Chapter Four

On Chamber Music

My collaboration with Alexander Schneider dates, in a way, from the concerts
of the Budapest Quartet in Williamsburg in November 1941, after which we
had made a date to meet in New York and play through some of the Bach
sonatas. This we did in the winter of 1942, and early in the following sum-
mer we also experimented with Mozart sonatas. I have now forgotten whether
we already contemplated the giving of concerts and whether Schneider had
already developed his wish to leave the Budapest Quartet. In any case, Mrs.
Coolidge came to hear us and expressed a desire to have us give two concerts
in October at Harvard under the auspices of her foundation.
I was spending most of the summer in Bennington, Vermont, where, for
two years, I had maintained a distant connection with the Bennington School
of the Dance. Schneider (I shall henceforth call him Sascha) came late in the
summer for a week or so of intensive rehearsing for the Bach and Mozart pro-
grams we were to do at Harvard. I was living just off the campus of Bennington
College in the house of a retired photographer and had my harpsichord and
my work table in what had been his studio. I was engaged in the preliminaries
for my Scarlatti book and in the usual summer’s practicing and accumulation
of repertoire. Martha Graham and her then husband, Erick Hawkins, were also
staying in the same house. Every morning we had breakfast together. A more
diverse quartet of personalities could scarcely be imagined.
Certainly the relationship between Sascha and myself was one of opposites,
not only in temperament but in background. As I have since told him, he was
probably the best antidote to a Harvard education that I ever had. I think that
almost immediately I realized that not only some good concerts might come
about as a result of our collaboration, but also that from it I had a great deal
to learn.
Sascha was impetuous, instinctive, and, in general, in need of taming.
Indeed, the discipline of the Budapest Quartet had made a superb ensemble
player out of him. His intelligence, however, was of a totally different kind
from mine;  he would believe something only after experiencing it and never
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