This music, so common in Germany, was
almost unknown in Paris before 1870. There was nothing but the Maurin
Quartette, which gave five or six concerts every winter in the Salle
Pleyel, and played Beethoven's last quartettes there. But these
performances only attracted a small number of artists;[236] and so far
as the general public was concerned the _Societe des derniers quartuors
de Beethoven_ had the reputation for devoting itself to a singular and
incomprehensible kind of music that had been written by a deaf man.
[Footnote 236: The quality of the audience atoned, it is true, for its
small numbers. Berlioz used to come to these concerts with his friends,
Damcke and Stephen Heller; and it was after one of these performances,
when he had been very stirred by an _adagio_ in the E flat quartette,
that he burst out with, "What a man! He could do everything, and the
others nothing!"]
The true founder of chamber-music concerts in Paris was M. Emile
Lemoine, who started the society called _La Trompette_. He has given us
a history of his work in the _Revue Musicale_ (15 October, 1903). He was
an engineer at the Ecole Poly-technique; and after he had left school he
formed, about 1860, a quartette society of earnest amateurs, though they
were not very skilled performers.
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