Background
Edward J. De Coppet was born on May 28, 1855 in New York City, New York, United States. He was the son of Louis de Coppet, a Swiss who came to America in 1828, and married Juliet Minerva Weston of Connecticut.
Edward J. De Coppet was born on May 28, 1855 in New York City, New York, United States. He was the son of Louis de Coppet, a Swiss who came to America in 1828, and married Juliet Minerva Weston of Connecticut.
Edward was educated in Switzerland.
On his return to America as a young man succeeded his father as a banker in New York, eventually founding the Stock Exchange house of De Coppet & Doremus.
So passionately was he devoted to the art of tone in one of its noblest manifestations, the chamber ensemble, that finance might be called his avocation and music his profession.
A cultivated Maecenas in the highest sense of the word, his devotion to music was shared by his wife, an excellent pianist; and it was in the sympathetic atmosphere of a home where the cult of the string ensemble (as of the piano trio, quartet, and quintet) was supreme, that the central interest of his life took form, which always will be associated with his name.
His fine impersonal desire to advance the art he loved raised his efforts above the status of a mere personal amusement. It is only just to regard him as an artist whose masterpiece was the Flonzaley Quartet.
The books in which are recorded the programs, participants, and guests of all his musical gatherings for thirty years, from October 21, 1886, to April 21, 1916, record one thousand and fifty-four meetings for chamber music in his home.
The Flonzaley Quartet which, though long self-supporting, was Edward de Coppet’s great achievement, was founded in 1904. It represented an attempt to weld four artists of superior merit into a homogeneous artistic whole, by making it financially possible for them to devote their entire time and effort to the development of a perfect string ensemble. The members of the original Quartet (Messrs. Betti, Pochon, Ara, and Archambeau) entered with zeal into the spirit of the esthetic adventure. It took the name of the “Flonzaley Quartet” from the Villa Flonzaley, near Vevey, on Lake Geneva, the De Coppet summer home in Switzerland; and passed in time from playing for the private entertainment of its patron and guests, and in public concerts made possible by his generosity, to independent existence as a self-supporting musical organization whose primacy in its particular field was still generally acknowledged after a quarter of a century.
To thousands of American music-lovers it has revealed at their best the choicest works of ancient and modern string quartet literature.
Edward de Coppet died a few hours after listening to the ensemble he had created play one of the later Beethoven quartets.
Quotes from others about the person
“He never supposed that, as do those who aspire to be patrons of art less for the sake of the art than for that of patronage, that he could create what he was after by the simple process of signing checks. His method was that of all genuine art: indefatigable experiment extending through a long series of years. ” (Daniel Gregory Mason)
“Sustained by Beethoven’s sublime thought, whose beauties he had lucidly analyzed an hour before his death, he passed suddenly and painlessly away and this death, so serene and simple, seemed the inevitable epilogue of a life like his, altogether expended in the pursuit of goodness and the love of beauty. ”