Trivia

Brother of Adolf Busch.

Busch disliked showmanship, and was known as a scrupulous musician who strove to do justice to the composers whose works he conducted.

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 was a German conductor.

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.

The last offer from the Nazis was a return to Bayreuth to replace Toscanini, who refused to work under the régime. Busch too refused.

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 Times called him "a virile, faithful and extremely skillful interpreter of Mozart" and continued, "His beat like his bearing was one of quiet authority; his interpretations were fully alive without fuss or idiosyncrasy but devoted wholly to the projection of the music as he conceived the composer to have intended it".

Busch was born in Siegen, Westphalia, to a musical family, and studied at the Cologne Conservatory.

He also conducted at the Bayreuth and Salzburg Festivals.