(b Siegen, Westphalia, 13 March 1890; d London, 14 Sept 1951). German conductor, brother of Adolf Busch. He was the eldest child of Wilhelm Busch, an itinerant musician who settled at Siegen as an instrument maker. As children, Fritz and Adolf played dance music with their father in taverns. In 1906 Fritz went to the Cologne Conservatory, where he joined Steinbach’s conducting class. His career began in 1909 with a season as the conductor at the Deutsches Theater, Riga. In 1912 Busch was appointed music director at Aachen, with responsibility for the city’s distinguished choral society (from this period dated his close friendship with D.F. Tovey). In 1914 he volunteered for the army; in 1918 he conducted the Aachen Municipal Opera for six weeks, then became music director at the Stuttgart Opera. There he brought a fresh mind to widening the repertory and encouraging new artistic developments: for instance, with first performances of the young Hindemith’s one-acters Mörder, Hoffnung der Frauen and Nusch-Nuschi; the inclusion of five Verdi operas, and three by Pfitzner; the choice of Appia’s designs for Das Rheingold.
From 1922 to 1933 Busch was music director of the Dresden Staatsoper; in addition he made many guest appearances, including the reopening of Bayreuth with Die Meistersinger in 1924, visits to New York in 1927 and 1928, and to London in 1929. Though he was not immediately accepted as the fine opera conductor he became, and was criticized for not doing enough German repertory, Busch and his Intendant Alfred Reucker between them brought the Staatsoper to high renown. First performances given by Busch included Strauss’s Intermezzo (1924) and Die ägyptische Helena (1928), Busoni’s Doktor Faust (1925), Weill’s Der Protagonist (1926), Hindemith’s Cardillac (1926). The German Verdi revival, too, was now in its stride; and as well as the new works, Strauss’s earlier operas were given, often with the composer conducting. Guest designers included Max Slevogt, Oskar Kokoschka and Oskar Strnad. Nonetheless Busch remained dissatisfied with the difficulty of maintaining repertory performances at the level of new productions, and with the inability of the solo ensemble to do justice to Mozart. In 1932 he found a congenial spirit in Carl Ebert. The two worked harmoniously on Mozart’s Die Entführung aus dem Serail for that year’s Salzburg Festival, and subsequently on Verdi’s Un ballo in maschera at the Städtische Oper, Berlin. Busch held that production to mark the culmination of his work in Germany. Outside events now intervened. Busch was not Jewish and, until he began openly to express dislike and mistrust of the Nazis, was not politically active. Bitter intrigues led to his dismissal from Dresden in March 1933.
Busch left Germany in May, refusing to take his friend Toscanini’s place at Bayreuth, but accepting an invitation to the Teatro Colón, Buenos Aires. On his return to Europe that winter to start a long association with the Danish RSO and the Stockholm PO, he was greeted with the proposal to become music director of the private opera house John Christie had recently built at Glyndebourne. He accepted, on condition that Ebert was made artistic director. The level achieved by the carefully chosen and rehearsed ensemble at the summer festivals, 1934–9, is part of operatic history. The repertory was based on Mozart but included Donizetti’s Don Pasquale and the first staging by a British company of Verdi’s Macbeth. Ironically, it was at patrician Glyndebourne rather than at Dresden that the democratically minded Busch came nearest to his ideal of being able ‘to build up an opera production in the smallest detail and with … complete respect for the work’. He conducted three more seasons in Buenos Aires (in 1934 he gave there the first complete St Matthew Passion on the American continent). Winters up to 1940 were spent in Scandinavia, Busch having grown so attached to Copenhagen that he turned down the offer of Toscanini’s post with the New York PO. From June 1940 to 1945 he was mostly in South America, except for a Broadway experiment (New Opera Company) and guest appearances with the New York PO, both in 1942. In 1945 he conducted at the Metropolitan Opera and toured with the company for four seasons. Busch was never entirely at ease in New York, where one concert promoter complained that ‘he was not a showman’. He conducted the Chicago SO in 1948–9 and 1950, resumed work in Copenhagen and Stockholm in 1949, and went back to Glyndebourne for the 1950 season. That year he took the Danish RSO to the Edinburgh Festival, then appeared as a guest conductor at the Vienna Staatsoper. Early in 1951 Busch revisited West Germany, conducting the North-west German radio orchestras at Cologne and Hamburg. At Glyndebourne in 1951 he conducted four Mozart operas including Idomeneo. The Glyndebourne Don Giovanni he repeated at the Edinburgh Festival, adding Verdi’s La forza del destino.
Busch was the soundest type of German musician: not markedly original or spectacular, but thorough, strong-minded, decisive in intention and execution, with idealism and practical sense nicely balanced. Recordings of three Mozart operas remain as testimony of his work at Glyndebourne, where a plaque dedicated to his memory and bearing his effigy is on the wall of the main foyer.
Aus dem Leben eines Musikers (Zürich, 1949/R; Eng. trans., 1953/R as Pages from a Musician’s Life)
A. Christie: ‘Fritz Busch: an Appreciation’, Opera, ii (1951), 697 only
J. Strachey: ‘Fritz Busch 1890–1951’, Glyndebourne Festival 1952 [programme book]
S. Hughes: Glyndebourne: a History of the Festival Opera (London, 1965)
G. Busch: Fritz Busch, Dirigent (Frankfurt, 1970) [incl. discography]
B. Dopheide: Fritz Busch (Tutzing, 1970)
R. Bing: 5000 Nights at the Opera (London, 1972)
D.-R. De Lerma: The Fritz Busch Collection: an Acquisition of Indiana University (Bloomington, 1972)
J. Delalande and T. Potter: ‘The Busch Brothers: a Discography’, Recorded Sound, no.86 (1984), 29–90
D.E. Anderson: ‘Fritz Busch and Richard Strauss: the Strauss Scores in the Busch Nachlass’, MR, xlix (1988), 289–94
RONALD CRICHTON