The Emerson String Quartet has been performing Beethoven’s quartets for decades. Some of the members are my age, in their late 60’s or early 70's; Phil Setzer, the first violinist on this recording, was my roommate while we both attended Juilliard. Their accumulated wisdom is something I can trust, and I hear and feel it in their sensitive interpretations of everything they perform. I had not heard their Op. 132 until a few days ago when they shared a performance on YouTube via Stony Brook University/Staller Center for the Arts. I came to the online concert late in the performance, just as the players began the third movement. Before I knew it, I was sobbing, earphones on, sitting at the dining room table, a slobbering fool, totally undone.

Yesterday, I decided to assemble a video tribute in which I would attempt to translate that experience into movement and editing. (The five-section form and awesome sonic power of the music struck me as a premonition of Bartok’s quartets). I was once again shaken to the bones with a sense having been purged or undergone a religious experience. Beethoven included the following note in his score after III. Molto adagio-- Andante: "Holy song of thanksgiving of a convalescent to the Deity, in the Lydian mode". I am not convalescing, unless I consider the year of a global pandemic and my recent COVID vaccination as a kind of trauma and slow convalescence. What I know as a dancer well beyond my prime and shocked at the indignities of be