Background
Gustav Dannreuther was born on July 21, 1853, in Cincinnati, Ohio, the son of Abraham Dannreuther, who came from Strasbourg to Cincinnati in 1849, and Sophie Fishbacher.
Gustav Dannreuther was born on July 21, 1853, in Cincinnati, Ohio, the son of Abraham Dannreuther, who came from Strasbourg to Cincinnati in 1849, and Sophie Fishbacher.
After studying the violin with Henry Eich, of Cincinnati, Dannreuther was sent, in 1871, to the Berlin Hochschule, which had been reorganized by Joseph Joachim only a few years before, and there he studied the violin with Heinrich DeAhna, the eminent solo violinist and quartet player, who had joined the faculty of the Hochschule, and with Joachim himself; besides taking theory courses with Heitel.
Leaving the Hochschule in 1874, Dannreuther spent six months in Paris, and then passed to London, where he taught and played in public until 1877.
Dannreuther then returned to the United States and became a member of the Mendelssohn Quintet Club of Boston, with which he traveled through the United States, as well as in Canada and Newfoundland, until 1880. It was a period favorable toward a string organization devoted to high ideals. The severe industrial depression of 1873 had abated; the South was emerging from the era of the carpetbaggers with Reconstruction well underway; in the West, the age of the mining camp was merging in that of the railroad town.
Musicians of merit devoted to the ensemble could win an appreciation once only accorded to the virtuoso; and the services of Gustav Dannreuther and his associates in this field played their part in laying a foundation for the present widespread cult of chamber music in the United States.
In 1880, the year of Garfield's election to the presidency, Dannreuther established himself in Boston; and the year following he became a member of the Boston Symphony Orchestra called into existence by the liberality of Col. Henry Lee Higginson, and played in its first concert in the old Music Hall, October 22, 1881. As soon as a favorable opportunity offered, however, he felt himself unable to refuse a call to return to the chamber music ensemble, and from 1882 to 1884 was active as the conductor of the Buffalo Philharmonic Society, an organization which gave some sixty concerts of chamber music during the time he had it in charge.
In 1884 Dannreuther realized a long-cherished ambition and formed a string quartet of his own, which antedated by two years the founding of the Kneisel Quartet. The Beethoven String Quartet, renamed the Dannreuther Quartet on the tenth anniversary of its existence, was composed of Dannreuther himself (first violin), E. Schenck ('cello), O. Schill and later F. L. Smith (second violin), and I. Kovarik (viola).
For a time it was the oldest in the United States, and its cultural achievement during its more than thirty years of existence under the direction of its founder represents the latter's greatest contribution to the cause of better music in America. While prior to 1899 he was for three years the leader of the New York Symphony and Oratorio Societies under Walter Damrosch, after that date he devoted himself altogether to chamber music and to teaching, in which he was notably successful.
Dannreuther became an instructor in music at Vassar College in 1907. His activities as a teacher (in which connection he wrote a set of Chord and Scale Studies for Young Players) are cast in the shade, however, by his service in arousing appreciation for the classic literature of the string quartet, presented with meticulous beauty and reverence by the organization which bore his name. For years the three concerts given annually in New York by the quartet, assisted by distinguished artists, were regarded by the cognoscenti as events of the musical season, and while at the time the Dannreuther Quartet played, composers such as Debussy, Stravinsky, Goossens, Bloch, Malipiero and others had not yet introduced new harmonic factors of color and atmosphere in string quartet literature, the Quartet established, for the older literature, the standard the Kneisels maintained. Gustav Dannreuther died on December 19, 1923, in New York City, New York, of pneumonia.
In 1882, in Buffalo, Gustav Dannreuther married Nellie M. Taylor of that city.