Brainin, Norbert

The eldest of three children is Sophie Gutenberg and Adolf Abraham Brainin. The wife of Norbert Brainin - Katinka Kottow, daughter - Anne Brainin (1950) ^[1] .

He came from the well-known Jewish family of Brainin : the great-grandson of the publicist Ruvim Brainin ^[2] , the cousin of the poet Harald Brainin , among the relatives are the poet and translator Boris Lvovich Brainin and the poet and musician Valery (Willy) Borisovich Brainin .

The desire to become a violinist appeared in Norbert at the age of six when he heard the 12-year-old child prodigy Yehudi Menuhin . Norbert's first violin teacher for three years was his cousin Uncle Max Brainin , later a famous American advertising designer and architect. Although "Uncle Max" did not make a professional musical career, his performing level was high enough to participate in professional quartets as a violinist (he continued to play quartets until he was 90) ^{[3] [4] [5] [6]} .

At the age of 10, Norbert Brainin entered the New Vienna Conservatory ^{[7] [8]} in the class of Ricardo Odnozpozoffa , later also studied with Rosa Hochmann-Rosenfeld , who instilled in him a taste for the quartet game at the age of 12 years. ^[4] By the age of 13, Brainin owned almost all of the popular violin repertoire. In 1938, Rosa Hochmann-Rosenfeld wrote to her teacher Karl Flash in London, recommending Norbert as a student ^[4] . Departure to London was accelerated due to the annexation of Austria by the Nazis .

As a 15-year-old teenager, Norbert Brainin, as a Jew, was forced to flee the Nazis from Austria to the UK. In his memoirs, he describes this as the flight of “two frightened women and seven children, of whom I was the eldest” ^[9] . At first, he lived in London with his aunts and studied with Flash, to which he entered without entrance examinations. Flash worked with him six days a week for several hours. After Flash left London in 1940, Brainin continued his studies with Max Rostal , a student and assistant to Flash.

In 1942, as a citizen of a hostile state, Brainin was interned in a camp on the Isle of Man , where he met another refugee violinist, the same young Austrian Jew Peter Szydlof . The conditions of the camp were quite humane. Both brought violins with them and performed the original editing of Mendelssohn's violin concerto. Sidlof soloed, Brainin played the part of the orchestra. Brainin spent two months in the camp, after which he was released as a minor and was supposed to participate, until 1945, in military service for eight hours a day at the arms factory as an “untrained machine operator”. Until the end of the war, he was forced to stop playing the violin because of ill health.

Despite a two-year hiatus, in 1946, Brainin won the Flush violin competition, established with the active participation of Rostal, dedicated to the memory of the master who passed away a year earlier. At the competition, he performed with a violin concert by Brahms . As a prize, Brainin got the opportunity to play with the BBC Orchestra. His successful performance of Beethoven’s violin concerto opened the door for a solo career. However, he preferred chamber music.

In 1947, Brainin began renting an apartment with the cellist ’s parents Martin Lovett ^[9] . Earlier, Szydlof introduced Brainin to violinist Sigmund Nissel , another young Jewish refugee from Austria. Brainin initiated co-production of music and founded a string quartet with his friends, in which Nissel played the second violin, Sidlof viola, and the youngest member Martin Lovett became the cellist of the quartet. The quartet was first called the Brainin Quartet , sometimes positioned as the “Vienna-London Quartet” (“but it looked like a train schedule,” writes Brainin in his memoirs), and in 1948 he received the name Amadeus Quartet . Both premieres of this collective - both as the Brainin Quartet (with the Mozart , Verdi and Beethoven Quartets), and as the Amadeus Quartet - were accompanied by a resounding success. Forty years of work as part of this ensemble brought Brainin worldwide recognition, including the highest state awards of Great Britain, Austria and Germany.

At an early stage of his creative activity, Brainin also performed in other chamber compositions, including the piano trio with Edmund Rabbra and William Plit ^[10] . After the death of Shidlof in 1987, the quartet decided to stop its activity (that is, not to invite another violist), and Brainin acted as a chamber musician with the Cologne pianist Gunther Ludwig . Brainin did a lot of pedagogical work, was a professor at the Cologne Higher School of Music , at the Fiesole School of Music (Scuola di Musica di Fiesole near Florence), at the Weimar Higher School of Music. Liszt , at the London Royal Academy of Music , Honorary Doctor of York University .

• Among the violins Brainin played were Rode Guarneri del Gesu (1734), Chaconne Stradivarius (1725), Gibson Stradivarius (1713).
• Brainin was a supporter of the "low tuning fork " (" Verdi " in Brainin's terminology). He demonstrated the sound of his Stradivarius with tuning for the first octave = 432 hertz (in contrast to the “absurdly higher than the standard 440 hertz Karayanovsky system, ” as Brainin called it) at many concerts, claiming that Stradivarius conceived the acoustics of his instruments for such a system. ^[9]
• Brainin introduced the concept of “motifführing” into musicology (Motivführung - literally “leading a motive”, motivational development, which has been preserved throughout the entire composition), which describes the method of developing musical material by Viennese classics ^[11] .
• In December 1989, shortly after the fall of the wall , Brainin spoke in Berlin with the Beethoven Festivity in Honor of German Unity, which was attended free of charge by more than 800 citizens of the then existing GDR (totaling over 1000 students) ^[4] .
• For 20 years, Brainin supported Lyndon LaRouche , a controversial American politician (but also the author of philosophical and musical projects), who was twice convicted in the United States practically partially for political reasons. Shortly after the concert given by Brynin in Boston in support of LaRouche in December 1987 and covered by leading newspapers, the trial was found to be held with significant violations. Brainin was next to LaRouche during the second trial in late 1988, when he was sentenced to 15 years in prison (after 6 years he was released on parole). After this, Brainin gave many concerts in the USA and Europe in support of LaRouche, whom he considered innocent convicted, and visited him twice in prison, where they discussed musicological problems ^[4] .
• Brainin was famous for his jokes and jokes, which was noted in an obituary published in London's The Times on April 12, 2005, citing the following plot. Brainin interrupted the rehearsal of the Schubert quintet in order to defuse the tense atmosphere by the dialogue of two street violinists in New York: “What kind of violin do you have?” - “Stradivarius, 1699” - “Son, this is cheap” (in English “1699” is pronounced “sixteen ninety-nine ”, which can also be interpreted as the price of the instrument) ^[4] .

• Muriel Nissel. Married to the Amadeus: Life with a String Quartet . - London: Giles de la Mare Publishers Limited, 1996, ISBN 1-900357-12-7
• Daniel Snowman. The Amadeus Quartet - The Men and the Music . - London: Robson Books, 1981, ISBN 0-86051-106-5

• Martin Lovett recalls Norbert Brainin (inaccessible link )