Wilhelm Schmitz-Scholl was only the first of many who were to play the role of Maecenas in Busch's career. He offered to have the boy educated in either art or music and, although Adolf loved drawing and painting and kept up connections with art and artists to the end of his days, he unhesitatingly chose music. And so on 16 September 1902 his father and Fritz delivered him to the Cologne Conservatory, where he was to study violin with Willy Hess, piano with Paul Flasche, theory with Franz Bölsche, chamber music with Friedrich Grützmacher the Younger and, in the fullness of time, composition with Fritz Steinbach – successor as Director of the institution to Franz Wüllner, who had died suddenly, only a week before Busch's arrival. His general education was entrusted to a grammar-school master, with whose family he was boarded; but this teacher seemed more interested in money than in education and Adolf, moreover, could not bear to be separated from Fritz. He never forgot calling home and hearing his mother, unused to the newly acquired telephone, ask repeatedly: ‘Who is that?’ – ‘Well, actually, it's Adolf’, he responded plaintively, blurting out how homesick he was.2 Thus in December the violin and embroidery shop in Siegen was sold and the Busches moved to Siegburg, near Bonn, where they took an apartment at 63 Königstraße. Adolf could now go home for weekends and his siblings were always so pleased to see him that when Sunday came and it was time to return to Cologne, he sometimes faked a fever so as to delay his departure by a day. When at home he could help the family finances – even more straitened than usual, since the lawyer entrusted with the sale of the shop had run off with the proceeds – by playing in the Kapelle Busch. Such moonlighting was strictly against Conservatory rules but the authorities turned a blind eye, as did Schmitz-Scholl, who had initially made it a condition of his largesse that Adolf should not be distracted from his studies in this fashion.

For the first time, Busch found himself in a major cultural centre. Cologne, the jewel of the Rhineland until the devastation of World War II, had inspired such artists as Heine and Schumann to some of their finest work.