like it's a huge struggle ... You need to finish the Grosse Fuge absolutely exhausted." She calls the piece "apocalyptic". Arnold Steinhardt of the Guarneri String Quartet calls it "Armageddon ... the chaos out of which life itself evolved". One way to express the impact of the fugue is through poetry. In her poem "Little Fugue", Sylvia Plath associates the fugue with death, in a melange of hazy associations with the yew tree (a symbol of death in Celtic Britain), the Holocaust, and the death of her own father: The poet Mark Doty wrote of his feelings on listening to the Grosse Fuge: Reception and musical influence After the first performance as the original finale to the op. 130 quartet in 1826, the fugue is not known to have been publicly performed again until 1853 in Paris by the Maurin Quartet. One hundred years after its publication, it still had not entered the standard quartet repertoire. "The attitude of mind in which most people listen to chamber music must undergo a radical change" to understand this piece, wrote Joseph de Marliave in 1928. "This fugue is one of the two works by Beethoven—the other being the fugue from the piano sonata, Op. 106—which should be excluded from performance." As late as 1947, Daniel Gregory Mason called the fugue "repellent". By the 1920s, some string quartets were including the fugue in their programs. Since then, the fugue has steadily gained greatness in the eyes of musicians and performers. "The Great Fugue ... now seems to me the most perfect miracle in music," said Igor Stravinsky. "It is also the most absolutely contemporary piece of music I know, and contemporary forever ... Hardly birthmarked by its age, the Great Fugue is, in rhythm alone, more subtle than any music of my own century ... I love it beyond everything." Pianist Glenn Gould said, "For me, the 'Grosse Fuge' is not only the greatest work Beethoven ever wrote but just about the most astonishing piece in musical literature." Some analysts and musicians see the fugue as an early assault on the diatonic tonal system that prevailed in Classical music. Robert Kahn sees the main subject of the fugue as a precursor of the tone row, the basis of the twelve-tone system developed by Arnold Schoenberg. "Your cradle was Beethoven's Grosse Fuge," artist Oskar Kokoschka wrote to Schoenberg in a letter. Composer Alfred Schnittke