In Memoriam: Robert Mann 1920-2018

Juilliard String Quartet founding first violinist and emeritus faculty member Robert Mann (Diploma ’39, violin; faculty 1946–2011) died January 1 in Manhattan.

He was 97 and is survived by his wife of 66 years, Lucy Mann—they met at Juilliard when she became manager of concerts, in 1947. He’s also survived by their daughter, Lisa Mann Marotta, and their son, chamber music faculty member Nicholas Mann (Pre-College ’75; BM ’79, MM ’81, violin). When Nicholas Mann gave the 2014 commencement address at the Cleveland Institute of Music, he said that throughout his career his father “strived to stay an amateur. Not an amateur in today’s pejorative connotation, but in its true meaning: amour—to love—to do it for the love.”

Robert Nicholas Mann was born in Portland, Ore., on July 19, 1920 (two days before his longtime friend violinist Isaac Stern). He came to New York in 1938 to enroll at what was then called the Institute of Musical Art—now Juilliard; he studied violin with Édouard Dethier (faculty 1906–62), composition with Bernard Wagenaar (faculty 1925–67), and conducting with Edgar Schenkman (Diploma ’34 orchestral conducting; faculty 1940–48). Mann won the prestigious Naumburg Competition in 1941 and gave his New York debut in 1941, two days after the attack on Pearl Harbor. Mann served in the Army in World War II, which he mostly spent at a base on Long Island Sound, watching for U-boats. Among his Army friends were a violinist named Robert Koff (JSQ 1946–58) and a cellist named Arthur Winograd (JSQ 1946–55). After the war Mann returned to Juilliard, where he had also been a graduate student, as a faculty member. President William Schumann wholeheartedly supported Mann’s plan to found a quartet that would have the then-radical mission of playing “classical music as if it had been just composed [and] contemporary music as if it were classical,” as Mann would recall in a 1993 NPR interview. He soon recruited his friends Koff and Winograd as well as Boston Symphony Orchestra violist Raphael Hillyer (JSQ 1946–69)—and the Juilliard String Quartet was born.

The ensemble gave its first official concert in December 1947, launching a storied career that continues today. Mann would play thousands of concerts with the quartet— which saw change in its personnel but never its mission or dedication—over the next half century before his final one, in July 1997. In one of the many interviews he gave at the time of his retirement, Mann told a reporter from the Billings (Mont.) Gazette, “Consider the contributions America has made to music. Magically, I’ve been a part of it.”

Mann's JSQ colleagues paid tribute to him in the Journal