 A very warm welcome to Pierre-Colombierre, Caperelle, Magadur, Marie-Cylaine, and Raphael Merle. In one word it's the famous, the world-famous, Katoueur Eben, string quartet. We all know and love. My name is Wolf-Tita Zeifert. I'm the general manager of G-Handler. Maybe I should say the world-famous text publisher. And if I look into the market, I doubt that there is a big market still for string quartet ensembles, especially for the young. There are so many wonderful young string quartets coming up. So I'm asking myself, where can they make money from? Is there enough audience? So I would like to ask you as being also a teacher, you teach string quartet music in master classes and at universities. So I have two questions. Why do you do this? And is there a market? What do you think? Why do we do that? I think first that we are really lucky to have the opportunity to teach the young generation and to make them maybe love our everyday work and job. And this passion we have to dig into the music and to search altogether in the music and also the relationship we have human speaking in a quartet. It's an experiment that we love to share and we want to make them aware of that. I think when we were young, even if our access to the social network was not so great, now it's everybody makes no himself through the networks. But anyway, in France when we were young, only four or five quartets existed. And now it's tsunami. It's an explosion of string quartet all around the world. We have many young and good groups in Munich here. We know a lot in France, in Belgium, in Holland, everywhere. And it's amazing to see. They want to do it. They have passion. They work every day. And it's a question that we can wonder if there will be a job for any of them, even if there are a lot of competitions, a lot of managers now taking care of that. And I think even for the audience, the passion for string quartet is growing up because I think we have more and more chamber music concerts. Being a publisher, I would like to ask you, when you go into the classes, what kind of scores do their students bring to learn the music? Is it always their word text? Is it always Henle? Certainly not. But it happens. It still happens as students bring some very old editions which to our perception now doesn't make any sense anymore. It's very important to realize that the old text necessity is really some kind of a synchrone phenomenon to the historical informed way of playing. And with us, the Harnokur revolution, probably the need of old text wouldn't have been that big. I'm glad Henle did not wait so long to bring the main classical repertoire. Because if you put Mozart and Haydn and early Beethoven and early Schubert, if you put them out of old text, you access nearly to another language. It's like old style 19th century art of playing where people were thinking very honestly and good-willing, they would supplying some lack of composers with transforming slurs or eventually change. There's the famous story of the dissonance in quartet Mozart. But yeah, now I think most of our generation, we all made the experience if you once play a Mozart quartet, very old style edition of Mozart quartet and then switch suddenly to yours. Suddenly everything becomes clear in terms of articulation, meaning, lightness. But it still happens. Some students don't know and it's always very funny. So if you teach, you will advise them to throw away the old edition and to use the old text edition and you have your arguments. It's demanding, yes, of course. There's repertoire, still which is not of course concerned by this. But when this is the classical repertoire, I remember when we were younger we also bring our score and it was old edition. We were not able to, because it was too early for you. Talking about repertoire, it would be my next question. During the last decade we really forced to expand our catalogue, especially with the string quartet. And so Henle at the moment is pretending to offer the core repertoire for the classical romantic. But I would like to ask you, if you would have a visionist for me, maybe you can answer very shortly, everybody of you. What do you miss in the catalogue? Luckily you did already a wonderful job and as we have only 20 years of concerts behind us we still have a thousand of work to do with your... Which are already edited. But we are inside the project nowadays actually with the Belcea quartet and we play the Mendelssohn octet. And we don't have the material, we have all the editions and it's so unclear and we were all eight talking. We thought we had this meeting with you and it should be wonderful to ask you if the Mendelssohn octet would be out for a day. Yes, it's wonderful. This is my first wish. Okay, thank you. What about your wish? Janacek. Janacek, two. Yeah, the two, both Janacek. We play the first one already, but we had already two editions in the quartet and trying to understand it was so different that we thought maybe we have to throw one and just one by chance, I don't know. Maybe I would say full recorded? Full recorded. I would find it interesting. I think it's time to introduce the Handler Library app now, the digital version of the Complete Handler Catalog. You all know that we have this app out about six years now. We are the only music publisher in the world who invested a lot of money and brain into developing the digital app. I know that the Katouare Band is not using the app. Why not? I actually do use it. It's recent. While we were learning Brahms number three recently, or a Mozart G major, I had the iPad on the stand and knowing we would anyway play on paper on stage was not the question of training myself to play with the pedal on the iPad, but it was very interesting to use the little historic remarks because you don't have to umbletten and find where it is. And the second good thing is just tap and go to the corresponding place. Score and export. But for this I need a compatible pedal, which I don't have yet. Dad, Mali? I have to say I was almost totally in love with that. I have to say it, but I'm also really romantic and I really need to touch the paper and to write with my pencil. You know, I don't know, I'm a bit old fashioned, but maybe one day. Maybe I should give you the app with a candle light. Then you make a new start. I think as a second violinist, I will do a compromise. I will use my paper for playing in concert, but I will definitely get it as he gets for scores. And with me travelling with and looking at every score, because if I bring it with the paper version, I need a second suitcase and it's impossible. Yes, and of course we are travelling with that and we forget one score at home. We are sure we have everything there, so you don't have to lose the iPad, it would be a problem. The good news for our listeners is that the Katria Ray-Ban is providing the complete Beethoven string quartet for each separate voice with the fingering and the bowings for the Henle app. And this is really remarkable and will revolutionize. Also I think the rehearsing of this repertoire, because in the past there is no printed string quartet with the fingering of anybody. Maybe I have to explain for all the musicians they don't know what's happening. You have your, let's say the viola part of Opus 18, number one, and you have the clean, naked urtext. And in the future you can click on the name of Katria Ray-Ban or Marie and like a layer, the urtext comes with the way how you play it. That brings me to another question. Is it really your way to play? Is it really your fingering and your bowing or is it more for the pedagogical target? I think the fact that we accepted it, the idea is to give some peace of you. So you give your fingerings, it's not to tell people, okay, play this, it's good for you because we will never know. It's so personal with the morphology, with the instrument you play, with the, of course. But I think it's good to just share honestly what we do. Very good. Believe me. Very good point. Yeah. Believe me, there are some violinists looking at my fingerings they will think that the guy is crazy because sometimes I put four, four, four, you know, with this kind of fingering. Some people avoid four finger because it's weak and I love to use it, this kind of thing. You will do it for the app, your fingering, your personality. Of course. Wonderful. Because if I use a fingering, it's always for my personal expressive reasons. So I hope I can share it to some violinists. This is my passion to, yeah, of course. I'm sure that there are so many young string quartets out there in the whole globe. And not only the youngsters, also your competitors will have a look. What is he doing? So there will be, I think, a big success with our idea to share your personal instructions, to say for the Beethoven, okay, it's a huge project and it will take some time. But we have the plan to, latest, to publish it in the next Beethoven year. So I hope that we are still alive. I would like to go a little bit more deep into the next question. What's the deeper reason for the fact that the string quartet is such an established ensemble for so many centuries and not the string quintet or the string trio as a group. So the discipline rein is the quartet and not the quintet. Why? It's very probably both physical, natural, and also cultural. But the physical reason, the acoustic reason is quite easy to understand. That the human hearing, listening, can't integrate too many baselines. If you would put two double basses, one viola and one violin, the large spectrum of the two double basses would make one more violin and one more viola. It's probably useless or even covered. And acoustically speaking, it's just because of the spectrum of the natural harmonics, octave and fifth and fourth and third. The higher you go, the closer it becomes. So it's logical that the two violinists, they share the upper register. And if you consider the distance, we have one octave distance, but she only has a fifth distance to him. So that's absolutely following the rules of the nature. And culturally speaking, it's because of the Enlightenment Revolution in the 18th century. String quartet became under the writing of Haydn, principally, already the discipline reine, because of the revolution, it incarnated. No conductor, no polyphonic instrument, no soloist, just for equal personnel. You play around the globe. The string quartet repertoire from Haydn to nowadays. I'm interested to learn from you. Is there a different audience in the different society, in the different countries? Because I find out that my success, my commercial success for vertex dedition goes more and more to Asia. So the Asians are more and more open to our music. I will always remember the first time we went to Brazil, to Rio. We played... I don't remember what we played. A piano quintet with Jean Frédéric? Yes, with Neuburgé. And the audience, first, was very young. And they stood up and shouted like in a rock concert. Really, because they don't make a difference. They were excited, and that's all. Nobody said to them, you know, it's classical music. You have to be serious. You have to be quiet, but they were quiet because they were listening. And you have to respect, you have to... No, no, they were behaving like they wanted to behave. And in Africa, also in Nairobi, we played for the young in a very miserable place in the suburb of Nairobi. Fantastic place, by the way, it's an association who takes care of young people and brings them to music, and they save their life, really. And we played a bit of a quartet for them, and every time there was a fortissimo subito, like so every page, they were like this, reacting. Why in Europe we don't do that? Because I don't know, it's classical music, you know? And in Japan, they are so respectful of the job we do because they know the commitment. They are a very serious society. They like to do things correctly, and they know that when they are going to listen to a string quartet, things have been thought, worked very hard. And you feel the respect for our job. And of course in Germany, when we play, we feel spied. But we like that. We know that half of the audience knows every note, knows what is the structure, what is the form, so not. And in America, some of the audience in the US have a great knowledge, but they behave more simply, maybe. I think Korea, we should talk also about Korea or about France or Italy, South Italy, but we don't have enough time. I'm sorry to say, we are also hungry on Thursday. And it's really time to say a very warm thank you.