MUSIC : The Guarneri’s ‘High Fidelity’ : Academy Award winner Allan Miller explores on film the 26-year-old relationship of the successful string quartet

How have four top musicians managed to perform, tour and negotiate constantly with one another for 26 consecutive years without sacrificing their individuality or their ensemble?

So asks Allan Miller’s film, “High Fidelity--The Adventures of the Guarneri String Quartet,” opening at Laemmle’s Monica on Wednesday for two weeks. The 85-minute documentary, which unfolds to music of Haydn, Schubert, Mozart and others, has as much to say about relationships as it does about music.

From the film’s opening moments on, violinists Arnold Steinhardt and John Dalley, violist Michael Tree and cellist David Soyer show their personalities as well as their musical prowess. In rehearsals as well as at rest, their interaction lets the audience know both how much they respect one another and how often they are exasperated by one another; what they don’t say is often as interesting as what they do say.

“There are innumerable relationships in a quartet--each person with each other person, two against two, three against one--and they all switch all the time,” says Miller, an Oscar-winning filmmaker who is co-artistic director of Symphony Space theater here. “The ‘60s motto was ‘Let it all hang out,’ and you can’t let it all hang out in the string quartet. There are certain boundaries as to what you dare say to the other person if you want to preserve the relationship.

“Although it has a musical setting, this film is about people whose relationships are familiar to all of us. Husbands and wives, lovers, business partners or teammates always have to be careful that they’re not totally open with each other. We’re all looking for closeness, but sometimes that closeness contains ingredients that might merely provoke distance.”

Those sorts of issues intrigue Miller, who had been analyzing the musical process on film as far back as “The Bolero,” his Oscar-winning 1974 short subject about Zubin Mehta and the Los Angeles Philharmonic preparing to perform Ravel’s “Bolero.” His films highlight the human side of his subjects, and his ideal audience is clearly one packed with both proven and potential music lovers.

It doesn’t hurt that among the hundreds of chamber groups around the country, few are so film-worthy as the New York-based Guarneri. Not only is it the oldest quartet around with the same personnel throughout its history, but its members are both articulate and engaging. The quartet has been the subject of three books and several radio and TV shows; it has even been referred to in the Wall Street Journal as “the Grateful Dead of the classical music world.”

Miller, 57, had wanted to do a film about a string quartet for many years when, in 1986, his longtime producer Walter Scheuer indicated that funding for such a film would be available. The Guarneri agreed--Scheuer says the negotiations lasted maybe 12 minutes--and Miller’s camera crew started trailing the quartet on stage and off, into the recording studio and to receptions, on planes and at the breakfast table.

Shot during the Guarneri’s 1987-88 season, “High Fidelity” tracks the musicians getting into cabs, receiving medals and tending their gardens. The film begins in Baden-Baden, Germany--where we even get to listen in as they read a contract aloud--and stops everywhere from a lawn party in Tampa, Fla., to an autograph session in Prague.

There are some very candid moments in the film, particularly a sequence shot on an airplane where violist Tree almost pleads with violinist Steinhardt for more chances to play violin. Tree concedes that such segments later felt “slightly embarrassing” but says he and his colleagues found nothing objectionable in the film.

Then again, continued negotiation is fairly routine for chamber groups. A few years ago, Chamber Music America published a monograph called “Can This Marriage Be Saved?” Its authors, Janice Papolos and Howard Herring, surveyed chamber groups and found, among other things, an “extremely high attrition rate” even for very successful groups. The reason: “Most groups founder and fall apart simply because the members can no longer live with each other.”

The Guarneri musicians are clearly an exception. Three of the four men met as students at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia and even lived in the

same boarding house for a while. Cellist David Soyer, who was already performing professionally, caught up with them at the 1962 Marlboro Festival.

In 1964, the four men formed the Guarneri Quartet. Each still teaches, performs and records without his Guarneri colleagues, and all have successful individual careers as well.

“High Fidelity” opens here more than a year after its New York debut, and Miller says only that the delay “had to do with negotiations for the right location.” After New York, where it received very good reviews, the film played 30 to 35 other cities around the country, including Chicago and Washington.

The film reunites the directing and producing team of “From Mao to Mozart: Isaac Stern in China,” which won an Oscar in 1981. Although he did not receive director credit, Miller reviewed footage shot in China and worked with editor Tom Haneke for almost a year condensing more than 200,000 feet of film into “Mao to Mozart’s” 84 minutes. Haneke also edited “High Fidelity.”

Neither film has made any money for its producers, says arts patron Scheuer, a businessman whose family’s Four Oaks Foundation funded these and several other film projects. But 11 years after “Mao to Mozart” was made, Scheuer says, “hardly a week goes by that it isn’t playing somewhere in France or Switzerland, or at a benefit.” Scheuer says the film has made “in excess of $150,000” for Carnegie Hall, its predetermined profit recipient, and “another $100,000” at fund-raisers for music conservatories in the United States and Europe.

Guarneri manager Harry Beall says “High Fidelity” hasn’t led to a booking bonanza--he says the quartet limits itself to 100 dates worldwide each year anyway--but that film too has been shown at conservatories and music schools since its debut in summer, 1989. And Tree says one New York public relations firm even showed it to key executives to illustrate effective group dynamics.

The Guarneri project also sparked a new and unrelated film on last year’s Czechoslovakian revolution. Writer Marie Winn, who has translated Vaclav Havel’s plays into English, is also Miller’s wife and accompanied him and the Guarneri to Prague in 1987. There she had a secret interview with Havel, Miller says, adding that the tape of the interview was smuggled out in an instrument case marked “Guarneri rehearsal.”

Miller, Winn and Scheuer went back to Prague in December, 1989, a month after the November revolution, “when things were already fairly well settled, but still fluid” and started filming. They have made several trips since then, filming both in Prague and around the country, as well as acquiring material from Czech TV and underground film sources. Miller expects the film to be finished this spring, but says events keep changing the total picture so quickly, “the film will probably end with a question mark rather than with any conclusive point of view.”

The resulting film, which may be destined for either theaters or TV, will be a personal study of five or six university students who participated in the revolution, weaving in their pre-revolutionary lives. Tentatively titled “Children of the Revolution,” it also reflects Miller’s continuing interest “in the personal relationships of people who are working together as part of an important group or are involved in important events together. Those are the things which are universal--they cross national and generational boundaries.”

Still to come is a film about a conductor. Miller, who has an M.A. in music from Harvard, studied conducting with Hermann Scherchen in Europe and has worked as a free-lance conductor. He’s now co-writing a screenplay for a feature film about a conductor, he says, and has long wanted “to explore the conductor’s psychic motivation, leadership, need and total unchallenged ability to govern, manipulate and manage so many forces.”

Such European countries as England, France and Germany have long produced more programs for TV about the musical process and musicians, says Miller, who has made many documentaries for public television. “We don’t do that very much in this country. We’re interested in talk shows, where we get to meet stars of various fields in their rather stagy moments of friendliness with the interviewer, plugging a book or a movie.

“But we in this country have very little contact with performers in their ‘day-to-day’ lives, and in their professional struggles. Most of that is private, but some of it is not. And the part that is not offers a marvelous avenue into not only their lives but their art.”