To Arnold Steinhardt writing is "surprisingly similar to practicing the violin. You work on a passage [a musical phrase or a sentence] over and over to develop a coherent message served up succinctly, seemingly effortlessly, and artistically."

Steinhardt, a professor of music at Mason Gross School of the Arts and first violinist of the internationally acclaimed Guarneri String Quartet, has accomplished both skills in his lifetime. His first book, Indivisible by Four (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998), recounted the adventures of four people who were "almost joined at the hip by constant rehearsals, concerts, and travel."

His latest, Violin Dreams, published last year by Houghton Mifflin Co., vividly chronicles an atmosphere of terror and anxiety aroused by his tyrannical early violin teachers, his quest for the perfect violin, and his pursuit of perfection of Bach’s "Chaconne."

Along the way he describes some of the dozens of anxiety dreams he has had over the years including one in which, during a concert, the bow refuses to move across the strings as if it were treated with a quick-setting glue.

"Only a strangled croak came out of the violin," he writes. "A feeling of suffocating dread rose up in me and then I awoke."

The dream sequence occurred in a performance of the Chaconne, the last of Bach’s D Minor Partita’s five movements, which Steinhardt describes "a towering and emotion-charged work. It reminded me of a mighty cathedral – imposing in length, moving and uplifting in spirit, and exquisite in its details."

He suggests a relationship with the violin and its player that is both sensual and supernatural: "My left arm stretches lovingly around its neck, my right hand draws the bow across the strings like a caress, and the violin itself is tucked under my chin, a place halfway between my brain and my beating heart."

Steinhardt tells of his search to find the right violin, "my dream violin, the one I had always heard in my inner ear, the one with a sound that would reach to the very last row of a great hall."

He has owned seven violins, each more expensive than the previous, culminating in an 18th-century Storioni that once belonged to the late Joseph Roisman, first violinist of the Budapest String Quartet. There is an almost immortality connected to the instrument itself, he suggests, having been made "from a tree that was probably felled over one hundred years before it was crafted into an instrument. The melodies I play in it probably come out of a 300-year-old piece of wood. If any living thing has claim on immortality, it would be that tree."

Steinhardt continues to pursue a very busy schedule of teaching, writing, and concertizing with the quartet or as a soloist, he told an interviewer recently, and plans to continue until his brain and body say "enough already."

Included with the book is a CD on which Steinhardt recently recorded the Partita in D Minor on his priceless Storioni and the same piece recorded by the artist 40 years ago, along with a booklet containing a conversation about the music between Steinhardt and his friend the actor Alan Alda.

Steinhardt’s son, Alexej, a professional web designer, has created a website, www.arnoldsteinhardt.com, which offers information about the two books, various recordings to listen to, photos, and stories of the artist and the Guarneri Quartet, and a look at the original manuscript of Bach’s Chaconne.