The quartet performed all the quartets within a week six times late in their career, between 1903 and 1907.
The Joachim Quartet was not the first to perform the complete Beethoven quartets as a cycle; that took place back in 1845 in London by the Beethoven Quartet Society, over a relatively leisurely stretch from 21 April to 16 June. This society repeated the cycle in 1846 and 1847.
It was another forty years before a second group put on a complete Beethoven cycle. A Dresden quartet led by the former second violinist from Joachim’s Quartet, Eduard Rappoldi, accomplished this in their 1888-89 season and another in 1892-93. The other members were Lange-Frohberg, Remmele, and Grützmacher. The violist used Hermann Ritter’s “Viola alta.”
These performances, led by Carl Prill while concertmaster at Magdeburg, are documented in Iván Mahaim’s Beethoven’s Late Quartets study, but are not included in most other secondary sources. Carl Prill (1864-1931) was a violin prodigy whose career began early when his father took him and his two younger brothers on tour. (Emil Prill became the solo flutist of the Berlin Königliche Kapelle under Felix Weingartner, and Paul Prill had a career as a Kapellmeister.) Carl Prill went on to become concertmaster with the Leipzig Gewandhaus from 1891-97, and then to an even higher profile position as first concertmaster at Vienna’s Hofoper. He taught at the Conservatory and continued his chamber music activity with his Prill Quartet.3 The Magdeburg group was made up of Edmund Froehlich, Moritz Trostdorf, and Albert Petersen. The Grosse Fuge was included as part of the cycle.
Another Dresden quartet led by Henri Petri followed Rappoldi’s example for their 1902-03 season. They included the Grosse Fuge.
Once the Joachim Quartet started making headlines with their cycles, several other quartets followed. Halir’s Quartet gave the Quartets as a cycle for Berlin with their 1905-06 season and the Gürzenich Quartet did the same for Cologne.
All of these earlier performances have a connection to Joachim: he took part in the 1847 London performances, and he was a teacher of Carl Prill and Henri Petri. Eduard Rappoldi was in Joachim’s quartet from 1871-77. He deserves recognition for his initiative in his programming of the cycle, which included the Grosse Fuge. Rappoldi also led the performance of two late Beethoven quartets in 1864 and 1865 in Rotterdam.
The Joachim Quartet was, however, the first to perform the cycle in five successive days, and they did this six times: at the 1903 Bonn festival; in Brussels in 1904; in Rome, Paris, and London in 1905; and in Vienna in 1907.
Joachim’s programming of the quartets as five concerts:
Op. 18, no. 1; Op. 127, Op. 59, no. 2
Op. 18, no. 3; Op. 59, no. 3; Op. 130
Op. 18, no. 4; Op. 18, no. 2; Op. 95; Op. 135
Op. 18, no. 6; op. 59, no. 1; Op. 132
Op. 18, no. 5; no. 74; op. 131
Bonn
17-21 May 1903
“The audiences were large and most enthusiastic. The financial result was most satisfactory, a surplus of 1,000 pounds having been handed over to the Beethovenhaus Society.”
Brussels
end of March 1904
The Joachim Quartet, with its Beethoven program, at the Cercle Artistique in Brussels, scored a success the like of which the Belgian capital has rarely known before. Through the efforts of the Countess of Flanders, King Leopold decorated Joachim with the Leopold order.” Musical Courier 48 no. 16 (20.4.1904): 6.
Paris
13-16, 18 March 1905
“The memory of the week just ended will certainly remain for a long time in the minds of all those who are enthusiastic about the cult of pure music. In the course of five successive soirées, for which the Philharmonic Society will rightly take credit, the famous Joachim Quartet, true to its promise, offered us on the whole the most sublime of performances and the purest of pleasures, by introducing us to the wonderful series of Beethoven’s seventeen [sic] string quartets with that heartfelt reverence, that incomparable nobility of style, that astonishing clarity of emotion and wonderfully fine shading of all the nuances that are characteristic of it alone and make it especially suited to reproducing the most immortal masterpieces.” Signale für die musikalische Welt (1905): 445.
Rome
21-28 March 1905
“The French ambassador had provided the Quartet with the Palazzo Farnese, an acoustically very favorable hall decorated with frescoes by Carracci, which gave rise to all kinds of foolish gossip against the German Embassy, but also against harmless German-French artist get-togethers. The subscribers paid fantastical prices, in part probably more because of the distinguished reception and the (much overrated) frescoes than because of Beethoven and Joachim; the promoter of the visit was Count Franchi, known for his writing on music as well as for his marriage to Teresina Tua. The German colony celebrated the violin master with Abruzzo folk dances and free German beer.”
London
20-24 November 1905
Joachim’s volume of tone is diminished, “but in other respects the great violinist’s playing this autumn has been even finer than usual, quite apart from the question of that profound insight into the varying moods of the music which is the great secret of himself and his colleagues of the quartet.”
Vienna
4-5, 7-9 March 1907
“Of course, we must completely dispense with criticism of the Joachim evenings. What does it matter whether one or the other passage of the venerable leader of this ideal quartet was brought out more powerfully, more brilliantly in earlier years–what does even an occasional small deviation from absolute purity of tone mean compared to the unforgettably compelling impression of the great whole.” Musikalisches Wochenblatt (21 March 1907), 297.