The Everlasting Quartet

by WHIT BURNETT

THIS is a story told me by a Welshman, an amateur musician, who had the wit to recognize the architecture of sublimity when he saw it. He was a man past middle age, with a huge, dark scimitar of a nose, and shaggy brows, and a wave of black hair—quite handsome in his way, but unmarried, and capable, one suspected, of a kind of dark humor, or irony. His name was Evan Evans, and he was a lawyer and a singer.

It is such a simple story, really. There is not even a woman in it, for a viola player’s wife, who was not even present, can hardly be considered a participant. It could be retold in a flash — and yet that would not do justice to the theme, the passion of devotion of the four men involved.

One, I believe, I met once. I have a vague remembrance, in some little orchestra, of slight, sandy-haired Stevens. . . . He had a remarkably cheap, unusual violin. The Welshman later showed it to me. And I thought then, when he held the instrument in his hand, there was something wild and unearthly in his eye, as if he were remembering a glimpse of some other world.

The Welshman was also a fiddler, if not a very good one, and the love of his life was to sit down of an evening with a few pickup string men and play a humble second through the classics. So it is not such a strange thing that at one time or another Evan Evans knew them all, their manners and their morals and even the make of their instruments.

It happened in Brooklyn, where there is frequently to be found the string player, usually a moody, melancholy fellow, not quite good enough to be a soloist, not steady enough to be a professional, who is not geared by nature for orchestras. If he is, for example, a viola player, he is always seated in front of the trombones and cornets, and, on a full attack, the tin pans of hell seem suddenly to crash in his skull, and the delicate thing in his soul which makes him a player on a mellow string is shattered and, at the next tuning up of the Brooklyn Home Symphony, while the horns are out in number, the viola has disappeared. Lost, dead, perhaps, but usually just forlornly absent, wishing somehow he could find a friendly string quartet.

Fiddle players are plentiful, but viola players are rare. Even their instruments are not easy to find, and like the performers themselves they come in odd sizes, no two quite alike, with odd-sized necks and different-sized bellies, and lengths which vary in inches.

Such a man was Arthur Nilson, a viola player.

Mr. Nilson was a tall, lean, Danish kind of chap, silent and thoughtful, and not quite successful at anything, a fiddle player who never had the fire for virtuosity and so “took up” the viola. That is, in his case, he clasped to his bosom the sad sweet alto of the viol family and, as his interest quickened to the almost hopeless task of conquering his new love, he saw, I was told, his wife depart his bed and board—that very day she had gone to five with her mother. It didn’t much matter, for his passion was elsewhere. The viola is a challenge even to experts; to Arthur it was the test and fulfillment of his higher self. Anyway, he privately thought, his wife had the voice of a guinea hen, a high aggressive petulance of squawk, like a squeaking door with will power. Still, she always saw that he was well fed, and he didn’t quite know what he would do without her.

The day it all began was a fair one. Brooklyn crashed to left and right, cars and trolleys and buses clattered and whirred on by, and there stood Arthur Nilson on a corner at Fulton, his viola case under his arm, big end to — he’d been for a sound-post adjustment — when this little man came up behind him, touched his arm, introduced himself politely, and the first of the dreadful consequences began to fall in line.

The man who accosted him, the Welshman said, was Old Herr Stoeffel.

“Excuse me,” Stoeflel said, ”I hope you don’t mind. But that instrument — isn’t it a viola?”

“Why yes,” admitted Nilson. “It is.”

And his eyes, of course, immediately took on life. Viola players not only sense that they are an isolated group, not much wanted in the society of really showy players, but they feel, as individuals, alone in the world. That anyone should recognize even the case as that containing a viola and not just a violin meant that here was someone indeed — it could only be a quartet player, and quartet players are in the seventh rank of angels.

“I thought so,” said Old Stoeffel, He was a stocky, squat little German-American with a sense of persistence. “It wouldn’t be, also, that you play occasionally in a string quartet?

“Yes, it would be,” said Arthur eagerly. I was in a quartet four years, until our second violin walked into an open elevator shaft. By accident, of course. All the other second fiddles we tried were difficult. Married. Or busy. Or they moved away. ... It broke up the quartet.”

“I see,” said Stoeffel, rocking back and forth on his heels and nodding sagely. “So you fell back on the Beethoven trios, for a while, and even the Dvorák terzetto . . .”

“As a matter of fact, we did.

“It didn’t work. Even Beethoven knew it wouldn’t work for very long. There is no balance in three. And it was all good enough to get sore at the second fiddle and write him out, as Beethoven did, but three is no good, in anything — somebody is always the mother-in-law. Second fiddlers are no verdammt good. Still, you cannot have a quartet without a second fiddle.”

No bus came. The conversation continued. Herr Stoeffel suggested, finally, that since it was a bright sunny day, and a good dry one too, the instruments would be in fine voice and wouldn’t the viola player like to see, if he wasn t too busy, if they couldn’t rake up a couple of fiddle players; he would get out his “old dog box, and they might play a few quartets.

Old Stoeffel’s instrument was the cello.

2

AT the time, happily, Mr. Nilson was unemployed. The amount of time he spent practicing on his instrument had rather depleted his energy, and going up and down stairs in the department store basement where he had presided at a kitchen hardware counter had proved rather wearing. One day he quit, and although he had only a few dollars left, he had not really begun yet seriously to look for re-employment. He wanted first to get through the Kreutzer, arranged for viola, and then he was going out and battle the world. Unfortunately the meeting with Stoeffel was the event which was to preclude this forever.

He hesitated only an instant. He knew his wife would be expecting him to come for her, which he know he would probably do. . . .

“I would be only too glad,” said Arthur. “When it comes to playing quartets, I would rather play than eat.”

He could have said nothing to bring more joy to Old Stoeffel. His square and rugged face abeam, he took Mr. Nilson by the arm and off they went up Fulton, only stopping for a necessary moment at a rooming house on route where they picked up Mr. Stevens.

“In Mr. Stevens,” the cellist said, “you will find a second v iolin player vom Herz aus.”

Mr. Nilson shook hands, and the three were on their way.

“I would rather play,” said Mr. Stevens, from behind his unrimmed glasses, “than eat.”

And while it was not a new phrase, it was the password of the devotees.

“Ja,” agreed Old Stoeffel, striding alone, “even he often does.”

And, if it is the Stevens I think I met once, playing in the Catholic amateur orchestra, it is possible that in those lean days he often went without a meal or two. He seemed to me a rather weak character, however dependable and solid in sustaining his part. His hair was thin and had been red, his eyes a pallid blue, soft and gentle behind his spectacles; and among the great violins of the world, he had no fine old Italian master, nor even one of the lesser Italians, old or new, nor even a German made by the numerous brothers Klotz, nor yet a common Czech made by the unskilled hands of peasant girls. It was Japanese. But even on a Japanese fiddle, Evan Evans said, Stevens made music.

On the way up Fulton, Old Stoeffel talked continuously. Perhaps he had nev er been so wound up with unspent bow strokes in his life. Perhaps he had not played quartets for as much as a month. And here, at last, he was assembling a group, and the day was shaping fine.

Only once on the way did Mr. Nilson suggest, a little worriedly, that perhaps he ought to make a phone call.

Stoeffel’s quarters were an old hrownstone basement where he kept his cello and his cameras, for in the good days he was a photographer, and oddly, for a confirmed bachelor, he specialized in children’s portraits. But hardly anybody in those days had much extra money to have portraits of their children — the kids cost enough as it was, there was no need of reminding their parents for all posterity. Der little mutts, anyway, said Stoeffel. For he did not like photography, it was a business. He had rather been a professional cellist, but while his application was excellent, his technique was not— he was never quite sure of the highest positions. Indeed he had once disgraced himself, but with an orchestra, so that, of course, didn’t count — he had a solo and it was to end on one of those slide-home-to-base notes up near the bridge in the highest treble register, and being a little nervous, for everyone was to hear this note, he chalked the point on the finger board and at the concert he slid up the neck in unholy abandon, sure of himself and the note, until he smashed out the wrong note — sour —which everyone heard, for some devil just before the concert had moved the chalk mark.

Stoeffel found the cello, the only properly dusted object in his room.

“ E in Momentl!” He leaned it on his chair. “I go up in the hall and telephone Rennie.”

“He is a First?” asked Nilson.

“What a First!” said Stevens. “And he will drop absolutely anything if you just say one word, Quartet.”

A familiar in Stoeffel’s basement, Mr. Stevens dug out the half-rusted iron stands and arranged the four straight chairs in the proper semicircle under a stand lamp with a good bright bulb, for, bright as it was outside, Stoeffel’s quarters were a bit gloomy.

The cellist had hardly more than returned and tuned up when the front door flew open and there stood the First.

He was a wild-eyed Italian, with double-lensed glasses, behind which popped the eyes of the true fanatic, sharp, bulbous, darting everywhere at once.

“Gentlemen!” shouted Rinaldo del Jolio. And he saluted with his out thrust fiddle case. And in less time than it takes to tell it he was seated, tuned and ready for the opener.

Herr Stoeffel thrust forward, with one foot, a tall stack of the Edition Peters.

“So! What shall it be?”

3

IT IS not necessary to tell any player in a string quartet, anywhere in the world, that of course they started with a little Haydn. All quartets, everywhere, start with a little Haydn, and it comes from the 30 Beruhmte, and if it doesn’t at first sound so berühmte it sounds better as time goes on.

Old Stoeffel leaned into his cello, grasped between his knees like some beloved mount, and on his face was that lost rapture of the Kammer spieler of old. Mr. Stevens, as second, soberly beat time with his left foot, the anchor of the seconds; Arthur Nilson, when he found that he was just about as good as his companions, achieved a kind of otherworld serenity, which in the adagio became sheer love itself, and it was with reluctance he let go of the rich gold tones when, at times, he produced them.

The first violin, Rinaldo del Jolio, was fire and steam and energy itself, and grace, too, and delicacy when the mood required. He was the lark, in The Lark, and Old Stoeffel was the root and the trunk of the oak; and when it came to Mozart, Del Jolio was the hunter and the hound and the fox, and behind him, with him, beyond him, with him again, were the others, Mozartian riders, the horns of the Hunt echoing and re-echoing from cello to viola, all coattails flying through the measures.

And so the day passed, celestially.

“Anybody tired?” asked Stoeffel, who looked hardy as a bull tiddler. It was long past dark.

“’Tired!” sneered Rinaldo del Jolio. “How can anybody be tired when we have done only five Hay dns and six Mozarts? And those only the chestnuts!”

“I am as fresh as a daisy,” said Mr. Stevens, although the fiddler’s neck was beginning to show a bit red beneath his jaw.

“I could die playing such music,” said Arthur Nilson, with warmth. For here, indeed, were players, four who spoke as one, four whose voices blended from their instruments to weave ineffable patterns in the air. . . . There was nothing in life like this.

“I hope nobody is married,” said Old Stoeffel, at the next brief pause. He looked accusingly at Nilson. “Wives are always expecting a person home.”

“I am not married,” said Stevens, needlessly, with pride.

Mr. Nilson awoke from his brief reverie of bliss — the bliss of music, not marriage.

“Oh,” he said, “I forgot . . .”

They’ looked at him with alarm.

“It’s all right,” Mr. Nilson set them all at ease, although he himself still looked a bit anxious. “After all, my wife was a guinea hen.”

“You know,”said Del Jolio as the breather continued, for good quartet players do take breathers, although they can well play’, if they are good players, without a stop till morning, “a funny thing. My girl used to tell me she was interested in me because she loved my music. The closer we got to getting married, the more often she told me I spent too much time on the very thing she liked about me most — music. Believe me, I saw what was coming out of that. I dropped her like a brick.

“Lucky for you,” said Mr. Stevens. “Remember little Hermanson, the oboe?”

“Oboes are crazy ,” said Del Jolio dogmatically.

“‘Yes,” Mr. Stevens concurred. But he had a wife who was very irritating. She objected to his practicing. It did something to her head.”

“It does something to the oboe player, too,” said the First.

“They had row after row, but Hermanson had to practice to keep his lip up. One day when she broke in on him he killed her. He is leading the orchestra Up the River now. He was a neat fellow, very orderly, too. He cut off her ears so he could stuff her down a drain pipe.”

“Schluss mit den vimmen!” said Stoeffel, handing out parts. “Bitte, mein’ Herren — Schubert!”

“Schubert!” agreed Mr. Nilson.

And so there was Schubert, the one in A Minor, with the lovely andante theme from Rosamunde, which of course led to the harrowing and exciting Death and the Maiden, more exhilarating than the chase of any earthly female.

“When we get through all the music I have,” said Stoeffel some hours later, “I have a big surprise. I save it.”

The night had gone. It was early in the morning.

“This is a very practical apartment,” said Mr. Nilson, sweating now, a trifle. “Nobody seems to object after eleven.”

“The people on the next floor are away for the summer,” said Stoeffel, “and nobody higher up hears anything. We can play right on.

They finished all the early works of Beethoven and were in the Rasumovsky period when the sun came up. By this time the tones of all were really golden.

Mr. Stevens’s left arm required a little shifting.

“You’re not getting tired!” frowned the Italian First.

But he did condone a moment’s rest.

“I like your viola,” he said to Mr. Nilson. He reached for the big dark somber instrument and turned it about with a knowing eye.

“Yes,” said Nilson, “it has a nice tender tone.”

“Ah, the tender tone!” said Del Jolio. “Once I had a job with Rosenthal next to Carnegie Hall. Would you believe it? I used to repair fiddles. The cheap ones. I was quite good, too. But it was a terrible bore. The customers were fantastic. I got mostly the amateurs. They were always griping at their instruments. I was glad to quit.

“There was one fellow came in the shop with a fiddle and asked me if I could give it a tender tone. That’s what he wanted, a tender tone.

“I told him I could shift the bridge, change the strings, maybe alter the position of the sound post. I told him what I could do. But he looked at me so skeptically I couldn’t figure him out. Finally, the cheap skate, he put the fiddle under his arm and walked out. ‘I think,’ he said, ‘I see what I can do myself. I want a really tender tone.’

“About a week later he came back to the shop with the fiddle in a bag. It was all to pieces. The tailpiece was off, the ribs apart, the neck was in a pocket of his jacket, and the back and belly were lying on the counter like platters.

‘“My heavens, my good man!’ I said. ‘Is this the same fiddle? Is this the instrument from which you wanted a tender tone?’

“I must say the fellow hung his head.

‘“Well, speak up, man,’ I said. ‘What in heaven’s name did you do with the fiddle?’

“‘Well,’ he said, ‘finally, I boiled it!’”

“Very funny. Ha-ha. Now,” said Stoeffel, “back to work!”

And the quartet buckled down again to business.

It must have been quite late the next day when Herr Stoeffel felt the time had come to spring his big surprise.

It seemed there was a lawyer, an amateur musician, who lived half a mile out toward Flatbush, who was a friend of Stoeffel’s, and the lawyer had recently come into possession, as a collector, of the entire musical library of the famous Gneiset Quartet. He had simply bought it, having money, and he had asked Stoeffel to catalogue it for him.

“What is so supremely obliging of my friend” — Stoeffel radiated his appreciation — “is that at this moment he is in Wales attending some Folk Song Sing or other, although he cannot sing a true note and is only Welsh through his great-grandmother.

“And being in Wales,” he added, “he has left his house empty. And t he music fills a whole room! And all we have to do is pick up our stands and take the bus to his door, and then we can really sit down, without disturbance, and play some quartets— quartets I bet you never heard of.”

“I have alwavs wanted to play a little Reger,” said Mr. Nilson. “We never got around to Reger when I had my quartet.”

“If he has a real library,” put in Mr. Stevens, “there are dozens of Haydns you don’t find in the Berühmte.”

“What are we waiting for?” Del Jolio arose with his fiddle and jammed on his hat. Impatiently, like the leader he was, he waited, foot in the stirrup, ready to charge the unknown.

4

IT WAS this move, according to my informant, which was fatal. It was the one step too much. It opened to the players a world of treasures, and it was simply more than mortal could stand.

On the way to the Welshman’s house everyone was busy with speculations as to just what they might find.

“Everything standard, of course,” Del Jolio was muttering to himself. “The Gneisels played the whole classical repertoire.”

“The Russians — all the Russians,” Herr Stoeffel added.

“A little Boccherini might be nice,” said Nilson.

And in the eagerness of expectation no one absolutely no one — thought of lunch, although it was now again near sundown.

But Old Herr Stoeffel did think to buy several dozen large white candles, explaining that, at the Welshman’s house, with him away, there were neither lights, nor bells, nor telephones.

Thus they arrived at the big old brownstone, buoyed up only by the spirit. Nothing more substantial.

And after the key was turned and the music unfolded, only then did Herr Stoeffel think to mention food.

‘I hope nobody is getting hungry,” he said, in a low voice. He half hoped nobody would hear. “ We have all this music before us.”

“Hah!" snorted Rinaldo. He looked around, almost fiercely.

“No,” said Mr. Stevens. “I have said it. I would rather play than eat.”

“ Also!” said Old Stoeffel, pulling up his A. “ Let us hear no more about it. Fried fish! Phaw!”

“I am not hungry,” said Mr. Nilson, who, for the last time, was thinking of his wife. She did love to see him eat. . . .

And thus began a session of quartet playing which, in all history, has never been surpassed. In a deserted house, near Flatbush, on a side street, in a room the proper size to give back a moderate fortissimo, four lovers of the art of chamber music sat down, in full possession of their faculties indeed with faculties attuned to concert pitch — in the total absence of an audience, for audiences have never been sought by your true chamber music players— and from Palestrina to Bartók, the four fellows fiddled , . . and fiddled . . . and fiddled. . . .

They fiddled low and they fiddled loud, they fiddled adagio and they fiddled prestissimo, they fiddled through the wildness and the pathos of Smetana, and they glowed in the sentimental honey of Borodin, faced each other through the thick harmonic woods of Brahms, waxing soft and beatific in the serenities of Franck. They fiddled the classics of the masters, and wandered into the half-forgotten mannerisms of the Dittersdorfs and others of their kind; they played the archaic and the modern. They found hand-copied reproductions of the In Nomines of Byrd and Brewster, and Sonatas a quattro by Searlatti and a lone rare Ricercari a 4 voci; and then, in contrast, they ventured out into Debussy’s glazed lakes of tone and were swept along by the rhythmic rushes of Prokofiev.

If, in Stoeffel’s casual library, music had seemed to have been created at times past for the sake of the players, here in the collector’s home, amid these treasures of the spirit, the players seemed to have been created for the sake of the music, and in this sphere, a realm of sounds, four lone men, with no allegiance other than to this, were lost to the world, and they who had rather play than eat just played . . . and played . . . and play ed . . .

. . . and played. . . .

The Welshman came home late in the fall. His stay in Wales had been a prolonged one. He had had a lovely time, and music was in his veins, singing Fal la la with the Welsh. Evan Evans was rather looking forward to finding Old Stoeffel and sorting out the music.

The lawyer had not expected to find Old Stoeffel where he found him —nor any of the others, including Mr. Nilson. But there they were. No one had ever missed them. No one had even looked.

They were all still seated, slumped a little, their instruments glued to the chins of the three fiddlers — and all was quiet, as if at the end of a peaceful cantabile the choir of musical sounds had thinned away, diminuendo, into final silence — and Old Herr Stoeffel, motionless, still gripped his cello between his well-starved knees.

The candle wax lay white on the Welshman’s carpet.

It was, of course, the perfect quartet. It is a rare thing to find a quartet which can meet at a time to suit every one. Four individuals have four separate lives, it is rare, when you find four good players, that one doesn’t have to leave before the others are satished. Here was a meeting not only of minds and talents, but a meeting of spirits. It could happen only once in a lifetime. And they all simply play ed themselves to death.

I have never had any reason to doubt the Welshman s story. As I say, he was himself a fiddler. Nilson and Stoeffel and Del Julio I never knew. But the cheap little Japanese fiddle that Stevens used to play on is still in Evan Evans’s collection.

“A memento,” he explained, “of a great artist — four great artists!”

It was a Nipponese imitation of a Stradivari.

“In a good quartet,” he said, “even the second fiddle is beautiful!”

He was right. He would know. And I haven’t any doubt that ringed around in their proper chairs in heaven are now the four greatest amateur quartet players of all time— Old Herr Stoeffel, the organizer, the pack horse of the dog box, undefeated; Del Julio, the egoist, making commanding eyes at the thirty-second note runs; Mr. Stevens, in his unrimmed glasses, nothing, it is true, by himself, but strong among his kind; with Arthur Nilson, free from his conscience forever, sweetly blending in on his tender-toned viola — and in the pizzicato passages the whole quartet airily outplucking all the angels of heaven and their harps.