Violin Mastery - ADOLFO BETTI - Part 1
THE TECHNIC OF THE MODERN QUARTET
What lover of chamber music in its more perfect dispensations is not familiar with the figure of Adolfo Betti, the guiding brain and bow of the Flonzaley Quartet? Born in Florence, he played his first public concert at the age of six, yet as a youth found it hard to choose between literature, for which he had decided aptitude,[A] and music. Fortunately for American concert audiences of to-day, he finally inclined to the latter. An exponent of what many consider the greatest of all violinistic schools, the Belgian, he studied for four years with César Thomson at Liège, spent four more concertizing in Vienna and elsewhere, and returned to Thomson as the latter’s assistant in the Brussels Conservatory, three years before he joined the Flonzaleys, in 1903. With pleasant recollections of earlier meetings with this gifted artist, the writer sought him out, and found him amiably willing to talk about the modern quartet and its ideals, ideals which he personally has done so much to realize.
[A] M. Betti has published a number of critical articles in the Guide Musical of Brussels, the Rivista Musicale of Turin, etc.
Violin Mastery
Talks with Master Violinists and Teachers
by Frederick H. Martens
Published 1919
