'They are not for you but for a later age!' Ludwig van Beethoven, on the Opus 59 quartets Beethoven's sixteen string quartets are some of the most extraordinary and challenging pieces of music ever written. They have inspired artists of all kinds - not only musicians - and have been subject to endless reinterpretation. What does it feel like to be a musician taking on these iconic works? And how do the four string players who make up a quartet interact, both musically and personally? The Takács is one of the world's pre-eminent string quartets. Performances of Beethoven have shaped their work together for over forty years. Using the history of both the Takács Quartet and the Beethoven quartets as the backbone to his story, Edward Dusinberre, first violinist of the Takács since 1993, recounts the exhilarating challenge of tackling these pieces. Beethoven for a Later Age takes the reader inside the daily life of a quartet, vividly showing the necessary creative tension between individual and group expression and how four people can enjoy making music together over a long period of time. The key, the author argues, is in balancing continuity with change and experimentation - a theme that lies at the heart of Beethoven's remarkable compositions. No other composer has posed so many questions about the form and emotional content of a string quartet, and come up with so many different answers. In an accessible style, suitable for novices and chamber music enthusiasts alike, Dusinberre illuminates the variety and inherent contradictions of Beethoven's quartets, composed against the turbulent backdrop of the Napoleonic Wars and their aftermath, and shows that engaging with this radical music continues to be as invigorating now as it was for its first performers and audiences.

How does music heard and played over many years inform one's sense of home? In Distant Melodies, Edward Dusinberre, the English first violinist of the Takacs Quartet, explores changing ideas of home, exile and return in the lives and particular chamber works of four composers: Antonin Dvorak, Edward Elgar, Bela Bartok and Benjamin Britten. A resident of Boulder, Colorado for nearly three decades, Dusinberre discovers ways in which music may both accentuate and ameliorate homesickness, as he visits and imagines some of the places crucial to these composers' creative inspiration. Drawn to the storiesof Dvorak, Bartok and Britten's American sojourns as they try to reconcile their new surroundings with nostalgiafortheir homelands, Dusinberre looks at his own evolving relationship to England through the prism of Elgar's unusual Piano Quintet and the landscapes that inspired it. New aspects of familiar music reveal themselves under altered circumstances. In the forty-eight years since the Takacs Quartet was founded in Budapest, the ensemble has undergone several significant changes of personnel. During a concert tour in Hong Kong and a return to Budapest to perform in the same hall where Bartok gave his last concert in Hungary, Dusinberre examines how a piece of music may both reinforce roots and cross borders. When travel is forbidden, the ability of music to affirm home and transcend distance takes on extra significance. As the Takacs welcomes a new violist during the COVID-19 pandemic, Britten's string quartets shape the ensemble's experience of rehearsing at home. Combining travel writing with revealing and humorous insights into the working lives of string quartet musicians, Distant Melodies illuminates the relationship between music and home.