The name Busch, a common one in Germany, was borne by several notable men in the nineteenth century: the publicist Moritz, the industrialist Adolphus and the comic artist and poet Wilhelm, who worked for the Fliegende Blätter. But the first half of the twentieth century brought it a new association, with music, through a remarkable family that sprang from relatively humble origins in Westphalia.

The making of a great musician is a complex process and begins before he or she is even aware of music. From their parents the brothers Fritz and Adolf Busch, so close in age and affinity, inherited unerring senses of pitch and rhythm, a rare combination of gifts. From their mother Henriette, the Busch children acquired a simple German Protestant faith, emotional stability and optimism: their father Wilhelm contributed the introspective, temperamental, even stormy characteristics which led so many of them into the performing arts. Although this Wilhelm Busch was of peasant stock, with origins firmly rooted in Westphalia, he was an extraordinary character who soon outgrew his background and had something of the bohemian about him. He was born in the village of Erndtebrück in the Sauerland in 1861, the youngest of twelve children, but no one could ever agree on whether his birthday was 1 or 30 July – he happily celebrated both. His sons suspected a gipsy element in his ancestry, as his mother Marie Elise had jet-black hair and unusually brown skin for a German. He himself liked to say: ‘Our house in Erndtebrück was called the Spaniards’ House. We all originally came from Spain’. His dark eyes had the deep-set, burning look which was such a feature of his second son Adolf; his mind and body were nimble, well exercised by innumerable boyhood scrapes; and he soon developed a fierce self-reliant streak after the suicide of his father Heinrich, a Tagelöhner or day-labourer who managed a small farm. As a boy Wilhelm loved music and made himself willow pipes to play when he was the village cowherd. Deeply attached to wild birds, he developed the knack of catching them with his hands. In his teens he ran away to Hamburg to study the violin and soon became a wanderer, living by his wits and his fiddle-playing.