Adolf Busch was a towering figure in the musical life of the twentieth century. He was also one of the great individuals of his time, a man of unquenchable idealism, integrity and intellectual rigour who lived out his beliefs and often suffered for them. Now that we can see the twentieth century entire, it is difficult to think of a more important German musician than Busch (except, perhaps, Hindemith) from that era. As man and artist he put most of his contemporaries in the shade and his life was an expression of almost heroic honesty and simplicity.

Yet he is not as well known today as he should be. His career as violinist and composer, like those of so many central Europeans, was disrupted by two catastrophic wars; and his decision to boycott his native country in 1933, when he could easily have stayed and prospered as others did, further fractured his life. This one action made him an exile, cost him the precious cultural nourishment of his native land and deprived him of his most devoted audience, virtually ending his prospects as a composer. Five years later he renounced all his concerts in Italy, where he was hugely popular, in protest at Mussolini's anti-Semitic laws. In America, where he settled at the end of 1939, his kind of musicality – which placed vigour and expression above virtuosity – was not fully appreciated. Any one of these setbacks could have spelt death to such a sensitive artist; and yet he rose above even the mental devastation which went with being a German, in the knowledge of what his people were doing during the Hitler decade.

In one biography of Wilhelm Furtwängler, it is implied that the Busch brothers found it easy to leave Germany in 1933. In another, they are listed as ‘expelled artists’. In a study of Furtwängler's recordings, it is stated that in forsaking their native country they ‘did so not because they were better men than Furtwängler, or had greater foresight, but because they had different priorities’.