When the great Hungarian quartet leader Jenö Léner arrived in New York on his own in 1943, he naturally wanted to carry on doing what he was famous for. One violinist does not a quartet make, so he found three other players and began planning a season. But he soon discovered the truth of the saying that a string quartet is like a marriage: he had neglected to arrange a divorce from his previous quartet.
In the inter-war years, the Léner Quartet, with its original line-up of Léner, Joseph Smilovits, Sándor Roth and Imre Hartman, had achieved an extraordinary fusion that transcended the personalities of the individual players and extended to every aspect of what the audience heard: bowing, tone, chording, vibrato,…