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Taking a Final Bow
The Guarneri Quartet is hanging up its bows, but the legacy carries on
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By James Reel

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DOROTHEA VON HAEFTEN INDIVISIBLE BY FOUR: Arnold Steinhardt, John Dalley, Michael Tree, and Peter Wiley.

In 1964, President Lyndon Johnson declared war on poverty, and Yasser Arafat’s Palestinian group Fatah effectively declared war on Israel with its first armed attack. In 1964, Barry Goldwater declared and lost his bid for the presidency. Carol Channing opened Hello, Dolly! on Broadway, and Fiddler on the Roof followed a few months later. The Beatles made their first appearance at the top of the Billboard pop chart (with “I Want to Hold Your Hand”) and played on the Ed Sullivan Show. Andy Warhol produced his Brillo-box art, and the first Ford Mustang rolled off the assembly line. Congress passed the Civil Rights Act. Robert Moog unveiled his analog synthesizer, and Terry Riley composed the seminal minimalist work In C. Keanu Reeves and Gilligan’s Island were born.

So, more auspiciously, was the Guarneri String Quartet. In the summer of 1964, violinists Arnold Steinhardt and John Dalley, violist Michael Tree, and cellist David Soyer came together at the Marlboro Music Festival, after having already played together in various combinations, and founded what would soon become one of America’s most honored and beloved chamber ensembles.

Now it’s 2009, and at the end of this spring season, the Guarneri Quartet will disband after 45 years of distinctive music-making.

The Guarneri maintained its original personnel roster until 2001, when Soyer, the oldest member of the group, retired and was replaced by his one-time student Peter Wiley, a former member of the Beaux Arts Trio. All along, it was a remarkably cohesive foursome, despite the fact that the members famously kept their distance from one other when they weren’t rehearsing or performing. It wasn’t that they disliked each other; it was simply a matter of maintaining some personal space, psychic sanity, and a productive businesslike atmosphere.


DOROTHEA VON HAEFTEN ORIGINAL ROSTER: With cellist David Soyer.

As Steinhardt wrote in his 1998 book Indivisible by Four, “We were, from the beginning, blunt with each other, quickly becoming like four brothers who have spent a lifetime together—affectionate, fun-loving, occasionally cantankerous, and certainly long past the need for etiquette. I began to notice that no compliments were passed around, a distinct departure from the behavior of other groups in which I had played.… The Guarneri Quartet was a compliment-free zone: if there was nothing to complain about, we moved on to the next order of business.”

Full-time professional quartets were rare in America in 1964; not so anymore, so how great a loss will this be to the classical music community? “Don’t we miss Piatigorsky?” asks violinist Lucy Chapman Stoltzman, who studied with all the original Guarneri members at Curtis and was a fellow student of Wiley’s there. “Don’t we miss Casals? Oistrakh? Heifetz? There are a lot of great violinists and cellists out there, but we still miss those people. Of course the Guarneri Quartet will be missed.”

The members of the group are hard-pressed to explain why they decided that now is the time to disband; the decision is unrelated to the recent announcement that the quartet will be sidelined temporarily while Dalley is treated for prostate cancer—it isn’t as if the 45th anniversary had ever been the target retirement date. But their explanations come down to two main issues: playing chamber music at a high level is still hard after all these years, and touring is even harder.

“This is an extraordinarily difficult task that we have before us, to realize the masterpieces in our repertoire to any satisfaction, says first violinist Steinhardt. “Some of it is virtuoso work, and some is work a watchmaker might do, requiring the most delicate precision movement of ensemble and intonation and artistry. It doesn’t get any easier with time. We all had the sense that we’re still playing pretty well, and it’s better to quit at that point than to go past our time. We had surprisingly little discussion; everybody came to that conclusion rather quickly.”

Logically, the group might have considered disbanding when Soyer retired in 2001, but the cellist says the subject never came up. “Not at all,” he insists. “The unanimous and first choice was to continue with Peter Wiley, my student.”

Wiley is more than a decade younger than his quartet fellows, with plenty of career ahead of him, and you might assume it’s a disappointment that the Guarneri is breaking up just a few years after the new guy came on. But Wiley says not. “I don’t feel like the new guy,” he says. “I was a fan of the quartet since I was 11 years old and I met them at that time, in 1966. So when I first was invited to join the quartet, that was after more than 30 years of being an incredible fan and student of theirs. It was a very natural transition for me. David Soyer was my teacher, so I was very much trained in their style musically.”

About Wiley’s arrival, Steinhardt says, “It turned out to be perfect. Peter is a musician with firm convictions, so it was impossible to say to him, ‘Look, this is the way we do it, just accept that.’ He was accepting of our ideas, but he’d say, Look, how about trying it this way? He was not shy in offering his positions. So somebody who comes to hear the Guarneri Quartet now says, ‘Yes, I recognize the Guarneri Quartet I knew from old, but there’s been a slight change of course.’ We’ve moved a few degrees in another direction.”

So how did the quartet’s sound develop? One might have expected Soyer to be determining the quartet’s direction back in 1964; he was a good 10 to 14 years older than the others, who were then in their 20s. It didn’t turn out that way. “I don’t think it was a question of David dominating us, just a question of everyone finding their niche,” Dalley says. “You have to be able to bend or give up some of your ideas. If you don’t compensate and give in and compromise, you just don’t get along. I think we had four strong personalities, and that’s good. It’s one way for a quartet to mature. The other way is to have a dictator who rules over the other three. That’s the way it was in Europe, but Americans don’t like that. It works faster, but the democratic way is more satisfying.”

Soyer was always the most blunt and opinionated member of the quartet, but he was careful not to bully the others, even though he did find a way to capitalize on his greater experience. “It was a help in the sense that I knew a lot of the pitfalls, personally and otherwise,” he says. “I still bore scars from some other quartets. Having been through it already was a help in establishing attitudes and relationships between the guys.”

For the Guarneris, thinking together has not necessarily meant thinking alike. Just ask them if, as individuals, they gradually became different sorts of players specifically because of their experience in the quartet and their interaction with the other members. The answers range from yes to no, with many nuances in between.

For Soyer, the answer is clearly a no. “I learned lots of things playing in the quartet, but my playing style and my musical aims remained pretty much the same.” What are those aims? “I believe that music is meant to be heard and enjoyed by the listener, and the listener ought to be moved by music in one way or another. Music has the power of creating many different emotions in the listener, and it should be played in such a way that this can occur in the hearts of the audience. Unfortunately, today that idea is getting lost in the loud and fast and thoughtless.”

But back to the idea of personal change through work in the Guarneri Quartet.

“I don’t think you become a different player,” says Dalley, “but you evolve as the group evolves. It was actually very good for us when Peter came in, even though the quartet field was new to him, having a new member of his caliber and without preconceived notions about how to play quartets. I think I learned more from Peter than he learned from us. He had a lot of good ideas that were brand new to us. We were set in our ways for 40 years, and when a new voice comes in, you have to reblend with that voice.”

Says Wiley, “Their music making is very, very free; they encourage that with each other, so I’m sure that’s rubbed off on me as well. When you sit next to the guys night after night in performance, you hear a new sort of inspiration coming from John or Michael or Arnold that you may not have rehearsed.”

Tree says, “Playing quartets is a learning experience, in a personal sense as well as anything else. We hear differently as quartet players,” he says, making reference to becoming acutely sensitive to balance issues.

“Playing chamber music and especially playing string quartets is a huge teacher about music and about working with people,” adds Steinhardt. “You wear so many different hats when you’re a string quartet player. The virtuoso element of each line is as challenging as anything in the solo repertoire. You have that hat, and you have the hat of humble accompanist, and along with that is the hat of a team player, where you’re in precise lockstep with other members of your group. And to change hats so quickly, you have to listen to all the voices and understand the music inside and out to be successful at this. The people I’ve played with in this quartet are marvelous musicians; these are all players who have something to say as artists.”


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This article also appears in Strings, Issue #166




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