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.
[Footnote A: M. Betti has published a number of critical articles in the
_Guide Musical_ of Brussels, the _Rivista Musicale_ of Turin, etc.]