Fiddler’s Beat

Mr. Jascha Heifetz (born 1901, died 1987)
Violin Virtuoso Section
Heaven

February 2, 2012

Dear Mr. Heifetz,

Today, February 2nd, is your birthday. Happy birthday, sir, and my deepest thanks for the miracle of your artistry. I have listened to you play the violin throughout my entire life—actually my entire life plus nine months to be exact, since mother attended your concerts and listened to your recordings throughout her pregnancy with me.

In my childhood, I first heard you performing Beethoven’s Violin Concerto on our family’s records. The purity and shimmering tenderness of your playing brought unexpected tears to my young eyes. Then, as a young violin student struggling with the daunting difficulties of the instrument, your virtuosity astonished me. My teacher at the time, Peter Meremblum, you may recall had gone to school with you in Russia. Hardly a lesson went by without Meremblum’s making a comment about you. “Heifetz practices six to eight hours a day. Heifetz plays two hours of scales before he even looks at a piece of music.” The Heifetz campaign continued at home. My parents urged me to work harder so that I could become the next Heifetz. And when I slacked off they shook their heads sadly. How could I expect to be a Heifetz when I wasted time playing ball? At student concerts, “He’s no Heifetz” from my dad was the kiss of death.

The steady flow of comments was a testimony to your playing. You of all people know how difficult the violin is and that only a precious few have truly mastered it. Yet you had something beyond this. They say that an accident takes place when several unlikely things converge at the very same moment. You were the perfect example of a statistical improbability, or better said, a divine accident—the confluence of an ideal violinist’s body, an uncommon musical gift, and an obsessive need for perfection on every level. But there was something more. You seemed to have the nervous system of a humming bird: you could execute the minutest details at breakneck speed, shift moods in a split second, and recklessly dare all where others were prudently cautious. I listened to your recordings in disbelief. It was simply not possible for a human being to play with such wizardry. I despaired of ever even remotely approaching your level.

For a brief time as a teenager, though, I dared to think otherwise. I liked to play a little game with you, Mr. Heifetz, putting my assigned music on the stand and your rendition on the record player. It might be any number of pieces I worked on—Tchaikowsky’s Violin Concerto, Saint-Saëns’ Havanaise, or Sarasate’s Gypsy Airs. First I listened to you, shaking my head in wonder. Then I practiced the same piece myself. At the outset, the gap between us seemed too immense to cross, but with work I improved, and with improvement my spirits soared. I was catching up. Why, I was almost as good as you! Time to swagger over to the record player and listen to you again—you whose fingers moved so effortlessly, whose phrasing was like liquid mercury, whose playing seared with white heat one moment and teased playfully the next. “Jascha, Jascha”, I muttered despairingly as the record ended. You reigned over every would-be violinist, inspiring the industrious, crushing hope for those not supremely gifted, and stalking the lazy.

Finally, I heard you in person. Small, slender, but immaculately dressed, you stepped out onto the stage with a minimum of gesture. You did not accept our welcoming applause with deep bows but merely tilted your head in our direction. As you stood in front of the Los Angeles Philharmonic waiting for your solo entrance, you hardly moved, and even when you began to play, there were no excessive gestures, no grandstanding for the public, only those motions necessary to play the violin. Visually, you gave off a feeling of reserve, even aloofness, and yet the perfection of your delivery and the range of expression were astonishing. You challenged the most difficult of passages by rushing headlong into them—a display of fearlessness that took my breath away. Yet the lyrical moments had such tenderness and sensitivity that I wanted to weep. It was a performance of fire and shimmering light delivered in a container made out of ice.

Other violin virtuosos engaged me differently than you. When I listened to Fritz Kreisler, someone I know you admired greatly and who shares your birth date, I could easily imagine a benign and loving 19th century world lit by candlelight. The Hungarian violinist, Joseph Szigeti, my last teacher, affected me no less deeply but quite differently with his keen intellect and touching nobility. But when you played, Mr. Heifetz, my heart raced and the palms of my hands broke out in sweat. The improbability of your performances was almost too much to bear.

I risked listening to you only occasionally as my years in music school came to an end and I prepared for a concert career. Your playing was too seductive, too hypnotic. I wanted to sound like you—a common if forgivable trait in young players under the spell of a great artist. It was, of course, an impossibility, but also highly inadvisable. There could be only one Heifetz. My job was to become Steinhardt, whoever he might turn out to be and however long that would take.

Last February, a weekend seminar devoted to you took place in Athens, Georgia. Pianist Seymour Lipkin and I played a recital that included Dreams in the Twilight by Richard Strauss, an unpublished transcription of yours. The next day, God’s Fiddler, a new documentary about you, was shown. Afterwards, there was a panel discussion with Seymour Lipkin who had performed with you for U.S. soldiers during the Second World War (remember that scrawny but immensely gifted kid with the big glasses?), John and John Anthony Maltese, father and son, who are writing a book about you, Peter Rosen, the film’s producer, and yours truly. We had a lively enough discussion about you as a violinist, artist, and personality, but I couldn’t help thinking that you’ve been the subject of similar if less formal conversations over the course of my entire adult life. How many times have we musicians gathered together during rehearsal breaks, back stage before concerts, or over dinner and drinks to talk breathlessly about your performances of say, Paganini’s Perpetual Motion, Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess, Bruch’s Scottish Fantasy, Brahms’ Violin Concerto, Bach’s Chaconne, or easily dozens and dozens of other works.

Several of us who revere you, Mr. Heifetz, have coined an expression for that rare individual in any field, be it music, sports, chess, dance, etc., who has reached your exalted pinnacle of excellence. “He’s a real Jascha”, we’ll say, conferring our highest possible praise. In your case, however, that pinnacle apparently came with a price. We rejoiced reading about your earliest days as a child prodigy and loved seeing the home movies of you as a wildly successful and fun loving young man. But then came painful stories about how you began to change over the years. Jack Pfeiffer, who was both our Guarneri String Quartet’s and your record producer at RCA for several years, told us that you once called him to discuss your latest recording project. When the conversation ended, Jack apparently asked you how you were. “I called you,” you said. “You call me if you want to know how I am”.

Most of us would find it hard to imagine how much the public’s expectations and your self-imposed standards must have pressed in on you. Perhaps your iron-fisted resolve was what inadvertently began to separate you from people. Perhaps it led you, along with the devotion and kindness you often showed to your students, to become quirky, suspicious, and mistrustful of many of your friends and colleagues.

And yet, year after year, and despite whatever else was taking place in your life, you continued to play the violin like a God for me, for us. Seymour Lipkin said that despite the highly dangerous circumstances of the war raging nearby, not once in the dozens of concerts you generously gave for United States troops did you play less than your very best. Perhaps, it was only through the violin that you could truly communicate from your heart to each one of ours.

Although you passed away in 1987, I still listen to your records. Each time you play, my heart races, the palms of my hands begin to sweat, and I shake my head in wonder.

Happy birthday, and thank you, Mr. Heifetz. You are a real Jascha!

My daughter, Natasha, once came home from her weekly piano lesson and asked to use my metronome—a request from her teacher. I told Natasha that I didn’t own a metronome. At the next lesson, her teacher insisted I go out and buy one. The clerk at my local music store looked at me oddly as he rang up the sale. “Isn’t it a bit late in your career to be buying a metronome for the first time?”

Well, yes. I must have been over forty years old at the time. But let me explain. I have very mixed feelings about the metronome, mainly because it’s so… metronomic. Is there anything in our lives that has the exact, undeviating pulse of a metronome? Even the beating heart at rest has a certain amount of variation to it—so does the stride of a long-distance runner, Ravel’s Bolero, a Rock and Roll beat, Old Faithful geyser, and even the earth’s daily turn around the sun, be it ever so minimal. Then why do we put such faith in the metronome?

It wasn’t always this way, at least not until 1815 when Johann Maelzel patented a device to be used as a tool for musicians under the title, an “Instrument/machine for the improvement of all musical performances called the metronome”. The word “metronome” is of Greek origin: metron = measure, nomos = regulating. How did musicians keep a steady beat before 1815? And did they even want to? There are accounts of Ludwig van Beethoven, ironically the first notable composer to indicate specific metronome markings in his music, playing his own compositions on the piano with extreme freedom—in effect defying the very gadget that he found so useful.

I suppose composers put down metronome markings in order to suggest an ideal tempo. But is there such a thing as an ideal tempo, and if so can a composer pull it out of thin air, or in Beethoven’s case, being stone deaf, out of his inner ear, especially after the notes are already written down on paper? Even more confusing to performers is the fact that many modern day composers such as Bartok and Shostakovich have often brazenly ignored their own works’ tempo markings when recording them. Worse still, you might not even like their tempos. I recently patrolled YouTube looking for performances of Edvard Grieg’s Wedding Day at Troldhaugen, a piano work I happen to love. To my surprise, I found a recording of Grieg himself performing the work—but much too fast!!!

It’s fun to bad mouth the metronome but I must confess having used one long before I ever considered buying the thing. The traditional tempo indications such as Adagio for slow, Andante for a walking tempo, and Presto for fast give one only a general idea, but a quarter note = 126 or 82 or any other number allows for no wiggle room. The metronome’s pulse is non negotiable. That steady tic-tic-tic-tic helped steady my rhythm at its shakiest and at least gave me an entry-level tempo to consider. Easiest, of course, was to shamelessly bum a metronome off my fellow musicians, or that being unavailable, to rely on the metronome by another name, the clock. Since 60, for example, indicates a beat of one second duration, musicians know the useful trick of saying or thinking “one thousand, two thousand, three thousand” to pretty much give “one second, two seconds, three seconds”. Sing John Philip Sousa’s Stars and Stripes Forever and voilà: 120 to the beat. Hum your favorite disco song and you should be at 126.

These days, I tend to regard metronome markings a bit more cavalierly. For example, I’ve been working on Bela Bartok’s Sonata for Solo Violin lately. In practicing Melodia, the Sonata’s third movement, I had carelessly ignored Bartok’s marking of 90-92 to the eighth note, but also his more traditional tempo indication of “Adagio”. I simply played what I felt. But when I checked, my tempo happened to fall quite close to Bartok’s metronome number. This leads me to believe that while 90-92 to the beat gives an exact tempo and “Adagio” a more general one, the intrinsic structure of music, its DNA if you will, has an inevitable tempo embedded in it as dictated by the notes alone. Of course, my “inevitable” tempo might not be your “inevitable” tempo, otherwise we would descend into a PC world of tempo sameness—a dreary thing to contemplate.

So is the metronome friend or foe? I’ll let the pianist Arthur Rubinstein weigh in with the last word on this. In the early stages of our Guarneri String Quartet’s career, we had the extreme good fortune to record ten different chamber music works with Rubinstein and to perform with him in New York City, London, and Paris. It was a chance of a lifetime to make music with a man who was more than a great pianist and more than a fine musician. Rubinstein was an artist who could create magic when he played. Yes, he produced a famously opulent sound and his musical taste was impeccable, but what struck me most was the unerring suppleness of Rubinstein’s phrasing and his ability to tease out the very essence of a rhythmic figure. Rubinstein possessed a kind of joyful daring in the way he played with time.

In preparation for our Paris concert, we rehearsed for an entire day at Rubinstein’s elegant Parisian home. With a backdrop of impressionist art hanging from the walls, we worked through the entire program, stopping only for a gourmet lunch served by Rubinstein’s wife, and for hugely entertaining stories that he showered on us between movements. As always, Rubinstein’s playing was alive with intelligence and fantasy, but often with a distinct disregard for the printed tempos. At one point, we in the Guarneri Quartet stopped playing, gathered around the piano, and pointed out to Rubinstein that we were not doing the indicated metronome marking in one particular movement of Fauré’s C Minor Piano Quartet. Rubinstein thought about it for a moment and looked up at us slyly. Then he said, “Fauré only meant the metronome marking for the very first measure, you know. After that, you’re on your own.”

I began to study the violin with a series of teachers who taught music and the instrument, but who as time went by also saw fit to teach me the elusive craft of performance. Toscha Seidel, an early teacher, challenged me to break out of my shell and show the music’s emotional character. My next teacher, Ivan Galamian, stressed the importance of playing in a way that allowed my sound to reach a listener in the very last row of a large concert hall. My mentor and friend, the violinist Alexander Schneider, demanded that every single note, no matter how short or seemingly insignificant, be executed with extreme clarity—with articulation as he put it—so that it would not disappear on the concert stage and that its intent be apparent. My last teacher, the Hungarian violinist, Joseph Szigeti, insisted that I delve into a work’s structure and deeper meaning—an attempt to crawl into the composer’s skin, in effect—while making another more personal journey into my own heart and mind.

Now that I myself teach, I try to look for fresh ways to pass on my teachers’ long ago advice about performing. At some point, it occurred to me that music making and acting have something in common, and that the similarities might be useful as a teaching tool. When a student plays solidly but too carefully, I might suggest that he is like an actor unwilling to take chances with his role. If a student plays a concerto with a timid sound, I encourage her to speak her lines to the very last row of a three-thousand-seat auditorium. If quiet notes tend to disappear for lack of articulation, I sometimes accuse the student of mumbling, or of carelessly dropping syllables, or of failing to cultivate a stage whisper. And when a student plays every single note clearly and solidly yet fails to make a musical impression, I occasionally challenge him to be the actor who looks into himself more deeply in order to tell his story with relevance and conviction.

But if acting and music making are indeed kissing cousins, shouldn’t a musician capable of turning a beautiful phrase also be able to deliver a few lines of dialogue successfully? I’ve never dreamed about being an actor but the idea of having an acting role of any kind intrigued me. Would I be any good at it, I wondered. The unanswered question dropped quickly out of my mind as being merely theoretical. When on earth would I ever have the opportunity to act?

Then, the movie “Music of the Heart” arrived on the scene. The film tells the true and inspiring story of Roberta Guaspari, a highly gifted and charismatic violin teacher in New York City’s public schools, who was let go when the city’s arts budget shrank. In gritty response, Roberta created Opus 118, a not-for-profit organization, to help her continue teaching and to start a Harlem community music school. Roberta was eventually reinstalled as a violin teacher in the public schools. My wife, Dorothea, served as both photographer and head of the music school’s board for many years, and I was able to enlist the participation of my violinist friends and colleagues in fund raising concerts. In the film, Meryl Streep played the role of Roberta, Jane Leeves played my wife, and to my astonishment, I was asked to play myself in two small scenes. After reading my lines for Wes Craven, the film’s director, I asked him how I had done. He regarded me quizzically. “You’re playing yourself, you know. You don’t have to do anything.”

It wasn’t that simple, at least in my mind. The first of my scenes had me talking to the violinist Itzhak Perlman on the telephone. No words were indicated in the script. No words, no problem. In the second scene, however, I had two or three sentences of dialogue with my wife as played by Leeves. Practice makes perfect, you would think, but the more I practiced those simple sentences in the comfort of my living room, the more challenging they became. The words had to be clear, even the individual syllables. Most importantly, the meaning of those sentences had to be conveyed convincingly. It seemed strikingly like what I strive for on the violin every time I practice a concerto, a virtuoso showpiece, or a string quartet. Simply put, notes traded places with words, sentences with phrases, and the essential meaning of speech with that of music. Suddenly, parallels between music and acting that I regularly foist on my unsuspecting students had come home to roost.

One word in particular gave me trouble. My response to a line of Dorothea’s regarding the plight of Roberta and her young violin students was to be “Uh-oh”. It seemed bland to say “Uh-oh” in an even and neutral voice. I had to give it some character, some oomph. So I tried “UH- oh”. Was that better? I wasn’t sure. How about waiting a beat between “UH” and “oh”, as in “UH– oh”. It was certainly more forceful. What about waiting two beats, then. “UH— oh”. Hmmm. I was becoming confused. Let me try something completely different, I thought. I’ll place the emphasis on the second syllable: “Uh-OH”. At that point, Dorothea called out from the next room. “You sound absolutely ridiculous”.

During filming, we shot the telephone scene first—the one in which I expected no speaking lines. To my surprise, the director, Wes Craven, asked me to say something to Itzhak Perlman on the phone—something “conversational” as he put it. The cameras rolled and in my un-preparedness, I blurted out: “Hello, Itzhak. It’s Arnold. You know, the other fiddler.” as if, silly idea, we were the only two violinists in the entire world. I have no idea how the second scene went although we repeated it a few times. I was in a daze.

When “Music of the Heart” was finally released a year later, I sat in the movie theatre relishing that Roberta Guaspari’s inspiring story had made it to the big screen. But I was also nervous about my cameo appearances. Most specifically, how was “Uh-oh” going to come across? Would it have meaning, nuance, even a touch of humor, or irony, or drama? This was my acting debut, after all. Suddenly, there I was on the screen holding the phone and saying, “Itzhak. It’s Arnold. You know, the other fiddler.” to Itzhak. My delivery was passable enough. The next time I saw Itzhak in person he even greeted me as “The other fiddler”. But what about “Uh-oh”, my big moment? I waited and waited as Roberta’s story unfolded but “Uh-oh” never appeared. It seems that Wes Craven had deleted the entire scene. Was the scene ultimately unnecessary? Or was my rendering of “Uh-oh” (shudder) below par?

Too late now, but maybe I should have had an acting coach who would have told me when I mumbled, when I didn’t project, and where and how I should reach down deeper inside myself. Then again, the coach might have simply demanded that I speak my lines with the eloquence of a great violinist.

I had just settled down with my ice cream cone in front of Ralph’s Pretty Good Café when a garbage truck rumbled to a stop directly in front of me. To my consternation, the driver got out with the motor still running and noisily began to empty garbage cans into the truck. No, I said to myself as I sat there: Neither noise nor fumes nor icky smells will keep me from the pursuit of this ice cream (chocolate, two scoops). But as I licked away and absentmindedly watched the man at work, I noticed that his T-shirt had something written on it.

I’m often intrigued by people’s desire to have themselves serve as living billboards for places they’ve visited, personal philosophy, or downright silliness. Some writing is pointed: “Continue drinking until the economy improves”. Some merely goofy: “Up to now this is the oldest I’ve ever been”. So what exactly did the sanitation worker’s T-shirt say? For a split second, one odoriferous can remained still enough in his hands for me to read the words: “If the music is too loud, you’re too old”.

I stopped licking. Why, that T-shirt could be talking about me. I hate loud music. I’m quite old. Worse still, the T-shirt proclaimed that I was too old, or at least too old to enjoy loud music. But what’s so desirable about loud music? My friend, Jill, once complained to the manager of a trendy New York restaurant that she was unable to converse with her companion over lunch because of the blaring music and general noise ricocheting off the tiled walls. He told Jill that she had no idea about the restaurant business. Then he let her in on a secret. Young people are attracted to places with ear splitting music because they feel that’s where the action is.

Should I worry about these young people? After all, eating in restaurants with loud music can lead to drinking in bars with loud music and that, as we all know, can ultimately lead to the mother of loud things: rock concerts. I’ve only been to a rock concert once in my life. My son, Alexej, invited me to hear Radiohead and several other groups perform in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park. I paid $115 to join 60,000 other people in this sold out event, proving the lie to the idea that young people don’t go to classical music concerts because tickets are too expensive. (Why weren’t there 60,000 people at our last Guarneri String Quartet concert?)

Frankly, I prefer Mozart’s Requiem or Schubert’s A Major opus posthumous Piano Sonata to Radiohead’s music, but no matter. Thom Yorke, the lead singer, crooned appealingly with his distinctive tenor voice and the band had personality to burn, but the decibel level overwhelmed me. Even with the earplugs that Alexej had thoughtfully provided, Radiohead’s amplified sound coming out of huge speaker banks stationed at regular intervals throughout the park was painfully loud. Was I too old for this? Maybe. Was I by far the oldest person at that moment in Golden Gate Park? Definitely. The throngs of young people standing tightly packed all around me weaved back and forth and mouthed the words to Radiohead’s songs for the entire night. They clearly loved the music. Between numbers, I overheard snippets of conversation comparing the merits of “The Bends”, “OK Computer”, and other of the group’s albums. This audience would probably go to many rock concerts throughout their lives.

Sound intensity is measured as sound pressure level (SPL) in a logarithmic decibal (dB) scale and noise can cause permanent damage hearing loss at chronic exposures equal to an average SPL of 85 dB or higher for an eight-hour period. A few dB examples:

Gunshot: 140 to 170 dB
Jet takeoff: 140 dB
Rock concert: 110 to 120 dB
Stereo headphones: 100 dB
Lawnmower: 90 dB

Our hearing is threatened at work, at play, at rock concerts, and even at the symphony orchestra. Orchestral brass players and those musicians sitting directly in front of them must be exposed to dBs not much below those during a jet’s takeoff. Come to think of it, who knows whether the clang of cans and the garbage truck motor’s constant drone didn’t put that driver with the T-shirt at hearing risk. Even I, playing this little thing called a violin all my life, may have suffered some hearing loss from the surprisingly loud and piercing sound that rushes day after day only inches past my ears.

I finished my ice cream cone just as the garbage truck noisily drove off. I’m comfortable with the driver’s “If the music is too loud, you’re too old” message. That’s me. But what about younger generations who willingly, even blissfully expose themselves to high decibel danger? Let’s hope that they won’t be sporting T-shirts in their old age with this sad message: “Rock concert fan. Can’t hear you!”; or with just a single word: “What?”

Not long before I graduated from the Curtis Institute of Music in 1959, John Dalley, a fellow violin student, asked me whether I’d like to work on Beethoven’s late String Quartet in B Flat, Opus 130. The Paganini String Quartet had recently performed at the school, ending their program with another late Beethoven Quartet, Opus 132 in A Minor. I had never heard the A Minor Quartet before, but sitting with the other students in Curtis Hall awaiting the performance, I expected music of the highest order. This was our great Beethoven after all. But Opus 132 transported me far beyond its stunning craft and originality. Especially during the slow movement in which Beethoven gives thanks to God for having recovered from an illness, I had the odd sensation of having left my life of ordinary experience behind. I felt like a space traveler visiting areas of unimaginable breadth and substance.

I accepted John’s offer eagerly. Without quite knowing what I was getting into, I must have hoped for another late Beethoven experience. John asked whether we could choose the original last movement, the Grosse Fuge (Great Fugue) rather than the one Beethoven later wrote as a replacement. He explained that the Grosse Fuge was so shocking and unintelligible on first hearing that Beethoven’s publisher asked him to write a substitute movement. My pulse quickened. The Grosse Fuge might just be my next other-worldly adventure. John Dalley, first violin, I second, Jerry Rosen, viola, and Michael Grebanier, cello, four highly enthusiastic but inexperienced students, began rehearsing soon after. Opus 130 has six movements rather than the usual four. One by one we read as best we could through each of them.

Manuscript of Beethoven’s Grosse Fuge, arranged for piano four hands, 1832, Juilliard School of Music Manuscript Archive

Four slow, quiet, but suspenseful notes in octaves and unison opened the first movement’s introduction, Adagio ma non troppo. The voices blossomed gently into rich harmony and flowed forward in stately, almost processional fashion. Then the main Allegro burst forth with notes rushing headlong under a five-note figure that seemed like a military call to action. (Was Beethoven summoning us?) A second theme began as soaring melody and then veered into scurrying clusters of sound; and throughout the movement, shards of the opening introduction appeared again and again as evocative flashbacks. Imagination. Substance. Daring. This was the Beethoven of my dreams. I expected nothing less from the other movements as I turned the page.

To my surprise, I discovered that Beethoven had decided instead on fun and games for the second movement. The Presto’s mood was sparkling, giddy, even recklessly jaunty, but then came yet another surprise. The party mood was jarringly interrupted mid-way by unabashed buffoonery in the form of odd scales, eccentrically drawn-out notes, and peculiar outbursts—a circus clown played the fool for laughs here. The movement’s high spirits were irresistible at that first hearing, but also inexplicable. How could these first two starkly different, seemingly disconnected movements exist side by side?

The third movement presented us with an altogether different mood. Clippity-clop went the good-natured and affable opening rhythm. Fragments of good-natured melody surfaced here and there, interspersed with beads of playful running notes. We had left the circus (on horseback?) and were now traveling leisurely through bucolic countryside.

With the fourth movement, I braced myself for yet another surprise, but not much of one was forthcoming. The Allegro assai, subtitled Alla danza tedesca (In the manner of a German dance), was nothing more or less than a simple rustic melody repeated in various disguises. You might say that our horses had happened on a peaceful summer outing filled with singing and dancing by the local inhabitants. The movement exuded warmth and goodwill, but that unsettled me on first reading. Where was the visionary Beethoven, the man whose late quartets by reputation traveled into unexplored depths of feeling and experience?

The Cavatina, Adagio molto espressivo, the movement that followed, began with a simple rising and falling of the second violin’s first notes, and then eased into hymn-like four-voiced music of heart-felt beauty. The word Cavatina originally described a short song of simple character, but Beethoven re-imagined the form. The extended opening section, moving as it was, then led into one of the most deeply affecting moments in music. While the lower three voices laid down a ghostly pattern of repeated triplets, the first violin wove imploring but tentative notes far above, almost none of which coincided with the ongoing rhythm. The first violin served as a proxy for someone who seemingly had lapsed into disorientation and hopelessness. The effect was one of gathering desperation. Beethoven marked the word “Beklemmt” above this passage, loosely translated as “oppressed” or “anguished”. The music, almost unbearable in its utterly gripping message, finally released its hold and returned us to a slightly altered version of the original material. Then the movement ended with several pulsating chords dying away in melancholy resignation. Beethoven, although deaf at the time, was said to have wept upon hearing the Cavatina in his inner ear. This then, was my long wished for space travel—a voyage not outward bound but rather one into the recesses of the heart, mind, and soul.

Guarneri Quartet playing the Cavatina, Adagio molto espressivo

And then from this exalted state, Beethoven opened the trap door and dropped us four wide-eyed students into a world of near chaos for fifteen minutes. The Grosse Fuge, the sixth and final movement of Opus 130, began with a twenty-four bar Overtura that limped breathlessly with strange fits and starts to the fugue’s beginning. The fugue itself, actually a double fugue with two subjects, was violent and dissonant. Dramatically leaping tones and slashing cross-rhythms threatened to burst into anarchy. A series of extended sections in contrasting keys, rhythms, and tempos followed the fugue. Then small fragments of the fugue subjects made their quirky entrances before the movement finally gathered momentum and rushed with manic elation to its end. At first, critics called the Grosse Fuge “incomprehensible as Chinese” and an “indecipherable, uncorrected horror”. Much later, Igor Stravinsky saw it more clearly “as an absolutely contemporary piece of music that will be contemporary forever”. In years to come, I would begin to understand the Grosse Fuge in sober structural terms, but as its last notes rang out for the very first time, a feeling came over me that no other work has elicited before or since. The Grosse Fuge was more than music. It was an overwhelming act of nature.

John, Jerry, Michael, and I worked on Opus 130 for the better part of the school year. We discussed, we argued, we reveled in the miracle this music was, and we groaned over the technical and musical challenges it posed. Finally, we performed Opus 130 in Curtis Hall. In the Menno mosso e moderato section of the Grosse Fuge, a moment of peace in the eye of the storm that surrounds it, I was suddenly overcome with emotion. We had worked hard and the performance was going reasonably well. I looked up in gratitude at my friends who had shared in this great adventure. Mistake. When I looked down again at the sea of notes before me, I had lost my place. For a few seconds that seemed like an eternity, I struggled to find my way back into the music. My lapse of concentration was embarrassing at the time but I look back at it now with different eyes. In 1964, only some six years later, John Dalley, Michael Tree, David Soyer, and I formed the Guarneri String Quartet that would perform Opus 130 and a host of other quartet masterpieces for the next 45 years. Without consciously realizing it, that first late-Beethoven encounter had changed my orientation and headed me toward the all-engrossing world of string quartets. I had not lost my place. I had found it.

The concept of other worldliness or outer space seems apt in describing the uncommon elements of Opus 130 but in fact, the Cavatina is literally traveling away from earth to distant parts of the universe as I write. The Budapest String Quartet’s rendition of the Cavatina was chosen by NASA as the last piece on the “golden record”, a phonograph record containing a broad sample of Earth’s common sounds, languages, and music. The record was sent into outer space with the two Voyager probes in the hope that intelligent extraterrestrial life would eventually discover it. I can’t help wondering what the aliens will think about that “Beklemmt” moment.