Love Music History? Meet The Zoellner Quartet. Here's How They Made Their Mark On LA

Joseph Zoellner, Sr. founded The Zoellner Quartet with his three children in the early 1900s. The family traveled the world performing high-quality classical music, but eventually made their base in Southern California, bringing cultural influence to a region that needed it at the time.

A family affair

Alexandra Foley, great granddaughter of Joseph Zoellner, Sr., says it wasn't until she was adult that she got interested in her family's history.

"My mother kept telling me all these stories, and I knew that she had Charlie Chaplin's cane lying around somewhere and all these pictures of Einstein and the quartet," Foley says.

In early 2020, she learned about an archive with around 85,000 objects, which was left in her cousin's estate to the UCLA Library Special Collections. Foley then made it her mission to tell the story.

The quartet members

Zoellner, Sr. was a highly accomplished musician trained in Aschaffenburg, Germany. He grew up in Brooklyn, and eventually came to direct Niblo's Garden, a famous theater in New York. He had three kids: Antoinette, Amandus and Joseph (Foley's grandfather).

Foley says the quartet performed around 3,000 times between 1916 and 1929.

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Alexandra Foley

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They moved to Stockton, California in 1904. And so began the Northern California string quartet tour. They were beloved.

Their popularity led the children to study music in Brussels, and soon they were famous in Europe as well.

Ending up in Los Angeles

They moved back to the United States before World War I and soon settled in L.A., where Zoellner, Sr. opened the Zoellner Conservatory of Music.

The Zoellner Conservatory of Music, which was originally located at 3839 Wilshire Blvd, eventually expanded and opened branches in Hollywood and Burbank.

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Alexandra Foley

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"They were very open-hearted. They were very inclusive," Foley says. "Their closest friend was the African American architect, Paul Revere Williams, who was the first person to rent a studio in the Zoellner Conservatory of Music."

The conservatory was originally located at 3839 Wilshire Blvd., which is now part of Metro’s Purple Line Extension Project.

"I'm determined to have a plaque or something to memorialize the location. It's a no brainer," Foley says.

The Zoellners became good friends with other local greats like Albert Einstein, who taught at Caltech and played the viola, and filmmaker Charlie Chaplin.

The Zoellner family was good friends with Albert Einstein.

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Alexandra Foley

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Learn more about The Zoellner Quartet

Alexandra Foley will be speaking at USC on Monday, Oct. 30 from 3-6 p.m. at the Friends of the USC Libraries Lecture Hall in the Doheny Memorial Library, Room 240. Students from USC’s Thornton School of Music will also perform pieces from the quartet’s original repertoire. 

Foley's book, The Lost Quartet, will be published next year.

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