Miriam Viazmenski, Contributing Photographer

After 47 years together, the legendary Emerson String Quartet performed their final concert at Yale on Tuesday night in the Morse Recital Hall. 

The Emerson String Quartet gave their last performance as part of the School of Music’s Oneppo Chamber Series. The Emerson String Quartet, hailed as “America’s greatest quartet” by Time Magazine, has held a central position in the genre of string quartets. After more than four decades as one of the world’s premier chamber music ensembles, the quartet will disband in October.

“With musicians like these, there must be some hope for humanity,” Jose García-León, dean of the School of Music, quoted from the London Times to a sold-out crowd. “I am not very far off in age, but I grew up listening and cherishing their recordings. I, as I’m sure many others, learned much about music from their superbly artistic performances, and for that I’m very grateful.”

As one of the biggest names in classical music, the quartet has made more than 30 acclaimed recordings and has been honored with nine GRAMMYs, three Gramophone Classical Music Awards and the Avery Fisher Prize — a prize awarded to the most outstanding American classical musicians. 

Their discography includes the complete string quartets of Ludwig van Beethoven, Felix Mendelssohn, Johannes Brahms, Béla Bartók, Anton Webern and Dmitri Shostakovich. 

“They’ve been at the center of the entire genre for almost half a century now, recording everything, commissioning works and performing around the world,” said Gregory Lewis, a violinist of the Callisto Quartet and the Yale College’s Fellowship Quartet in Residence. 

The quartet is composed of violinists Philip Setzer and Eugene Drucker, violist Lawrence Dutton and cellist Paul Watkins, who currently serves as the School of Music’s Polak Family Professor in the Practice of Cello.

As festival artists for many years at the Yale School of Music’s Norfolk Chamber Music Festival, the quartet’s connections with Yale run deep. The quartet members are close colleagues of many members of the School of Music faculty — they have performed extensively with School of Music Professors Ani Kavafian and David Schifrin. Schifrin is also the artistic director for the YSM’s Oneppo Chamber Music Series and worked with the Emerson Quartet to create the program for Tuesday’s concert.

During the concert, they danced through a diverse program, opening with “Lyric for Strings” by George Walker, the first Black composer to receive a Pulitzer Prize in Music.

After hearing the piece in its string orchestra version played by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra under Riccardo Muti, the quartet was “struck by how beautiful it was” and knew they wanted to put it in their repertoire, said Setzer. Additionally, Setzer said Walker told him that he wanted the quartet to play the piece for him, but Walker passed in 2018 — before they could play it for him. 

“Drink the Wild Ayre”, the quartet’s last commissioned work by Sarah Kirkland Snider MUS ’05 MUS ’06, was the second piece of the concert. 

“We picked [Snider] from a wide range of some of the most wonderful composing talent in the country,” said Watkins. “[Snider’s] writing really appealed to us from other quartets, and she had also been composer in residence at the Great Lakes Chamber Music Festival, which is a festival that I’m artistic director for, so we knew her pieces quite well.”

To Snider, collaborating with the Emerson Quartet was one of the “most meaningful artistic experiences of her life,” she said.

The quartet’s interpretations of the great string quartets were like “gospel” to her, Snider said. She added that she was honored to be asked to write for such an influential group of musicians, comparing it to being asked to write for “the Beatles.”

“There’s not a whiff of ego in the room, which is astonishing for a group this legendary, but you quickly realize that is the secret to their success,” Snider told the News. “They treat each other, and the composer, with consummate respect and collegiality, listening to each other’s ideas and suggestions with genuine openness and interest, with the shared goal of transforming notes on the page into magic.”

Following Snider’s piece, the quartet performed Mendelssohn’s colorful String Quartet No. 2 in A minor — one of Setzer’s top five favorite string quartets.

Then, after an intermission, they tackled Beethoven’s infamous String Quartet No. 13 in B flat major, a piece known for its beloved slow movement, the Cavatina and the visionary and monumental Grosse Fugue.

The audience on Tuesday night was aware of the gravity of the moment they were witnessing. Cheers and ovations that lasted minutes welcomed the quartet to stage well before they played their first note — a welcome not lost on Setzer, who was “very moved” by the “warmth” he felt from the audience, he said. 

“I think you applauded louder before we played,” Setzer said to the audience before their performance of the Mendelssohn, leading to another round of cheers and applause.

As a professor at Yale, Watkins explained that there is a certain amount of extra pressure they feel when playing in front of colleagues and students.

The quartet was “keenly aware” that the audience on Tuesday was one of the “most knowledgeable and distinguished” that they had ever played for, Watkins said.

But to Watkins, this awareness was a positive element. 

“It became a really intense performance because as performers, we can sense different levels of concentration in an audience, and it really did seem like Tuesday represented the highest level of concentration and appreciation,” he said. “So, by the time we finished the Grosse Fugue, we were invigorated by the whole thing.”

Many of the audience attendees on Tuesday night were students, and Setzer found the amount of young faces in the audience a “beautiful” reminder that classical music is not going to disappear when there are so many “wonderful young people learning and loving music,” he said.

After the Beethoven, the crowd gave the quartet a standing ovation, prompting them to perform an encore — “Vor deinen Thron Tret’ ich hiermit,” a chorale by J.S. Bach that was “taken by dictation, something that students here might shiver to hear,” said Watkins to the audience. 

On Wednesday, Setzer and Drucker taught a masterclass open to the public with the Callisto Quartet. 

Setzer first worked with the Callisto Quartet in 2018 at the Cleveland Institute of Music. Then, they spent a few summers at the Great Lakes Music Festival, where they had “a mentor-student relationship” with the Emerson Quartet, said Lewis.

“They are one of the reasons I wanted to spend my life playing string quartets,” said Hannah Moses, cellist of the Callisto Quartet. “They offer the rare perspective of people who have studied the vast quartet repertoire together for over four decades. After the impact they have had on my musical life, it has been an honor to have the chance to learn from them and to be present at one of their final concerts.”

Although the quartet is disbanding, they are not retiring. All of them will continue to play and teach.

According to Watkins, “it was a farewell gift, not a retirement gift.”

Watkins said he looks forward to focusing his energies towards his professorship at Yale.

“I’m very happy that we managed to get a performance at Yale so close to our final performance as a quartet because it feels like I’m closing a circle with my time at the Emerson Quartet while opening another circle as a professor of cello at Yale,” said Watkins, who replaced David Finckel as the quartet’s cellist in 2013. “Because if it wasn’t for the Emerson Quartet inviting me over to America in the first place, I don’t think I would have had the opportunity to teach at Yale.”

Setzer, Dutton and Drucker will continue to teach at Stony Brook University, the home of the Emerson String Quartet Institute. 

“The Emerson Quartet means everything to me,” said Lewis.

The Emerson Quartet will perform their final concert together at the Lincoln Center on Oct. 22.