"So, are you shocked?" asked Robert Mann, the first violinist of the Juilliard String Quartet, a few moments after saying that at the end of this season he would retire from the ensemble he helped found in 1946. His last New York performance with the group was to be the closing installment of a Bartok quartet cycle at Alice Tully Hall Friday evening.
Still ahead are a Japanese tour and a final concert at Tanglewood, the group's birthplace, in early July. The quartet will continue, with Joel Smirnoff moving from second violin to first and a new player, not yet selected, in the second violin's chair.Mann's decision to leave the Juilliard was not entirely unexpected; at 76, he has been on the road with the quartet for 51 seasons. These days, even after cutting down their touring schedule to spend more time teaching, the quartet gives 75 to 80 performances in a nine-month season.
Even so, hearing him announce his retirement definitively was, as he clearly hoped, at least a modest shock. As the only remaining member of the influential ensemble's original lineup, he represents not only the continuity within the Juilliard Quartet itself, but also, to a great degree, the development of chamber music in the United States during the second half of the 20th century.
Actually, retire may not be the best word to describe Mann's plans. Having recently recorded all the Beethoven and Brahms violin sonatas with the English pianist Stephen Hough, he hopes to look into more of the solo repertory. He said he might turn up to play quintets with the Mendelssohn String Quartet, in which his son, Nicholas Mann, is a violinist, or mixed ensemble works with the Mann Players, a flexible band of friends and relatives.
He also has several compositions in the works, among them a concerto for two violas; a piano sonata that he says is complete but needs revision; a handful of works for violin and narrator, which he plans to perform with his wife, Lucy Rowan, and a choral symphony. He has agreed to increase his teaching load at the Juilliard School. And he said he had a couple of books he wanted to write, one autobiographical, the other philosophical.
"You've heard of the seven-year itch," Mann said. "Well, I've got the 76-year itch." He was speaking energetically and with what sounded almost like a sense of liberation.
In a way, Mann's ambitious retirement program is a way of returning to his roots.
Although he became interested in chamber music when he was a 9-year-old violin student in Portland, Ore., it was as a soloist that he first made his name, having won the Naumburg Competition in 1941.
As a student at the Juilliard School, he added composition and conducting to his violin studies, and was a sufficiently advanced composer to study with Stefan Wolpe.
Still, the Juilliard Quartet has been the major focus of Mann's musical life since he helped found it, at the suggestion of the composer William Schuman, then the president of the Juilliard School, in 1946.
Except for Mann, the group's personnel list reads like a biblical genealogy: The original second violinist, Robert Koff, was succeeded by Isidore Cohen in 1958, Earl Carlyss in 1966 and Smirnoff in 1986. Raphael Hillyer, the founding violist, was succeeded by Samuel Rhodes in 1969, and Arthur Winograd, the first Juilliard cellist, was followed by Claus Adam in 1955 and Joel Krosnick in 1974.
From the start, the Juilliard established itself as a quartet that would concentrate both on the great staples of the Classical and Romantic literature - the Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven, Schubert and Brahms quartets - and contemporary works. The group played its first Bartok cycle at Tanglewood in 1946 and made it a specialty. Works by Elliott Carter, Milton Babbitt, Fred Lerdahl, Donald Martino, Walter Piston, Lukas Foss, Leon Kirchner and dozens more American composers found their way into the the quartet's stage repertory and discography.
Through their association with the Juilliard School, Mann and his colleagues were able to extend their influence to several generations of young players, many of whom have inherited the Juilliard Quartet's fondness for contemporary works. The LaSalle, Tokyo, Concord, Emerson, American, Shanghai, Brentano and St. Lawrence string quartets all passed through the Juilliard Quartet's studios.