Married to the Amadeus : Life with a String Quartet

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 wa