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on time, works hard, and knows what to expect.
    Too often, though, Anthony stays near safe musical shores. The quartet plays Beethoven and Bach, of course, and sometimes Brahms or Ravel. Never Janáček and never the Shostakovich string music that Suzanne loves. Anthony is cautious about including contemporary composers, keeping them occasional and unassailable. All too often the quartet’s programs include some piece of pretty-headed, many-noted brunch music by Haydn or Telemann—music written at the behest of someone who could pay for it. Suzanne fears that one day the quartet will wind up playing “Happy Birthday” for some snarling old woman or unctuous child before she realizes what is happening in time to stop it.
    “At least you play for a living,” Ben said when Suzanne complained about a Vivaldi quartet, a piece of music she knew Ben despised. So many times at Curtis she had heard him say, “Vivaldi is the enemy of music’s future—and its past.”
    Alex always called Vivaldi supermarket cake frosting—pretty if you don’t know better, unpalatable if you’ve eaten freshly whipped cream on real pastry. Like Suzanne, he loved Fauré, that undervalued treasure, the musician’s composer. Though they broke on new music, she and Alex shared some peculiarities of taste, including an adoration of Janáček, his seemingly reckless juxtapositions, his refusal to comfort with transitions of either melody or silence, his controlled anger, his generosity, his respectful demands on the musicians who would play him, their finger pads be damned. And they shared an unlikely soft spot for Schubert, poor drowned boy who should have been stronger but whose music is so bright it sparkles. Suzanne understands that weakness is a fact of her art but knows it is not true that Schubert and the great composers wrote out of their insanity and indulgence. They wrote around it, despite it, as best as they could in the midst of it.
    Today the quartet works on a piece surprising from Anthony: Bartók’s sonorous but disturbing final quartet, written while the composer was changing publishers after refusing to answer a Nazi-authored questionnaire about his race. He was contemplating the larger decision of changing countries, though he would wait to move until the death of his mother, whom he supported. No doubt Anthony—who might well have filled out that paperwork to protect his position—chose the Bartók as a show-off piece. He hopes they will impress the audience with their glissandos, with the ponticello and con legno bowings, with the acrobatic stoppings and the notorious Bartók pizzicato. They will play the piece first, to a still fresh audience, or perhaps sandwich it between intermission and some problem-free piece that will let the people leave happy.
    They repeat brief and long segments, hammer a few measures at a time, begin anew. They finish with a full run-through, playing through their small errors of timing as though they have to, as though they are on stage. This reminds Suzanne of the funniest thing Rachmaninoff ever said. Playing with the famous composer in music’s most famous venue, violinist Fritz Kreisler lost his place and whispered, “Do you know where we are?” Rachmaninoff, the story goes, didn’t wait a beat before saying, at a volume audible to several rows of the audience, “Carnegie Hall.”
    The quartet works hard today, but the music’s difficulty brings pleasure and absorbs the hours, even for Suzanne. Like most musicians, they turn into children when they play pizzicato. Daniel grins, bobs his head, exaggerates the movements of his hands and the tapping of his big foot. Just as Suzanne realizes she, too, is smiling, the piece is over and she returns to herself. Grief floods her, her smile now just a strange shape on her face.
    The grief is for Alex, mostly, but it bleeds into the sadness she feels every time music is made and then gone—something real and loud in the air that disappears from