At 50, the Takacs Quartet Remains as Essential as Ever

Ormai and Fejer They were teenagers when they decided to form a quartet. In 1973, a year before entering the legendary Franz Liszt Music Academy in Budapest, they asked Takacs-Nagy to be his first violinist, but they had to be content playing trios during the two years that Take a second. Takacs-Nagy, anyone found Schranz in a football match.

Listen to Takacs-Nagy and Fejer talk about his education now, and he becomes obvious how lasting has been his imprint. His teachers, Andras Mihaly, fierce and, intriguingly, Gyorgy Kurtag, tried to instill a sense of musical morality in their students. “It was not intended to chase mistakes; they were looking for values,” said Takacs-Nagy. “We knew that in each bar, every note, there are gold mines, diamond fields.”

Fejer recalled that “they thought we knew, if not everything, most of the things, and these three wonderful teachers made the feeling of trust disappear in a matter of hours.”

“That was the last time any of us thought we knew something,” he added.

Despite the travel difficulties imposed by life behind the iron curtain, the Takacs increased rapidly, winning a series of competitions. They studied Bartok with Zoltan Szekely, who premiered the second violin concert of the composer and still called his old friend Bela. They also found a mentor in Denes Koromzay, who, like Szekely, had played in the legendary Hungarian rope quartet. Over time, said Takacs-Nagy, became more aware of themselves as part of a distinguished national lineage.

“The Takacs offered all the virtues of the tradition of the Central European chain and only occasionally their defects,” wrote Bernard Holland, of the New York Times, after listening to them on their first tour of the United States, in 1982. Other quartets could be more precise, he continued, but with the Takacs, “one always felt in the presence of music.”