Obituary of Norbert Brainin - honorary Barghigiano

Norbert Brainin - Violinist and leader of the Amadeus String Quartet

Christopher Driver and Anne Inglis Monday April 11, 2005
The Guardian


Photo: Garry Weaser

The violinist and leader of the Amadeus String Quartet Norbert Brainin, who has died of cancer aged 82, was a soloist who seldom played solo, a natural autocrat who loved an argument, and a Viennese who found his home, career and friends in London.
The Amadeus ran from its debut at Dartington in 1947 when it was first known as the "Brainin" Quartet, until the death in 1987 of his close friend, Peter Schidlof, who played viola in the group. Brainin had first met Schidlof when they were both briefly interned during the second world war in Shropshire. Schidlof was transferred to an internment camp on the Isle of Man, where he in turn met second violinist Siegmund Nissel. But Brainin and Schidlof kept in touch, and with Nissel became pupils of Max Rostal.

Just after the war it was through the connection with Rostal, with whom violinist Suzanne Rosza also studied, that they met her friend and later her husband, the talented young cellist Martin Lovett. All four of the future Amadeus found themselves playing together for the first time in the chamber orchestra that Rostal directed.
As a child in Vienna, Brainin was given a quarter-sized violin for his seventh birthday, a present inspired by the Viennese debut of the 13-year-old Yehudi Menuhin. Brainin had an instant rapport with the instrument, and he never considered a career other than one devoted to the violin. His teachers included Riccardo Odnoposoff (leader of the Vienna Philharmonic), Salomon Auber and Rosa Hochmann-Rosenfeld, who managed to convey her love of chamber music to Brainin and also effect a valuable introduction to Carl Flesch, who was then teaching in London.

By 1938 Brainin had lost both his father and mother, and so, with his siblings, was supported by his uncles. A branch of their furrier business had opened in London's Bond Street, and this proved a useful connection when it came to leaving Austria. With the political instability intensifying, he and his family left Vienna for England, and in 1939 Brainin started lessons with Flesch. He went to boarding school near Southend, but was given permission to concentrate on the violin. He played for various refugee organisations, and, still in his teens, gathered plenty of early concert experience.

During the war, once out of internment, Brainin worked as a machine tool fitter as well as playing in various small concerts, a life that intensified postwar with performances and soirées in private houses. Brainin still nurtured his ideal of becoming a soloist, and entered and won the gold medal in the Carl Flesch competition in 1946.

Part of the prize was a performance at the Albert Hall; he chose the Beethoven concerto, which he performed in January 1948 with the London Philharmonic Orchestra. But he was gradually becoming immersed in chamber music, trios with cellist William Pleeth and Edmund Rubbra, for instance, with Rosza and other members of the nascent string quartet. The idea of creating a lasting group was formed, and the four accepted an invitation from Imogen Holst to perform at Dartington in 1947. Leonard and Dorothy Elmhirst, founders of Dartington, sent Brainin off to leading dealers WE Hill & Sons, where he chose a violin made by Pietro Guarneri of Venice, for which they paid.

For a quarter of a century, the group was unsurpassed, technically and musically. Their debut at the Wigmore Hall in 1947 had queues stretching round the block and it opened many doors. The British Council set up trips to Europe, and after some hesitation the group decided to go to Germany.

Each German region had its own radio station, and each wanted to build its own library of recordings. This exposure led to requests for concerts on the continent and then, in 1953, the all-important invitation to go to America, followed by a world tour in 1954. This was the pattern for nearly 40 years, with few rests in between. In their last season, 1986-87, their schedule was typical, with visits to Germany, the US, Argentina and Italy.

Recording contracts were numerous and included their core repertory, Beethoven (they were in the middle of re-recording the late Beethoven when Schidlof died), Mozart and Schubert, and numerous collaborations with friends and colleagues, such as their celebrated Schubert String Quintet with William Pleeth and later Robert Cohen.

In their later years the Amadeus were matched or even surpassed as changes of professional style and public taste flowed past them. But their sonority, which Brainin imagined and kept in his mind from the first Mozart quartet he played as a young child, became the benchmark for two generations of players and listeners.

Brainin and his colleagues had a rather tenuous connection with composers of their own century. Even Bartok, whose six quartets they played magnificently, had died before the group's formation. The Amadeus knew what they liked and shone in what they knew, notably Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert. They seldom strayed even as far as the Second Viennese School.

Brainin was the instinctive child in his jokes, vehemences, appetites (including football - he would practise in front of a televised match with the sound turned down) and accidents. His absent-mindedness was legendary. He once walked on to the platform to play leaving his Guarneri in the green room, and it took him at least a year to recover from the day when he got into the driving seat of his car and sat on the little finger of his left hand with all his roly-poly weight. Nevertheless, in serious mood he would talk the hind legs off a dromedary.

In the early years of the Amadeus, rehearsals were "bedlam", according to Imogen Holst, and 20 years later he delighted an interviewer by insisting that "democracy" means nothing unless it is something more than the sum of counting votes. In an interview in The Strad published in 1998, Brainin expanded on the idea of argument to serve the musical score: "For a group to whom this is a life's work, everything that happens within the quartet is life and death. You argue about the music and personal matters. When something isn't resolved, you can't carry the member who isn't of the same opinion. You have to argue."

Max Rostal thought that Norbert could have stood on his head and still played beautifully. Those who remember his playing of Mozart, such as the cycle of violin sonatas or the Sinfonia Concertante with Schidlof, know that Brainin's variety and delicacy were a foil to the homogeneity which small group psychology sets up over time - the Beethovenian "Es muss sein" (It must be), arrived at by bar-by-bar decisions during their 40-year quadrilateral "marriage".

The leader of any string quartet embarking upon a Beethoven cycle has to learn and play harder notes than the same composer's violin concerto, extended for about 10 hours' worth of music, and at the same time incorporate in the music the architectonic impetus and understanding expected of a conductor in a Mahler cycle. Brainin, more than anyone else in his time, made it seem effortless and faithful to the composer.

He celebrated his 80th birthday with a concert at the Wigmore Hall in which he played.

Brainin was married to Katinka Kottow (born in Prussia) and they had one daughter, Ann.

Norbert Brainin, violinist, born March 12 1923; died April 10 2005

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Norbert was a resident in Barga for many years and was given honorary citizenship of Barga recently for his services to music.