Lessons of the Masters

As we approach the official publication date of Tully Potter's long-awaited life and times of Adolf Busch, here are two short extracts which demonstrate how Adolf and his brother Fritz were willing to learn from others. First, we join the brothers in Pyrmont:

More progress in broadening and deepening his repertoire was made that summer, when Fritz had a second season as Pyrmont Hofkapellmeister and Adolf again agreed to be his concertmaster. This time there was no chance of reinforcing the moth-eaten orchestra with young, unpaid students; worse, there was little music of good quality for the ‘court musicians’ to play. Chamber music came to the rescue. […] Fritz also arranged a small Schumann Festival, at which Adolf performed the Fantasy and the renowned tenor and reciter Ludwig Wüllner took part with his sister Anna in Manfred: the chorus was provided by visitors to the baths, augmented by the local male-voice choir. After the morning rehearsal, Fritz asked Wüllner for his comments and was told: ‘Young man, you are doubtless gifted but you have not the slightest idea what lies behind the notes of this magnificent work. The spirit, the true beauty of this music is a completely dead letter to you, and I am afraid you will never grasp it, as you are much too conceited’. That afternoon Wüllner gave Fritz a three-hour tutorial in the interpretation of Schumann’s music; and the evening concert was an experience neither of the Busch brothers ever forgot.

Most of the time, the musicians were expected to grind out selections from operettas by men such as Paul Lincke, the particular local favourite. Fortunately the chief director of Simrock, publisher of Brahms and Dvořák, was taking the waters at Pyrmont. When he heard of Fritz’s plight, he sent for the scores and parts of all Dvořák’s available orchestral works and made the young Kapellmeister a present of them. The Busch brothers already liked the Bohemian composer’s music but this chance happening led to a lasting love for it: they played it ad infinitum that summer of 1910, until the regular clientele began to complain and Kurt von Beckerath ordered Fritz to lay Dvořák aside and give the customers their usual fare. Adolf then suggested the ingenious ploy of announcing Lincke’s music on the programmes but playing Dvořák’s. All went well until Lincke, who unbeknown to the brothers had been taking the cure at Pyrmont, presented himself to Fritz and complained that he kept seeing his own name on the programme and hearing the strains of Dvořák. Adolf made a strategic exit, leaving Fritz to pacify the angry composer by suggesting a special series of Lincke evenings in the park, to be conducted by the composer himself with red illuminations; there would also be Lincke pieces in the morning concerts – which Fritz did not conduct. Thus honour was satisfied on both sides and the brothers could go back to their lodgings to play Beethoven and Bach sonatas.

A little over a year later, Adolf Busch found himself playing in New York with the great maestro, Toscanini:

Then came the most demanding test, Busch’s first concert with the Philharmonic-Symphony of New York under Toscanini, at Carnegie Hall on Thursday, 26 November. The programme would seem curious today: Mozart, Symphony No. 29; Bach, A minor Violin Concerto; Franck, ‘Morceau symphonique’ from Rédemption; interval; Beethoven; Violin Concerto; Overture, Der fliegende Holländer. During a run-through of the concertos at the Astor with Giesen at the piano, an amicable argument arose over a detail in the Bach, as Piero Weiss related:

In the last movement there was a grace note that Busch interpreted as a long grace note. Toscanini disagreed and wanted him to play an acciaccatura, not an appoggiatura – short, not long. Years later, Busch came to him and said: ‘Maestro, you were right about that note in the Bach Concerto, because I was just the other day reading Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach’s treatise on keyboard playing and there he quoted a passage that was exactly the same’. Toscanini said: ‘Mio caro Busch, either you feel it here’ – touching his heart – ‘or you need to read a lot of books’.

It appears that, at the concert, Busch played the disputed note Toscanini’s way. After the conductor had taken his final bow, green, pink and yellow slips of paper rained down from the top gallery, bearing the legend: ‘Long live the great Maestro Arturo Toscanini! Mussolini and his Black Shirts do not represent the spirit of Italy. Viva Arturo Toscanini!’ But Busch had his share of the evening’s ovations and cabled home: ‘Greatest success. Wonderful music-making. Maestro happy with me’. Fritz in Dresden received a similar telegram, signed by Toscanini and Kreisler – one of many string-players present. The programme was repeated on the Friday afternoon; but before then Busch had read some of the best notices of his life.

The two-volume set of Adolf Busch: the Life of an Honest Musician by Tully Potter is available from wherever good music books are sold.

Berlin, 1 April 1933

Tully Potter's two-volume exploration of the life and turbulent times of the violinist and composer, Adolf Busch, will soon be published by Toccata Press. In this extract, Busch and his colleagues in the quartet are confronted with the reality of life in Nazi Germany:

The Nazis had named Saturday, 1 April, as the first day on which they would enforce a boycott of Jewish shops and businesses (in Munich local thugs jumped the gun, beginning it at noon on Friday). The ban was to last from 10.00 a.m. to 10.00 p.m.: Nazi cells were to appoint themselves ‘commissioners for the staff’ in Jewish firms, forbid dismissal of non-Jewish employees and demand the sacking of all Jewish colleagues. At 3.00 p.m. all employees of Jewish concerns were to leave the premises and demonstrate outside. Cameramen would tour every city, filming people who bought from Jewish stores. All such premises were picketed by stormtroopers and bore a placard with a yellow circle on a black background, reading: ‘Closed as a protest against the Jewish atrocity propaganda at home and abroad – the Jewish proprietor of this business is responsible for the safety of this placard, which must be prominently shown’. In Berlin Jews were denied access to the Stock Exchange, Prussian State Library and University; virtually all cafes and cabarets were closed and knots of people stood about, jeering or waiting for trouble to start. The Gestapo made their presence felt, calling at Jewish addresses and taking people away – just an intimidatory move at this stage. ‘Most of us stayed indoors that day,’ Berthold Goldschmidt said, ‘though people were not actually being assaulted in the street.’ Among those defying the boycott and visiting the few Jewish shops which had dared to open was Frau Julie Bonhoeffer, 91-year-old grandmother of the anti-Nazi pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer – she ‘ostentatiously walked through the SA cordon’ to shop at the Kaufhaus des Westens. Carl Flesch Jnr, then 22 and working as an unpaid civil servant or Referendar – until he was barred from entering his office that morning – walked through the Berlin Westend reflecting that as he had lost his job, he had all the time in the world on his hands. He later wrote:

I was amazed by the attitude of the thousands of ‘nice’-looking Germans who crowded the streets. There was no obvious fanaticism, but rather an atmosphere of harmless fun, like a bank holiday on Hampstead Heath. They pointed out to each other and their children gleefully, but usually without sounding in the least malicious, the various insulting graffiti on Jewish shops and the SA men in front of them stopping the occasional defiant customer from entering (although most of the establishments had prudently remained closed anyway). It was then I realised that, for the time being, every layer of the German nation had become infected and there was nothing one could do about it in the foreseeable future.

The atmosphere in Berlin that Saturday was the last straw for Busch and his colleagues, who had to hold their rehearsal at the height of the disturbances. ‘On the way to the church, they saw people smearing stores with swastikas’, said Lotte Busch, ‘and on the way back they saw the mob again.’ The effort of concentrating their minds on Haydn’s most elevated music was harrowing in the circumstances, but a reviewer concluded: ‘The Busch Quartet played the profound pieces […] with the beautiful combination of expression and objectivity that distinguishes its interpretations of classical music’. […] After the concert, the players were openly saying that they could no longer work in Germany. Members of the audience who had come backstage, many of them Jews, were tearfully pleading: ‘You must not leave us. Now we need you more than ever’. But the die was cast. […] Years later Gösta Andreasson reminisced to his opposite number in the Amadeus Quartet, Siegmund Nissel, that Busch called the others to his hotel room at 2.00 or 3.00 in the morning to make their final, agonising decision. Irene Serkin-Busch remembered that her father telegraphed to a few German concert organisations that very night from Berlin, to cancel imminent performances. And Maltschi Serkin, who was staying in the Riehen house, testified that

Frieda was a very impulsive person. Busch, on the other hand, was very quiet but when he was in a rage, he was like an element. He was so enraged that when Frieda saw him in that state, she just quietly packed the suitcases and took him home. If he had shown the rage that was in him, he would have ended up in a concentration camp.

On their way back to Basel, Adolf, Frieda and Rudi were waiting for a train connection at Frankfurt station when they ran into Gustav Havemann. This was the man who in 1932, with the composers Paul Graener and Max Trapp, had proposed forming a Musikkammer to embrace the whole profession, demanding that it should be politically and racially pure – which meant devoid of Communists and Jews. […] ‘The movement is not directed against artists such as Serkin’, he now tried to assure Busch who, with the memory of the anti-Semitic demonstration at the Düsseldorf sonata recital still fresh, angrily brushed him aside. […] At home in Riehen later that day, Adolf was examined by his physician, who diagnosed a severe depression and said he must on no account play in public for the time being. Next day he telegraphed to the organisers of concerts scheduled for Breslau, Darmstadt, Frankfurt and Bremen: ‘Impossible to come, sadly. Letter follows’. The letter, copies of which were sent to the press and interested parties such as HMV, read:

I am sorry that with my sudden telegraphic cancellation I necessarily placed you in a disagreeable situation. Because of the impression made on me by the actions of my Christian compatriots against German Jews, which are aimed at displacing Jews from their professional occupations and robbing them of their honour, I am at the end of my spiritual and physical strength, so that I find it necessary to break off my concert tour in Germany.

Adolf Busch: The Life of an Honest Musician by Tully Potter will be published shortly by Toccata Press as a two-volume set with two CDs of Busch's music, both as a performer and a composer. It is available from all good booksellers.

‘The Life of an Honest Man’

Thirty years in the making, Tully Potter’s monumental two-volume Adolf Busch is now at press and will be available in the UK at the end of July and elsewhere the following month. ‘Eagerly awaited’ hardly begins to describe the level of anticipation that surrounds it.

Adolf Busch was not only a remarkable musician but an admirable man living in desperate times. Potter’s biography will look at his life and work in detail and will certainly remain the definitive source for many years to come. Two CDs accompany the books, providing an opportunity to hear Busch’s playing as well as his own compositions.

If anyone is thinking of following in Potter’s footsteps and starting a biography of a many-faceted musician, here is how you begin:


We had the Glyndebourne recording of Don Giovanni at home when I was growing up, so I was aware of the name Fritz Busch. But I probably first heard of his brother, the violinist and composer Adolf Busch, in the early 1960s, through LPs issued by EMI as ‘Great Recordings of the Century’. I remember finding his violin tone strangely haunting. Living in South Africa had made me aware of the evils of racism; and when I learned how well Adolf Busch had behaved during the Third Reich years, when many of his colleagues had behaved abominably, I began to be interested in him as a man, not just as a musician.

Back in Britain from 1966, I developed a fascination for string quartets, although I had been led to believe that Beethoven’s late quartets were rather daunting. When I actually acquired the three LPs of the Busch Quartet that were available from Germany, I discovered that all one had to do was listen – and this I did, often into the early hours of the morning. I count myself lucky that my introductions to Beethoven’s Op. 59/3, Op. 95, Op. 131 and Op. 132 came via the Busch ensemble. The only drawback has been that the playing of Busch and his colleagues has spoilt me for anyone else.

Gradually I discovered that a number of Busch’s friends and pupils lived in London. By 1975 I had begun collecting memories of him; and it was borne in on me that these precious recollections were unique. Hearing Rudolf Serkin in concert and speaking to him further fired my enthusiasm; and whenever anyone from Busch’s past came to London, I would try to see them. I also wrote to many people, such as the delightful widow of his younger brother Herman. In due course many members of the extended family were helpful to me, the sole exception being Fritz Busch’s son, Hans.

I went up to Edinburgh on the milk train to interview the composer Hans Gál, a friend and contemporary of Adolf and Fritz Busch. The train was five hours late and I only just made it to the interview in time, but it was a memorable meeting. Dr Gál, a tiny man in his late 80s, had heard both Joachim and Mahler and could recall what they were like as musicians. He kept leaping up to demonstrate something at the piano. I twice interviewed Sir Robert Mayer, who could remember Brahms, and I travelled to Paris to meet the American pianist Eugene Istomin. Hearing him in concert, I was amazed when just about every wind player in Paris turned up to boo the evening’s other soloist, Gervase de Peyer, because he was using an English clarinet.

I got to know Paul, the son of Busch’s violist Karl Doktor; and Björn, the son of Busch’s second violinist and assistant Gösta Andreasson, was supportive – sadly Gösta himself had already retreated into a twilight world. I missed speaking to Horszowski, because I did not realise at first how well he had known Busch. Fortunately, with his wife’s help, I was able to make up this particular lack.

Discovering, through contacts with the Busch Society in Germany, that Busch’s brother-in-law Otto Grüters had compiled a detailed chronology of his life, and had noted down many of their conversations, was another spur. Although Dr Grüters had understandably made mistakes – some of which sent me on wild goose chases – his frequent personal contacts with Busch had provided invaluable material.

Over more than 30 years, I have written and rewritten, checked and rechecked. One particular paragraph took me something like 20 years to get right. When I started out, most Continental orchestras and other musical organisations had very little available in the way of archives – many German sources had been destroyed by Allied bombing. But much has been recovered over recent decades and digitised.

In 1984 a friend and I published a little home-made paperback called Adolf Busch: The Life of an Honest Man, Volume 1. It was full of mistakes and, as so often happens, Volume 2 never materialised. The title came from something written by Charles Péguy, which was a favourite quotation of Busch’s: ‘The life of an honest man must be a perpetual infidelity.’

I am grateful to Martin Anderson of Toccata Press for the opportunity to issue a much expanded biography. I have changed ‘Man’ to ‘Musician’ in the title and I am taking the precaution of publishing both volumes simultaneously! My text is very detailed in places and there are a dozen appendices but I believe that Busch’s importance, as a leading figure in tumultuous times, demands this exhaustive treatment. I hope I have managed to provide a picture of a whole era – among Busch’s friends were such giants as Max Reger, Fritz Steinbach, Albert Einstein and Arturo Toscanini.

Working on Busch’s life has been worth every minute and far from getting bored with him or beginning to dislike him, as has happened to many other biographers vis à vis their subjects, I now like him more than ever. Meeting many of his friends, among them Serkin, Gál and Sir Ernst Gombrich, has enriched my life.

Adolf Busch: the Life of an Honest Musician by Tully Potter will be published shortly by Toccata Press, distributed worldwide by Boydell & Brewer.