The String Quartet’s Guide to Sex and Anxiety was conceived and developed by the theater and opera director Calixto Bieito. On stage, four actors and the music of Ligeti and Beethoven. Calixto Bieito humorously explains that he discovered twenty years ago that he had long been suffering from anxiety disorders. He “guides” us through a subtly interwoven collection of texts and music—Ligeti’s Quartet n° 2 and Beethoven’s String quartet n° 11, Opus 95 — majestically performed by four actors from the Birmingham Repertory Theater and the instrumentalists of the Heath Quartet. Calixto Bieilto got the idea for this production’s structure from W.H. Auden’s The Age of Anxiety, a long poem describing four drinkers in a New York bar, meditating on life in industrial society: “A quartet of actors for the texts, and a string quartet for the music.” Among his other sources of inspiration, the Albrecht Dürer etching Melencolia I, Robert Burton’s book The Anatomy of Melancholy, published in 1621, at the intersection of erudition, diary, and a collection of anecdotes, the ideas of the theorist Byung-Chul Han, as well as the films of Andreï Tarkovski, Béla Tarr, and Luis Buñuel. With a touch of irony, Calixto Bieilto adds: “it’s a kind of poem, a kind of concert… I hope it will convey a lot of hope.”