Around the globe with the Amadeus Quartet

These storymaps trace the touring schedule of the Amadeus Quartet from the year 1953 until the group ceased musical activities as a collective upon the death of Peter Schidlof in August 1987.

The source material for the locations listed on this series of maps comprises a set of agendas produced by the group (an example of which is pictured above), which are currently held in the Amadeus Quartet archive at the Royal College of Music in London. In producing this work, we have included locations listed in the agendas that indicate specific geographic locations (towns, cities, etc.) at which the Quartet performed to live, in-person audiences; we have excluded explicit references to radio performances, recording studios, or other recording sessions. Given the changeable nature of any schedule through postponements, cancellations, and so on, it is inevitable that there will be inconsistencies in this data set that may result in locations and dates appearing that do not correspond exactly to the reality of the group’s touring activities or, conversely, dates and places missing at which the group did in fact perform; we know, for example, that the Quartet were invited to tour America earlier than these maps indicate, though evidence of American touring does not appear in the agendas until 1960. Likewise, there were a handful of occasions upon which certain pieces of information included in an agenda was illegible, and could not be adequately worked out from any of the surrounding context - such pieces of information, of course, had to be excluded. Nonetheless, we have otherwise sought to stick faithfully to the places listed in the agendas, as we feel that the information included is more than adequate to the task of providing an excellent snapshot of the breadth of the Amadeus Quartet’s global reach; the dataset is incomplete and occasionally inaccurate, but it represents the story of the Quartet’s touring activity as it was written in their own hand. The one exception to our fidelity to the original data is to be found in our exclusion of locations at which the Quartet were scheduled to perform after 16th August 1987 – the death of Peter Schidlof – because after this point the group ceased touring activity (although these dates – where they exist – are still listed in the pop-up boxes that accompany each location).