The Pro Arte Quartet: A Century of Musical Adventure on Two Continents by John W. Barker (review)

John W. Barker, emeritus professor of history at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, has finally written a book on a subject based in his home-town, even at his home institution: the Pro Arte Quartet, originally founded in Belgium in 1912 as Quatuor Pro Arte, has been in residency at the University of Wisconsin–Madison since May 1940. His book "represents a final contribution to the celebration" of the quartet's centennial (p. ix).

In his preface, Barker confesses, "As a scholar of the history of centuries long past, I am not used to dealing with living descendants of, or participants in, the actual life of such an organization as the Pro Arte Quartet" (p. x.). His survey of unpublished sources betrays his reliance on the admittedly sketchy material available in Madison, supplemented by the papers of the quartet's early benefactor, Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge, at the Library of Congress, and its later first violinist, Rudolf Kolisch, at Harvard University. Because much of this material is rather unorganized, and Barker's book is "aimed at both a specialized and general readership," he dispensed with any "citational apparatus" (p. xi). We do not know whether Barker followed the publisher's wish in doing so, but the "minimal identification [of sources] within the text, in the hope that readers might derive some guidance to them" (p. xii) leaves many questions unanswered.

Barker's description of the prewar years of the quartet draws heavily from Anne Van Malderen's dissertation "Historique et réception des diverses formations Pro Arte (1912–1947): Apport au répertoire de la musique contemporaine" (Catholic University of Louvain-la Neuve, 2012; https://dial.uclouvain.be/pr/boreal/object/boreal:114941 [accessed 19 August 2018]) and from interviews that Germain Prévost, the quartet's original violist, gave in the late 1970s—thirty to sixty-seven years after the fact. Why Barker does not quote any material from prewar European periodicals remains a mystery. True, digitization of historical newspapers is less advanced in Europe than in North America, and no one would expect an octogenarian scholar to crisscross the Old World in search of elusive written evidence of concerts. But since Barker knows (and gives) most of the concert dates, he could—and should—have approached European archivists in order to flesh out at least some outstanding events, such as the quartet's appearance at the 1923 International Society for Contemporary Music festival in Salzburg (p. 15), the 1924 Italian tour of Arnold Schoenberg's Pierrot lunaire under the composer's direction (p. 18), or the intriguing story of the last German concert of the original foursome—Alphonse Onnou, Laurent Halleux, Prévost, and Robert Maas—in January 1934 and its aftermath: "on their way homeward, the players were arrested by the police in Aachen, causing an outcry in the press. Assurances from the conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler won their release" (p. 44). If this account is correct, it should have been easy to illustrate this "outcry in the press" with a few quotations.

Barker's perspective is an American one, which becomes evident when Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge enters the narrative in 1923 (p. 16). She formed close ties with first violinist Onnou. From 1926, the quartet made no fewer than seventeen American tours. It is interesting to see how the itineraries more and more gravitated toward colleges rather than cities, betraying the "limited market" (p. 114) for chamber music in the United States. Beginning in 1932, the quartet held summer residencies at Mills College in Oakland, California. It was also this focus on colleges that left the quartet stranded in Madison after the German invasion of Belgium in May 1940.

The year 1940 was fateful throughout: in February, illness prevented cellist Maas from entering the...