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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."