Adolf Busch was fond of saying ‘I am not a violinist, I am a musician who plays the violin’. To Blanche Honegger he remarked: ‘You and I play the violin because we love music, but so many people play music because they love to play the violin’. On other occasions he said: ‘An artist should never make you think of the beauty of his playing, but only of the beauty of the work he is interpreting’. He expressed such sentiments so often that some people took him at his word and a critical consensus developed, labelling him as an inspired musician but a less than first-rate instrumentalist. Hans Keller held that ‘as a fiddler, Adolf Busch was an anti-talent’. Sir Ian Hunter took an impresario's viewpoint: ‘If any great violinist becomes too involved in chamber music, the character of his solo appearances can suffer’. Szymon Goldberg felt that ‘Busch was a tremendous personality. He was not a born violinist but his shortcomings were made up by personality and powerful persuasion’. Isaac Stern drew attention to a congenital drawback in Busch's physical make-up, which many violin pedagogues would have thought an insuperable handicap: ‘He was extraordinarily dexterous, when you consider the size of his fingers – those weren't fingers he had, they were sausages’. Four American writers agreed closely with one another. Eric Salzman: ‘Busch was not a great virtuoso fiddler. He was, rather, a consummate musician with a mission to revive the great old traditions of German music’. Harris Goldsmith: ‘Busch differed from Huberman and Szigeti […] in that he probably never was or much wanted to be a great virtuoso’. Joseph Horowitz: ‘His performances were fiercely pure, denuded of superfluous detail. Like Schnabel, he was in every sense not a virtuoso’. Boris Schwarz summed up this transatlantic view: