A Question

October 28, 2025

American actor, film director, and screenwriter Alan Alda hosts a podcast called Clear and Vivid. In each episode Alda interviews remarkable people—anyone from a neuroscientist, to an astronaut, to a linguist, to a comedian—on a seemingly endless array of fascinating subjects. Alda, a masterful interviewer, brings to life the conversations with his guests clearly and vividly, as the title of his podcasts suggests. And at the end of every interview, as a kind of encore, Alda asks each guest the same seven questions. The questions feel somewhat playful but at heart they are quite thought-provoking. For example: what gives you confidence? How do you tell someone that they have the facts wrong? What book changed your life? In all of Alda’s podcasts I’ve listened to, the guests’ answers are invariably different and interesting. 

The question “what book changed your life” particularly intrigues me. You’d think that a single book, no matter how impactful, could have the power to change one’s life. But no, almost every guest named one. It prompted me to ask my friend Judith, with whom I’ve exchanged favorite books over the years, whether a single book had changed her life. “That’s easy,” she said, “Dick and Jane.” It was Dick and Jane, she explained, that had taught her to read and opened the door to the limitless world of books that awaited. War and Peace or Catcher in the Rye might become one of them, but first, Dick and Jane.

As a musician I ask myself a parallel question: what work of music changed my life? I learned to read music at the age of six, and there must have been a teaching manual given to me by my violin teacher comparable to Dick and Jane. But I was too young to be aware of its significance. Only later did I realize the power that had been given to me to unlock the miraculous world of music. Looking back on so many musical treasures I’ve either played or heard, one work does stand out from others as life changing: Ludwig van Beethoven’s String Quartet in B Flat Major, Opus 130. Four of us students at the Curtis Institute of Music decided to study the work as a semester project. Even though we were young and relatively inexperienced musicians, the late Beethoven string quartets had a reputation as transcendental experiences. In the fall of 1957, full of anticipation, we gathered in one of the school’s rehearsal rooms and read through the work for the first time.

Slow, quiet, but suspenseful notes opened the first movement’s introduction, Adagio ma non troppo. The voices blossomed gently into rich harmony and flowed forward in stately fashion. Then the main Allegro burst forth with rushing notes under a five-note figure that seemed like a bugle’s call to military action. (Was Beethoven summoning us?) A second theme began as soaring melody, and as the movement progressed, shards of the opening introduction appeared again and again as evocative flashbacks. There was imagination and daring to the movement, but I also had the inexplicable feeling that Beethoven was preparing us for a long and remarkable journey ahead. I excitedly turned the page.

The second movement’s opening Presto was sparkling and virtuosic. But then the joyful mood slipped unexpectedly into unabashed buffoonery: odd scales, eccentrically drawn-out notes, and peculiar outbursts. A circus clown played the fool for laughs here. The comedy of it all was irresistible. Still, on first hearing I wondered how these first two starkly different, seemingly disconnected movements could exist side by side?

The third movement, Andante con moto ma non troppo, presented us with an altogether different mood. Clippity-clop went the good-natured opening rhythm. Fragments of sweet 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 the bucolic countryside. 

The fourth movement, 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 upon a peaceful summer outing filled with singing and dancing by the local inhabitants. The movement exuded warmth and goodwill, but it 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 heartfelt beauty. The word cavatina originally described a short song of simple character, but Beethoven reimagined 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 above, almost none of which coincided with the ongoing rhythm. It was as if the first violin served as a proxy for someone who had lapsed into desperation, disorientation, and hopelessness. Beethoven marked the word Beklemmt above this passage, loosely translated as “oppressed” or “anguished.”The music, almost unbearable in its gripping message, finally released its hold and returned us to a slightly altered version of the original hymn, a moving remembrance of its first appearance. Then, following one last spasm of anguish, 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 while watching the Schuppanzigh Quartet rehearse the movement—a spiritual voyage into the recesses of the heart and soul.

And then, from this exalted state Beethoven opened the trap door and dropped us four wide-eyed students into a chaotic and unimaginable world of extremes. The Grosse Fuge (Great Fugue), the sixth and final movement of Opus 130, began with a twenty-four bar Overtura that in quirky fits and starts introduced separately two different fugue subjects. But when Beethoven then put them together as a double fugue all hell broke loose. At times I was sure that one or more of us had lost our place jn the music, such were the violent, almost incomprehensible dissonances that emerged. Dramatically leaping intervals and slashing cross-rhythms threatened to collapse into complete anarchy. Yet, just as suddenly, the double fugue would become quietly thoughtful, then playful, then dance-like, then angry and full of drama. There was a bizarre moment when the music stopped abruptly, paused, started, paused, then started again, beginning loudly and slowly, and gradually becoming quieter and faster as it returned to the original tempo. It was as if a fast-moving train suddenly had an emotional breakdown. Was Beethoven simply having fun after all the high-stakes drama? Or was this collection of extremes, plus a joke or two, the visionary plan all along? “Don’t take me too seriously,” he might have been saying. But did it really matter? The music’s originality and sheer impact allowed me nothing but amazement and wonder as the movement gradually 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. Opus 130 had led us on an uncharted, unpredictable, and dizzying journey that culminated in the deeply moving Cavatina and the Grosse Fuge, not mere music but rather an overwhelming act of nature.

As a typical violin student of the 1950s, my hope was to become the next dazzling virtuoso. But the experience of studying and eventually performing Opus 130 shook my sense of priorities. Albert Einstein once said that things should be as simple as possible but no simpler. With a mere four voices, the basic building blocks of music, Beethoven had created a work of inconceivable beauty and imagination. Not only that, was anything in the process of learning the solo violin repertoire more gratifying than learning Opus 130? What could be better than the four of us, with our different personalities and musical inclinations, questioning, proposing, disagreeing, fighting, laughing, and finally coming together in the hopes of fashioning a polished and meaningful rendition of one of music’s most breathtaking creations? And although upon graduation from music school I explored many musical avenues—performing as soloist with outstanding orchestras, becoming assistant concertmaster of the Cleveland Orchestra, and performing chamber music with my colleagues—the inspiring Beethoven quartet experience continued to grow in me. 

In 1964, four of us formed the Guarneri String Quartet, which would perform on the world’s concert stages for the next forty-five years. The study of Beethoven’s Opus 130 String Quartet in B Flat Major only seven years earlier had changed my life.