Robert Mann: A musical revolutionary on par with Cage, Bernstein, Callas and Gould
Robert Mann once explained in an interview that, zealously fired up after founding the Juilliard String Quartet in 1946, he went so far as to obtain an orgone accumulator. It wasn't enough that the feisty young ensemble already exhibited an explosive energy the likes of which had never been imagined in the refined realm of chamber music. The irrepressible violinist expected to further intensify Beethoven and Bartok string quartets with some of that supposed psychic/sexual power (later debunked) from the so-called orgone force.
"My epitaph," Mann joked to me, "will be that I was the first person to put a string quartet in an orgone box."
The time, I'm sad to report, has now come
