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The establishment of the string quartet as a genre in American musical life can be traced to the work of the Kneisel Quartet (1885–1917), which gave the world premiere of Antonín Dvořák’s American Quartet (1893) and, with guests, the first U.S. performances of Johannes Brahms’s String Quintet No. 2 (1893), Maurice Ravel’s Piano Trio in A minor (1914) and Arnold Schoenberg’s Verklärte Nacht (1899). Although the Kneisel Quartet left no recorded legacy (aside from a roughly 15-minute test pressing of movements from quartets by Beethoven, Mendelssohn and Anton Rubinstein), its important place in Gilded Age musical culture can be judged in part by the contents of an archive at Yale University, the Love Family Papers. In these letters to three women who served over the years as secretaries and schedulers to the quartet and its founder, Franz Kneisel (1865–1926), some of the most eminent musical personalities of the late 19th and early 20th centuries give us a window into the building of a taste for chamber music in American concertgoing. The papers also disclose a century-old conversation that will be more than familiar to concert organizers today: Worries about audiences, disputes over programs, haggling over fees, venue scheduling conflicts, and entreaties from composers. By closely examining some of these documents, and drawing on other contemporary witnesses as well as the work of cultural historians such as Joseph Horowitz, I show that while pre-World War I predilections for certain composers (i.e., César Franck and Richard Wagner) have shifted with time, what has not changed from that time to this is the belief that chamber music should be a part of American musical life. I will also assess the repertory choices of the Kneisel Quartet and demonstrate that while some once-popular pieces have vanished from our concert halls, the quartet offered a more varied, looser style of programming than we have today, with more of an eye on entertainment. It also prioritized the championing of new music as a matter of course, including a host of pieces by contemporary Americans. In so doing, and in its extensive educational work (the Kneisel was the first-ever string quartet in residence, at the new Institute of Musical Art in 1905), the quartet left a powerful legacy that established chamber music as a vital taste for American audiences, and offers some lessons we can still profit from in our own time.