Music's New Friends

String quartets have long played to a smaller public than flea circuses. But one U.S. musical organization, Manhattan's New Friends of Music, which has succeeded in making chamber music pay, last week gathered reverently to put on their 100th concert.

While the famed Budapest Quartet played compositions by Schumann and Haydn, a packed house listened with hushed attention, savored each trill of the viola, each violinistic vibration. Many of the audience were well-known Manhattan musicians who had dropped in for a quiet taste of musicians' music. Many others were concert-hardened music lovers whom only the caviar of two violins, a viola and a cello could drag from their homes on a pleasant afternoon. But nearly all of them were regular patrons to whom the New Friends' concerts are a weekly ritual.

In the last six years the New Friends have played their devotees whole marathons of chamber music: virtually the entire output of Beethoven, Haydn, Schumann, Brahms, Mozart. They have never deigned to relieve the high-brow austerity of their concerts by anything so low-brow as a violin concerto or an opera aria.

The New Friends of Music was founded by a smart Manhattan business executive named Ira A. Hirschmann (vice president of Bloomingdale's department store) in order to impress a lady pianist he wanted to marry. Some men buy their prospective brides platinum rings. Black-haired Ira Hirschmann gave Pianist Hortense Monath the New Friends to play with.

While Executive Hirschmann handled the New Friends' business matters with an expert hand, Wife Hortense dictated its artistic policies with the relentlessness of a musical Robespierre. A woman of stern, uncompromising tastes, she decreed that the New Friends should have no stars, no intermissions, no encores, no flowers, no free passes. For her audiences she hired a few carefully selected soloists (Pianist Artur Schnabel, Violinist Joseph Szigeti and others) and a roster of the finest string quartet players in the U.S.

Instead of picking an artist and asking what program he would like to play, she picked a program and hired the artist to play it. She presented Beethoven's entire output of chamber music, quartet by quartet. The audience could like it or lump it.

When Soprano Lotte Lehmann, hired for a selected group of Schubert Lieder, complained that the management had refused to sell extra seats on the stage, and that she felt lonely without a stageful of her devoted admirers, Impresario Monath fixed her with a steely stare. "Mme. Lehmann," said she coldly, "you are not alone on the stage. Franz Schubert is with you."

Even the most astute of Manhattan musical managers prophesied that Impresario Monath's funereally earnest concert-giving would end in a bust. But Manhattan concertgoers bought out 97% of the first season's tickets before she had even presented her first concert. Today, the New Friends still operate without the help of wealthy patrons, still qualify as one of the very few entirely self-supporting high-brow musical institutions in the U.S.

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