Amadeus Quartet: Journey to the Fifth Quartet Part 2
Early years in Britain
In 1969, the Amadeus Quartet premiered Joseph Horovitz’s 5th Quartet. This piece of music had been composed in honour of the art historian E.H. Gombrich on the occasion of his 60th birthday, at the request of his publishers, Phaidon Press. Three members of the Amadeus Quartet, as well as Horovitz, Gombrich, and Phaidon Press itself – including its founders, Ludwig Goldscheider and Horovitz’s father, Béla Horovitz – had all escaped Nazi persecution in Austria and made their way to England prior to the outbreak of the Second World War. Horovitz remembers that, whilst writing the piece, his memories of emigration from Vienna formed the psychological backdrop; ultimately, he realised that he was ‘writing a political quartet,’ which had been ‘the last thing [he had] wanted to do’ (Horovitz, interview with Association for Jewish Refugees/Bea Lewkowicz, 2021). The 5th Quartet, then, is a piece born out of recollections of flight – an experience shared by so many of the individuals connected to it. This series of storymaps will trace the paths taken by these individuals, along with Phaidon Press, from their Central European origins to their lives and careers in England. Reading these stories side-by-side, across the places in which they unfolded, illustrates clearly the poignant origins behind the highly-mobile lives of these individuals, and spans the historical transition between a lost world of Central European culture and the burgeoning cultural life of Britain in the post-war years. Each of these maps illustrates well the importance of transnational mobility to these individuals.
In this map, we will follow the paths taken by Horovitz, the Quartet members, and Gombrich during their early years in England. Consequently, much of this narrative is taken up by the war years, and as such, we will follow intersecting stories of internment and war-work alongside those of education and early careers.
To use this storymap, simply scroll through the slides; at any point, you can interact with the right-hand maps, images, videos, and other items by clicking on them. To use the embedded Google Streetviews, first click on them, and then interact with them as normal by using your mouse.
This work was produced as part of 'Music, Migration, and Mobility,' an AHRC-funded research project conducted led by the Royal College of Music in conjunction with the Paris Lodron University, Salzburg, and Royal Holloway, University of London. Click here to return to the project homepage, or click here to return to the project's collection of storymaps.
Click here to return the other storymaps in the Amadeus Quartet collection.
(Header image: Old Bond Street, c.1955. Credit, Ben Brooksbank ( CC-BY-SA-2.0 ))
If you would like to see more work from the Music, Migration, and Mobility project, please click here to return to the project homepage, or click here to return to the project's collection of storymaps.
Sources / Further Reading:
Snowman, Daniel (1981), The Amadeus Quartet: The Men and the Music, Robson Books: London.
Snowman, Daniel (2003), The Hitler Emigres: The Cultural Impact on Britain of Refugees from Nazism, Pimlico: London.
