Listen to the Amadeus Quartet

Siegmund Nissel was second violinist in the Amadeus Quartet. On the platform the least demonstrative of the four, Nissel was a consummate musician providing a secure and subtle balance in everything the quartet undertook. He was also a revered teacher, passing on the distillation of a lifetime’s experience to younger generations of musicians.

Born in Munich of Jewish parents originally from Vienna, Sigi (as everyone called him) began playing the violin at 6, learning from various ad hoc teachers: his best friend’s elder brother, a nun and at one point the leader of the Munich Radio Orchestra.

In 1931 Nissel’s mother died, and his father took the nine-year-old Sigi to live in Vienna where he continued his musical studies — one of his violin teachers was Max Weissgärber, a member of the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra. Throughout his life Sigi retained vivid memories of the arrival of the Nazis in Vienna in the spring of 1938 and the ecstatic welcome they received, and his rapid realisation that no career, in music or anything else, would long be possible for him there.

Nissel was one of the lucky ones: not only did he sail for England with a Kindertransport but he also obtained entry for his father, who arrived at the end of August 1939, days before the outbreak of war.

In 1940, along with so many other “Hitler émigrés”, Nissel was interned as an enemy alien. On the Isle of Man he befriended Hans (later Peter) Schidlof, another Viennese refugee, who had already met the violinist Norbert Brainin (obituary, April 12, 2005) at another camp. It was thus in internment that three quarters of the Amadeus Quartet first met.

All, once released, encountered one another periodically in wartime London, playing music in people’s homes and studying with Max Rostal. From time to time, they would team up with the young cellist Martin Lovett, and in January 1948 the foursome launched themselves at the Wigmore Hall as the Amadeus Quartet. It was Nissel who proposed the name: it sounded nice, embraced the ideas of love and God, and was Mozart’s middle name. The quartet quickly became dubbed the “Wolf Gang”.

For nearly 40 years, until the death of Schidlof in 1987, the Amadeus Quartet, its personnel unchanged, enjoyed an unparalleled career, setting the highest standards of performance wherever they played. In a typical season their repertoire would include not only the standard Viennese classics but also works by more recent composers such as Bartók, Shostakovich and Britten (whose final quartet was written for them).

In general a conservative quartet, they were at their most authoritative, perhaps, in the works of Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert. Discerning listeners claimed to find a specifically “Viennese” quality in the Amadeus sound, perhaps arising from the broad vibrato sometimes adopted, or the warm sense of rubato that enabled the foursome, as with a single voice, to effect subtle variations of tempo the way a singer might do in a Schubert song. Such nuances were worked out in minute detail in rehearsal, and the Amadeus, like any such ensemble, was not devoid of controversy, sometimes heated. In all this, Nissel was usually the adjudicating force, the voice of reason, of practicality. Of the four, it was often he who was the most concerned with delicacies of balance and shading. He also became the de facto manager of the group, adept at arranging with their agent the best contract for a concert or recording, or the complex logistics of a forthcoming tour.

Never “just” a musician, Nissel was a man of wide intellectual and cultural tastes, great charm and infectious wit. Like his wife Muriel, one of Britain’s leading social statisticians and a magistrate, Nissel was a keen theatre and opera-goer. The couple would host elegant dinner parties in their house in northwest London or escape to their home in northern Tuscany.

Nissel was a highly respected teacher, notably in Cologne and, latterly, at the Royal Academy of Music in London, admired by pupils for the refinement and subtlety of his musical intelligence. Far from insisting that younger players adopt his interpretation of a particular work or passage, he would coax from them whatever he felt they had to give while imparting (in the words of one of them) “a broad and immensely well-informed awareness of every aspect of the score as a whole”. He will be remembered with profound admiration and affection by all who knew him.

Nissel is survived by his wife, Muriel, and their son and daughter.

Siegmund Nissel, musician, was born on January 3, 1922. He died on May 21, 2008, aged 86