Lovers of chamber music form an extremely refined and cultured class, and, like all highly refined and cultured people, are very conservative. They are the purists among music-lovers, the last people who would care to see the classical forms abandoned, and who would be disturbed, not to say shocked, by any great departure from the sonata form. For the string quartet is to chamber music what the symphony is to orchestra and the sonata to the pianoforte—is, in fact, a sonata for two violins, viola and violoncello, just as the symphony is a sonata for orchestra.

Oddly enough, a pianoforte solo is more effective in a large hall than a string quartet, although the latter employs four times as many instruments; and the same is true of those pieces of chamber music in which the pianoforte is used, such as sonatas for pianoforte and violin or violoncello, pianoforte trios, quartets, quintets, and so on. A fine soloist on the pianoforte will be more at home in a large auditorium like Carnegie Hall or even the Metropolitan Opera House than would a string quartet or any other combination of chamber-music players. Paderewski plays in Carnegie Hall, and, I am sure, would be equally effective in the 225 Opera House. But an organization of chamber-music players would be lost in either place. The Kneisel Quartet plays in New York in Mendelssohn Hall, a small auditorium which is just about correctly proportioned for music of this kind.

Indeed, compared with the opera, the orchestra and even with the pianoforte, chamber music requires a setting like a jewel. For just as its devotees are the purists among music-lovers, so chamber music itself is something very “precious.” It certainly is a most charming and intimate form of musical entertainment and the constituency of a well-established string quartet inevitably consists of the musical Élite.

The same opinions that have been expressed regarding the sonatas and the symphonies of the great composers apply in a general way to their chamber music. Haydn’s is naive; Mozart’s more emotional in expression; Beethoven’s, among that of classical composers, the most dramatic. In fact, Beethoven’s last quartets, in which the instruments are employed quite independently and in which rÔles practically of equal importance are assigned to each, are regarded by Richard Strauss as having given the cue to Wagner for his polyphonic treatment of the orchestra, and Wagner himself spoke of them as works through which “Music first raised herself to an equal height with the poetry and painting of the greatest periods of the past.” Nevertheless, there are many who hold that in his last quartets Beethoven sought to accomplish more than can be expressed with four stringed instruments, and prefer his earlier works of this class, like the three “Rasumovski” quartets, Opus 59, dedicated by the composer 226 to Count Rasumovski, who maintained a private string quartet in which he played second violin, the others being professionals.

Schubert’s most famous quartet is the one in D minor with the lovely slow movement, a theme with variations, the theme being his own song, “Death and the Maiden.” One of the greatest works in the whole range of chamber music is his string quintet with two violoncellos. His pianoforte trios also are noble contributions to this branch of musical art. “One glance at this trio,” writes Schumann of the Schubert trio in B flat major, “and all the wretchedness of existence is put to flight and the world seems young again.... Many and beautiful as are the things Time brings forth, it will be long ere it produces another Schubert.”

Mendelssohn’s chamber music is as polished, affable and gentlemanly as most of his other productions, and rapidly falling into the same state of unlamented desuetude. Schumann has given us his lovely pianoforte quintet in E flat. Brahms has contributed much that is noteworthy to chamber music, and, as a rule, it is less complex and more intelligently scored than his orchestral music. Dvorak in his E flat major quartet (Opus 51) introduces as the second movement a Dumka or Bohemian elegy, one of the most exquisite of his compositions. Fascinating in his national musical tints, he was genius enough for his music to be universal in its expression; and he who used the folksongs of his native Bohemia so skillfully was no less artistic in the results he accomplished when, during his residence in New York, he wrote his string quartet 227 in F (Opus 96) on Negro themes. Tschaikowsky and neo-Russians like Arensky, and the Frenchmen, CÉsar Franck, Saint-SaËns, d’Indy and Debussy, are some of the modern names that figure on chamber-music programs.