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Violinists: Second Fiddle, con Brio

5 minute read
TIME

Violinist Alexander Schneider is no dazzling virtuoso. “After I first heard Heifetz, I cried for a week,” he says. Nor, when he conducts an orchestra, is he a prima donna of the podium. Frequently, in fact, he is not even on the podium, preferring to lead unobtrusively from within the ranks with a toss of his head and a wave of his bow. Nor, as an intermittent member of the Budapest Quartet for more than 35 years, has he ever sawed away on anything but the No. 2 violin part. In short, he has made a career of playing second fiddle—and to all but his enthusiastic admirers he remains the dim background figure that second fiddlers are supposed to be.

But ebullient, frizzy-haired “Sasha” Schneider is, at 59, a second fiddler the likes of which chamber music has rarely seen. Whirling like a dervish around the fringes of the limelight, he is not only a tireless performer but also an enormously influential catalyst and organizer, teacher and tastemaker. Wherever he goes, music seems to happen around him through a sort of spontaneous combustion.

The Organizer. Having persuaded Cellist Pablo Casals to come out of exile and begin performing again in 1950, Schneider now serves as major-domo of the annual Casals Festival in Puerto Rico. He is one of the guiding spirits of Pianist Rudolf Serkin’s Marlboro Festival in Vermont. An indefatigable organizer of concerts, he has created such benign features of New York City musical life as the free outdoor performances in Greenwich Village and the offbeat chamber series at Manhattan’s New School. A restless exponent of widening the repertory, he once formed a Schneider String Quartet expressly to perform all 83 of Haydn’s quartets. He has been musical godfather to numerous younger musicians, among them Pianist Peter Serkin, Violinist Jaime Laredo, and the Guarneri Quartet.

“If you want to be an artist, you have to be a prostitute,” Schneider proclaims in his favorite paradoxical vein. “A prostitute is not ashamed of undressing and showing her beautiful body. An artist has to undress emotionally. The moment you fear showing yourself, stay home.” He prefers the intimacy of chamber music because “it is much more personal than symphony music—you must expose more.”

By these standards, last week’s concert at Manhattan’s Metropolitan Museum was a typical Schneider enterprise. It was part of yet another series directed by him. The program consisted of chamber works by Haydn, Mozart and Schubert, all played by Schneider and his fellow performers with much warmth, zest and perhaps a shade too much emotionalism (in Schneider’s view, “Haydn was a romantic composer; Mozart too—and Bach”). The performance was unified, but each player had the freedom to express his own personality. “Homogeneity is the worst thing in music,” Schneider explains. “It is not so good in marriage either. The first five bars sound wonderful, but afterward you are very bored because everything sounds the same.”

Nudes in the Score. Con brio serves as the motto of Schneider’s life as well as his music. Married and divorced three times, he is an Old World charmer who, as a friend puts it, has a different girl for every occasion. “The only important things,” Schneider sighs, “are women and music.” His exuberance sometimes leads him into a harsh candor about other musicians’ performances, which he cheerfully calls “giving it to them over the head.”

He is an inveterate prankster who used to break up his staid colleagues in the Budapest Quartet by inserting pictures of nude women between the pages of their scores. He is also an accomplished chef. One source of friction in his brief marriage to Actress Geraldine Page (1954-57) seems to have been her insistence on eating peanut-butter sandwiches; few would fault Sasha there.

Born in Vilna, Russia, a center of Jewish culture that produced Heifetz, Schneider acquired early experience as a teen-age member of a trio in a local restaurant. The trio occasionally was summoned to play in an upstairs room while a patron made love to a prostitute in full view of the musicians. Undaunted—even by the tip of a bottle of vodka—Schneider sometimes arranged to meet the girl afterward.

Later, he emigrated to Germany with his cellist brother Mischa, who also was to become a member of the Budapest Quartet. Before starting his classical career in opera orchestras, Schneider earned money for violin lessons by playing in cafés. As a result, to this day he can dash off dozens of waltzes and gypsy airs from memory.

Antlers in the Chair. During rare moments of inactivity in his Manhattan home—an elegantly eccentric converted loft in the garment district—Schneider sometimes lapses into a Dostoevskian depression at the thought that his generation and its values are passing. “We had a respect—for father and mother, for our teachers, for the universe,” he muses. “From that came a certain discipline. That is what I miss.” The self-indulgent style of some of the youngsters coming up in today’s foundation-fed music world appalls him. “If they wear sunglasses, long hair and have dirty fingernails, how can I see how their soul is, or hear it in their quartet?”

Yet, as he sits in an armchair made from antlers, munching a fine cheese taken from his bright yellow refrigerator, Schneider can never brood for long. After all, there are more concerts to be presented, neglected sonatas to be dug out, protégés to be promoted. “Plans I have for the future by the thousands,” he says, brightening. “How many will work, I don’t know. But without them you die.”

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