Fritz Busch (13 March 1890 – 14 September 1951) was a German conductor.
Busch was born in Siegen to a musical family and studied at the Cologne Conservatory. After army service in the First World War, he was appointed to senior posts in two German opera houses. At the Stuttgart Opera (1918 to 1922) he modernised the repertory, and at the Dresden State Opera (1922 to 1933) he presented world premieres of operas by Richard Strauss, Ferruccio Busoni, Paul Hindemith and Kurt Weill among others. He also conducted at the Bayreuth and Salzburg Festivals.
Being an ardent Anti-Nazi, Busch was dismissed from his post as director at Dresden in 1933 and made most of his later career outside Germany. He conducted in New York and London, but his main bases were Buenos Aires, where he was in charge at the Teatro Colón for several opera seasons in the 1930s and 1940s; Copenhagen and Stockholm, conducting the Danish Radio Symphony Orchestra and the Stockholm Philharmonic; and Glyndebourne in England, where he was the founding musical director of Glyndebourne Festival Opera working together with the stage director Carl Ebert.
Busch disliked showmanship and was known as a scrupulous musician who strove to do justice to the composers whose works he conducted. He died in London aged 61.
Busch was born on 13 March 1890 in Siegen, Westphalia, the eldest of eight children of Wilhelm Busch and his wife Henriette, née Schmidt. Wilhelm was a carpenter, violin-maker and music-shop keeper; his wife was an embroiderer. It was a musical family; Wilhelm and Henriette supplemented their incomes by performing dance music at weekends. Their other children were the violinist Adolf Busch, the actor Willi Busch, the cellist Hermann Busch, and the pianist and composer Heinrich Busch.
As a boy, Busch took music lessons with his father and others, and in 1906 he entered the Cologne Conservatory, studying harmony and counterpoint with Otto Klauwell, piano with Karl Boettcher and later Lazzaro Uzielli, and conducting with the principal, Fritz Steinbach. His relations with Steinbach were edgy, but he acknowledged the older man's influence on him. Steinbach was highly regarded by conductors as different as Arturo Toscanini and Adrian Boult; Busch thought him outstanding as an interpreter of Beethoven, Boult admired his Bach and all three put him at the top of Brahms conductors.
In 1909 Busch spent a season as conductor at the Deutsches Theater, Riga, and in 1911 and 1912 he toured as a pianist. He was then appointed director of music for the city of Aachen with responsibility for the Municipal Opera and the city's celebrated choral society. Among those whose works he premiered there were Donald Tovey, who became a close friend of Busch and his brothers. In 1911 Busch married Margarete Boettcher, a niece of his piano teacher; their first son, Hans, later a stage director, was born in 1914.
Busch remained at Aachen until the outbreak of the First World War in 1914, when he enlisted in the German army, rising from the ranks to become a junior officer.
In 1918 Busch successfully applied for the vacant post of Württemberg Court Kapellmeister – musical director of the Stuttgart Opera – in succession to Max von Schillings. The conservative tradition of the house, until then the court opera of the Kingdom of Württemberg within the German Empire, was swept away in the November Revolution of 1918, and Busch took advantage of the freedom to widen the repertoire, introducing new works by composers including Hindemith and Pfitzner, and presenting modern stagings such as Adolphe Appia's for Wagner's Ring.
In 1922, Busch was appointed musical director of the Dresden State Opera. In the words of The Musical Times:
This was success indeed: a musician in his early thirties raised to the post where Ernst von Schuch himself had conducted the premieres of [Richard Strauss's] Salome, Elektra and Der Rosenkavalier. No opera house in Germany held greater repute. Under Fritz Busch Dresden maintained its lead.
To Dresden's series of Strauss premieres Busch added Intermezzo (1924) and Die ägyptische Helena (1928)). He presented the world premieres of works by Ferruccio Busoni (Doktor Faust, 1925), Paul Hindemith (Cardillac, 1926) and Kurt Weill (Der Protagonist, 1926), and others, and the German premiere of Puccini's Turandot (1926). During his eleven-year tenure he kept the Dresden house at the highest level, mounting innovative, provocative stagings with the help of prominent costume and set designers.
In 1924 Busch conducted Die Meistersinger at the first post-war Bayreuth Festival. The production was not a success. The cast was second-rate and there were mixed reviews for the quality of the orchestral playing. Busch refused subsequent requests to conduct at the festival. In 1927, at the invitation of Walter Damrosch, he made his American debut, conducting the New York Symphony Orchestra: the climax of the programme was the nine-year-old Yehudi Menuhin's first performance of the Beethoven Violin Concerto. Busch was so impressed that he arranged for Menuhin to come to Dresden, where he played the Beethoven concerto, the Bach E major and the Brahms.
In 1932 Busch was invited to conduct Mozart's Die Entführung aus dem Serail at the Salzburg Festival. Having recently been much impressed by Carl Ebert's staging of that opera in Berlin, Busch accepted the invitation on condition that Ebert should be engaged as director. The success of the production led Ebert to invite Busch to Berlin to conduct a new staging of Verdi's Un ballo in maschera, a celebrated and long-remembered production.
Though not generally concerned with national or international politics, Busch had watched the rise of the Nazi Party with dismay and disgust. Not himself Jewish, he counted many Jews among his friends, valued democracy and hated dictatorship. He made no secret of his contempt for the Nazis, and after Adolf Hitler came to power in 1933, Busch was dismissed by the Nazi-dominated Saxon Landtag. Among those outraged by the affair was Strauss, whose new opera Arabella, dedicated to Busch, was to have been premiered at the Dresden opera under its dedicatee. Busch was replaced by Karl Böhm, a more congenial figure to the régime.
Although Busch was forced out of Dresden by the local Nazis, the historian Michael Kater writes that senior party figures in Berlin, notably Hermann Göring, had a high regard for Busch and hoped to secure him as general director of the Staatsoper. According to Kater, Wilhelm Furtwängler, chief conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic, did not want so eminent a rival as Busch in the city; as Furtwängler had the backing of Hitler, the post went instead to Clemens Krauss. The last offer from the Nazis was a return to Bayreuth to replace Toscanini, who refused to work under the régime. Busch too refused.
Buenos Aires, Copenhagen, Stockholm and Glyndebourne
From 1933 Busch's career was mostly outside Germany. In May of that year he accepted the musical directorship of the Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires for a season. Returning to Europe at the end of the year he began a long association with the Danish Radio Symphony Orchestra and the Stockholm Philharmonic.