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12 - Busch the Composer: Commentaries and Worklist

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 May 2024

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Summary

As a boy, Adolf Busch was expected to make even more of an impact on the world as a composer than as a violinist: admirers used phrases such as ‘a young Mozart’ to describe his facility in composition. Although he stole every minute he could for what he called ‘note-writing’, circumstances dictated that for most of his life he would be a summer and Sunday composer; his only other free time would be a couple of weeks at Christmas. Nevertheless he wrote an astonishing amount of music, in virtually every genre (his one attempt at an opera was abandoned). Like other composer-performers – Robert Casadesus, say, or Artur Schnabel – he had to live with the knowledge that most people would rather hear him interpreting other men's music than his own. Undoubtedly his compositional skill made him a greater interpreter, yet he had a real, continuing urge to express himself through writing music; and his efforts won the praise of many contemporaries. In the 1920s Wilhelm Stenhammar declared him to be the best composer then writing; and Donald Tovey took his music very seriously. In 1929 Karl Straube wrote to his friend the conductor and composer Siegmund von Hausegger:

Adolf Busch has written variations for orchestra on a Mozart theme [Op. 41] that are very beautiful and also have the virtue of brevity; furthermore his A minor Symphony is excellent.1 Get Breitkopf und Hartel to send them to you. As a composer Adolf Busch is also becoming an extraordinary phenomenon. He is completely outside the establishment and so it is our duty to help him along as a composer, because as far as that is concerned he belongs to the modest wing. Quite apart from that he is a great and sincere man, something that is all too rare in our business.

Rudolf Serkin, who had a Busch composition performed at the Marlboro School of Music each year, on or near the composer's birthdate, felt that his father-in-law's craftsmanship was ‘first class’, although he was too close to him to assess his achievement objectively.

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Adolf Busch
The Life of an Honest Musician
, pp. 1213 - 1282
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
Print publication year: 2024

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