Pro Arte Quartet

The Pro Arte Quartet was a Belgian string quartet founded in 1912 by students at the Brussels Conservatoire. Its first violin was Alphonse Onnou, a pupil of Alexandre Cornelis, and together with him the ensemble was formed by Laurent Halleux, Germain Prévost and Fernand Auguste Lemaire. It made its public debut in Brussels in 1913 and soon became known as an interpreter of modern music.

In 1918 Fernand Quinet took over the cello, replaced in 1921 by Robert Maas. That same year, together with Paul Collaer and Arthur Prévost, the Pro Arte Concerts were established, where works by Bartók, Casella, Honegger, Martinů, Milhaud and Rieti were premiered. In 1923 the quartet triumphed at the ISCM Festival in Salzburg and premiered works in Rome commissioned by Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge. It visited England in 1925, and in 1926 it performed at the opening of the Music Room of the Library of Congress in Washington. Tours of the United States and Canada followed and, in England, annual concert series in Cambridge between 1932 and 1938. In 1932 it received the title Quatuor de la Cour de Belgique.

In 1939 Onnou, Halleux and Prévost moved to the United States, while Maas was trapped in Belgium and played with the Artis Quartet. Onnou died in 1940, but the quartet continued until 1947 as the resident ensemble at the University of Wisconsin, directed first by Antonio Brosa and, from 1944, by Rudolf Kolisch. Since then the name has been used by the university's faculty quartet in Madison.

In the classical repertoire the quartet was initially less consistent, although over time it gained recognition in Mozart, Haydn and Schubert. Its style, centred on refinement and clarity of texture, was distinguished from the intensity of the Busch Quartet or the rich warmth of the Léner Quartet. It recorded numerous Haydn quartets, several for the first time. An Austrian quartet of the same name was founded in Salzburg in 1973.