You are drawn to the life because you love the art, and you imagine that knowing more about the life will bring you closer to the art, but for the most part the life is a smoke screen getting between you and the art. You pick up threads and clues, searching for a pattern that explains the whole, forgetting that a good deal of life (and art) depends upon chance events. You can never definitively find the hidden springs of an artwork; you can only attempt to grasp the results as they gush forth, and with music, which is nearly as changeable and bodiless as water, that grasp will be especially tenuous.
— Wendy Lesser, Music for Silenced Voices: Shostakovich and Fifteen Quartets
Wendy Lesser. Photograph: Sara Krulwich/The New York Times.