My collaboration with Alexander Schneider dates, in a way, from the concerts of the Budapest Quartet in Williamsburg in November 1941, after which we had made a date to meet in New York and play through some of the Bach sonatas. This we did in the winter of 1942, and early in the following summer we also experimented with Mozart sonatas. I have now forgotten whether we already contemplated the giving of concerts and whether Schneider had already developed his wish to leave the Budapest Quartet. In any case, Mrs. Coolidge came to hear us and expressed a desire to have us give two concerts in October at Harvard under the auspices of her foundation.

I was spending most of the summer in Bennington, Vermont, where, for two years, I had maintained a distant connection with the Bennington School of the Dance. Schneider (I shall henceforth call him Sascha) came late in the summer for a week or so of intensive rehearsing for the Bach and Mozart programs we were to do at Harvard. I was living just off the campus of Bennington College in the house of a retired photographer and had my harpsichord and my work table in what had been his studio. I was engaged in the preliminaries for my Scarlatti book and in the usual summer's practicing and accumulation of repertoire. Martha Graham and her then husband, Erick Hawkins, were also staying in the same house. Every morning we had breakfast together. A more diverse quartet of personalities could scarcely be imagined.

Certainly the relationship between Sascha and myself was one of opposites, not only in temperament but in background. As I have since told him, he was probably the best antidote to a Harvard education that I ever had. I think that almost immediately I realized that not only some good concerts might come about as a result of our collaboration, but also that from it I had a great deal to learn.

Sascha was impetuous, instinctive, and, in general, in need of taming. Indeed, the discipline of the Budapest Quartet had made a superb ensemble player out of him. His intelligence, however, was of a totally different kind from mine; he would believe something only after experiencing it and never in relation to a theory.