Married to the Amadeus - Life with a String Quartet (Nissel Muriel)(Paperback)

The Amadeus Quartet, which was active from 1948 until 1987 when its viola player Peter Schidlof died, is probably the most famous and distinguished string quartet of the 20th century. It played to a wide variety of audiences on innumerable occasions in all the major countries of the world, and produced a galaxy of recordings, many of which are still available. The intensity of its music-making was breathtaking. Muriel Nissel, the author of Married to the Amadeus, is the wife of Siegmund Nissel, the second violinist. Her book tells the extraordinary and moving story of the Quartet, with its many triumphs and its periodic setbacks and traumas, from the inside for the forty years from its inception during the time after the Second World War up to the 1980s. She reveals how it moulded the lives of the four players and their wives and families in unexpected ways, and how they all became inextricably involved in this unique joint enterprise. The fashion in which work and family life interacted was crucial to the Quartet's survival.She returned to her professional life as a statistician when the children went to school and describes how difficult it was in the 1960s for a married woman with children to achieve equal status with men at work; and she tells of the problems she also had to face at home finding satisfactory ways of caring for her family. Remarkably, the four members of the Quartet remained unchanged throughout. They each of them had exceptional qualities. Norbert Brain
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