded the sonatas of Beethoven and Brahms. Mr. Mann played his last concert with the Juilliard, a Beethoven program at Tanglewood, on July 2, 1997. He was succeeded by the quartet’s second violinist, Joel Smirnoff; Mr. Smirnoff’s old chair was filled by Ronald Copes.

Today, the Juilliard String Quartet comprises the first violinist Joseph Lin, the second violinist Mr. Copes, the violist Roger Tapping and the cellist Astrid Schween. Mr. Mann is survived by his wife, Lucy Rowan Mann; a son, Nicholas, a violinist on the Manhattan School of Music and Juilliard faculties; a daughter, Lisa Mann Marotta; a sister, Rosalind Mann Koff, a pianist who married the Juilliard Quartet’s original second violinist; and five grandchildren. Mr. Mann’s younger brother, Alfred E. Mann, a well-known scientist, industrialist and philanthropist, died in 2016. As a composer, Mr. Mann was known for his Fantasy for Orchestra, given its premiere in 1957 by the New York Philharmonic under Dimitri Mitropoulos. He was also known for his settings of Hans Christian Andersen fairy tales for chamber ensemble and narrator.\

As a teacher, he was not one to mince words. “You call that an accent,” he might say. “I call it dropping a pile of rocks on the downbeat.”

But his comments were leavened by his puckish sense of humor, a virtue that also helped ease the rigors of touring.

On one occasion in the 1960s, for instance, an airline barred Mr. Mann from bringing his Stradivarius aboard as carry-on luggage. Capitulating, he bought a seat for the instrument and belted it in.

At mealtime, Mr. Mann tucked a napkin under the seatbelt and insisted that the flight attendant serve Mr. Stradivari his dinner.

A version of this article appears in print on January 3, 2018, on Page B10 of the New York edition with the headline: Robert Mann, Founding First Violinist of the Juilliard Quartet, Dies at 97. © 2018 The New York Times Company

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http://www.msmnyc.edu/facultybio/fid/1003080320

Robert Mann Robert Mann, at 93 years of age, has been a driving force in the world of music for more than seventy years. As founder and first violinist of the Juilliard String Quartet, and as a soloist, composer, teacher, and conductor, Mr. Mann has brought a refreshing sense of adventure and discovery to chamber music performances, master classes, and orchestral performances worldwide. He is, in the words of Richard Dyer of the Boston Globe, “one of the country’s most admired and deeply loved musicians.”

Born in Portland, Oregon in 1920, Mr. Mann began studying violin when he was eight, and at age 13 was accepted into the class of Edouard Hurlimann, concertmaster of the Portland Symphony. In 1938, he moved to New York City to enroll in The Juilliard School, where he studied violin with Edouard Dethier, composition with Bernard Wagenaar and Stephan Wolpe, and conducting with Edgar Schenkman. Mr. Mann won the prestigious Naumburg competition in 1941.

In 1946, at the invitation of Juilliard’s president, William Schuman, Robert Mann founded the Juilliard String Quartet serving as the ensemble’s first violinist for 51 years until his retirement from the Quartet in 1997. The quartet, which celebrated its Golden Jubilee during the 1996-97 season, had played approximately 5,500 concerts and performed more than 500 works including some 100 premieres. Its discography includes recordings of more than 100 compositions. The Juilliard String Quartet received three Grammy Awards, and in 2011, the Lifetime Achievement Grammy Award.

Mr. Mann is a prolific composer and has composed more than 30 works for narrator with various instruments that he performs with his wife, the actress Lucy Rowan. He has also composed an Orchestral Fantasy performed by Dimitri Mitropoulos with the New York Philharmonic, the Vienna Philharmonic, and at the Salzburg Festival; a Duo for Violin and Piano that was premiered at Carnegie Hall by Itzhak Perlman; and a String Quartet that was included in the repertoires of both the La Salle and the Concord String Quartets. His other works include a Duo for Cello and Piano written for Joel Krosnick and Gilbert Kalish, a Concerto for Orchestra, and “Lament” for two solo violas and orchestra. His work “Dream Time” was recently recorded by violist David Carpenter.

Robert Mann has conducted throughout his professional career, leading ensembles such as the New York Chamber Symphony, Manhattan School of Music Symphony, and ensembles at the Ravinia, Tanglewood and Aspen music festivals. In addition, at the invitation of Seiji Ozawa, he has been in residence at Japan’s Saito Kinen Music Festival as a conductor, teacher, and performer. He also serves as head teacher at Seiji Ozawa’s International Academy for String Quartets and Chamber Ensembles in Rolle, Switzerland. Robert Mann is a mentor to younger generations of string quartets including the Alexander, American, Concord, Emerson, LaSalle, New World, Mendelssohn, Tokyo, Brentano, Lark, St. Lawrence, and Colorado string quartets.

Mr. Mann continues to actively perform as a violinist recently performing concerts in New York, Los Angeles, San Franciso and Houston. He is on the faculty at Manhattan School of Music and for the past two years MSM has presented the Robert Mann String Quartet Seminar which brings the country’s most talented young string quartets to the school for intensive week-long coachings with Mr. Mann. Since 1971, Mr. Mann has been President of the Walter W. Naumburg Foundation and his wife, Lucy Rowan Mann, is the Walter W. Naumburg Foundation’s Executive Director. Speak the Music: Robert Mann and the Mysteries of Chamber Music, a film by Allan Miller, is soon to be released.

Robert Mann has been married to Lucy Rowan Mann for 62 years. They have two children, Nicholas and Lisa.

2014 Cleveland Institute of Music Commencement Address: Robert Mann (via Nicholas Mann)