Unstrung: the romance and realities of life in a string quartet

The question was on my mind as I left a recent performance of Michael Hollinger’s “Opus’’ at New Repertory Theatre. The play, whose final performance is this afternoon, is about a fictional ensemble in the tumultuous period before a high-profile performance at the White House.

As a classical music critic whose most formative musical moments took place as a member of a string quartet, I was hoping “Opus,’’ written by an Oberlin-trained violist, might bring something of the ineffable magic of quartet life to a broader, theater-going public. Alas, the play is so shot through with melodrama, yelling, bickering, backbiting, petty rivalries, and other histrionics that it makes quartet life look altogether miserable.

The fact that the play has garnered such sincere interest — and largely positive reviews — since its Philadelphia premiere, in 2006, speaks to the general curiosity people may have about string quartets, the mystique of the proverbial four-part marriage, or more generally about the inner lives of classical musicians, those curious creatures tasked with serving up sublime art night after night in the formal costumes of Edwardian England.

Yes, as Hollinger’s play makes abundantly clear, musicians can be as flawed and dysfunctional as anyone else. We get it. I just wish the playwright had also shown — or better yet, made an audience feel — more of the real seductions and nuanced complexity of the string quartet experience.

The charm of the enterprise for players and listeners alike surely begins with its intimacy. If the Romantic 19th-century orchestra, which is the model of our present-day symphony orchestras, represents a giant overpowering collective, the string quartet — just two violins, a viola, and a cello — is the warm late-night dinner party, the communion of musical confidants. The scale is human, personal.

There is also an additional magic residing in the specific number four, as composers since Haydn have recognized. Stravinsky called the quartet “the most lucid conveyor of musical ideas ever fashioned.’’ That claim may even have some psycho-acoustic basis. A chamber musician once explained to me that the ear can perceive two and even three independent lines of speech or music at once while maintaining their distinctiveness, but when the fourth line is added, the separations crumble and we perceive only the totality, the blended whole.

As science that sounds specious, or certainly overly vague, but it hints at a more basic truth. A string trio even at its most lush can sound acoustically bare or skeletal. But a string quartet tearing through, say, the final movement of Beethoven’s Quartet Op. 59, No. 3, or the epic opening pages of Schubert’s G-Major Quartet, can sound positively symphonic. In music, four is a perfect paradox: the intimate crowd.

While pioneering groups like the Kronos Quartet have shown how wide a range of music such ensembles can tackle, the standard quartet literature itself is of awe-inspiring depth and breadth. And because composers from Beethoven to Shostakovich have often saved some of their most personal and private musical utterances for this genre, the best string quartets feel charged with a sense of existential authenticity — they are confessions without words.

For audience members, string quartet performances can possess their own mystique: knowing glances darting above music stands, torrents of sound cued by a single breath, individual lines flashing up against a backdrop of supreme integration. For musicians the basic allure of quartet life is also clear. You control your own artistic destiny, and maintain an individual voice rather than subjugating it to the vast orchestral machine.

But everyday work in such a musical hothouse can be extremely taxing, as quartets not only rehearse and perform but also spend long, draining stretches on tour together. Ask seasoned quartet musicians about life on the road and they’ll tell you about elegant concert venues around the world but also about many, many nights at Howard Johnsons.

When it comes to musical preparation alone, the casual concertgoer might be astonished to learn, as “Opus’’ does convey in some of its more compelling moments, the level of detail at which most quartets rehearse. Many exhilarating and exhausting hours of my life passed by probing the mysterious character of the opening 15 seconds of Mozart’s D-minor Quartet, the first piece my own quartet in college chose to tackle. Yet even for veteran professional groups, the spacing of a crescendo, the distance that a particular bow stroke should rise off the string, the precise pacing of a shift in tempo — any of these can be debated at great length. Then the chosen details fly by the ears in a flash.

In performance itself, the players’ four destinies are lashed together — like rock climbers on a mountain face, as Arnold Steinhardt, first violinist of the recently retired Guarneri Quartet, puts it in his book “Indivisible by Four.’’ One player’s finger slip curdles an entire chord; a wise tempo choice can lift an entire passage, a poor choice can sink it. Good quartet playing requires constant real-time assessments as each player must gauge how much prominence his or her specific part deserves in the sonic mix at that moment. The best groups do so with remarkable fluidity.

Cumulatively, the enterprise can bring enormous satisfaction but also enormous strain, particularly since the flip side of artistic enfranchisement is that there is no one external to blame. Orchestral musicians can nurse grievances and polish resentments, grumble about the management or the conductor. They can show up for work, play their part, and go home. Inside a quartet, there are no scapegoats except your colleagues, no place to bury an ordinary bad mood or a deeper discontentment, nowhere to hide.

Personal chemistry in each group, as you would of course expect, varies wildly. Plenty of quartets have husband-and-wife teams within them (including, locally, the Borromeo and the Chiara), which can anchor the dynamics or complicate them. The Ying Quartet was originally four siblings. Other groups, like the Guarneri Quartet, have yoked together four seemingly disparate personalities. It comes as little surprise after watching the abiding formality of the Guarneri on stage to read in Steinhardt’s book that he and his colleagues labored over the years to keep their private lives as separate as possible from their professional work.

Most groups at some point or other go through personnel changes; and when they do, it can affect not just the internal dynamic but also the quartet’s entire sonic profile, as well. When the respected Ukrainian violinist Mikhail Kopelman entered the Tokyo Quartet in the late 1990s, for instance, his brooding Slavic style mixed with the group’s light and crisply articulate approach like oil and water. He lasted just a few years before Martin Beaver replaced him, in 2002.

These days the Tokyo has just two of its original Japanese members. The Juilliard has none of its founding players. The steady churn of personnel in most quartets means that you have to be careful when a quartet is marketed on the basis of its titular longevity. Every new combination of four players is its own completely distinct organism, even if it shares a name and a bio with its predecessor.

Does quartet acrimony ever get as bad as what’s depicted in Hollinger’s play? The final scene of “Opus,’’ in which (spoiler alert) a musician smashes a cherished Italian instrument to smithereens, is patently absurd. But the annals of musicianly coexistence did hit a very public low point a few years ago with the plight of the Audubon String Quartet.

My own quartet, in fact, received some coaching from this impressive ensemble in the mid-1990s, and I heard them perform beautifully together, with no external signs of tension. So it was a shock to learn a few years later of their calamitous breakdown, a drama that pitted the first violinist against the other three, and played out over six years of lawsuits, with retirement savings, instruments, homes, even the quartet’s name, in the balance. (Thankfully, the Audubon, with a new first violinist, is back on solid footing these days.)

On the flip side, you might wonder, when quartets do endure, what’s their secret? The Emerson String Quartet these days is one of the longest-running groups around, so I called cellist David Finckel, who has been playing with the same three colleagues for 30 years, to ask how they do it. One crucial element, he said, is that each member is given veto power over major artistic decisions, so no one can be forced into a tour, a repertoire choice, or an artistic collaboration against his will. The four players also each maintain active professional lives outside of the quartet, which places less pressure on their collaboration to realize the full gamut of everyone’s interests and artistic goals. But a big part of it, insisted Finckel, is simply about each player having the right attitude.

“You are in charge of your own part, but you have to be as appreciative of the joy of giving as you are of receiving,’’ he said. “You have to really love supporting other lines, and fitting in, and making things work. You have to like being the janitor in the basement as well as the doorman out in front. If you don’t, you’ll be missing a big part of what’s enjoyable. As a cellist, making a really great foundation for the other stuff to sit on top of, setting the pitch well, it’s all very satisfying for me. “

I asked Finckel if he knew of any psychologists who provide group therapy for string quartets. He couldn’t think of anyone, but joked that “somewhere on the Upper West Side, there must be a room with four couches.’’

Jeremy Eichler can be reached at jeichler@globe.com.