Though often noted by scholars, Vaughan Williams’s work with amateur musicians has generally been neglected by them, presented as a kind of social or aesthetic backdrop to his more prestigious compositional projects. Such neglect does the composer a disservice, not only because more than half of his catalogue was written with amateur performers in mind but also because he recognized that it was on ‘amateur music’ that the entire edifice of English music stood. This essay charts the ethical significance that working with amateur musicians had for the composer (who was a principled democrat) and examines the economic impact that such music-making had on the emergence of a viable English compositional style. In a country where laissez-faire economics reigned supreme, it was the rise of an enormous amateur music market in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that created the modern music profession – the professional performers, teachers, journalists, publishing houses, administrators, and promoters who fed and ultimately grew this market. It was a development that in turn helped ‘make’ the modern English composer.

This chapter argues that visual art played a generative role in the compositional processes of Vaughan Williams. His taste in painting was influenced by the art historians Bernard Berenson and Roger Fry, who lauded the formal simplicity of works by fifteenth-century Italian artists like Piero della Francesca, Fra Angelico, and Andrea Mantegna. The hymn tune ‘Mantegna’ was conceived as a ‘musical representation’ of that artist’s Agony in the Garden (c.1455–6, National Gallery, London). Reproductions of fifteenth-century paintings were displayed in the composer’s home, The White Gates, Dorking, from 1929.

English modernist painting developed rapidly after 1910. Among contemporary artists, Vaughan Williams particularly admired the work of the brothers Paul and John Nash. Their work has been described as ‘Neo-Romantic’, returning to the traditions of British landscape painting but with a modernist inflection. Vaughan Williams engaged directly with the visual legacies of the Romantic era in Job: A Masque for Dancing (1930), a musical response to William Blake’s Illustrations of the Book of Job (1826). Blake’s images were vividly translated into sets and costumes by wood engraver Gwendolen Raverat. The production represented a masterly fusion of visual and musical elements.

This chapter provides an introduction to how Vaughan Williams’s music was received in interwar continental Europe, particularly within music magazines and scholarly periodicals. It is in two sections. The first considers the different contexts in which it was heard: choral performances of the Mass and folk-song arrangements, pieces played at International Society for Contemporary Music (ISCM) festivals, and performances of large-scale works in ‘seasonal’ orchestral concerts and recitals. For the most part, Vaughan Williams’s music was well received, even at ISCM festivals, where he might have been overshadowed by more radical figures; and the increased number of European performances that he received during the period reflected a growing interest among leading continental performers. The chapter then examines some of the writing on Vaughan Williams by continental critics, primarily those from France and Germany. These reveal two contrasting but not necessarily mutually exclusive narratives: one in which Vaughan Williams is presented as the leader of a new English school of composition that is underpinned by the language of English folk song, and another in which Vaughan Williams is considered in a pan-European context, where the influence of French impressionism is more keenly felt. A table of selected performances is also included.

Throughout the Second World War, Vaughan Williams was not just the ‘grand old man’ of English music but in many ways its leading figure, often serving to represent what was worth protecting and preserving in English cultural life. He and his music were featured extensively on radio and film, and his major work of the period, the Fifth Symphony, was warmly received. The serenity of that work may seem to suggest a certain remove from wartime realities; indeed, his music generally in this period seems out of keeping with the turbulence of the war years. And yet, his vision of music as a source of spiritual sustenance and serenity seemed to find traction in wartime, in a newly powerful way. In the course of the war, he established himself as a cultural figure of national importance in a way that few musicians had before, both building on and reinforcing the growing importance of music itself in wartime life, and serving as a major representative of English and, in turn, British culture to the wider world.

Many thousands of historical pageants were held in twentieth-century Britain. These musical-dramatic re-enactments of history were especially popular in the interwar period, and in the 1930s Ralph Vaughan Williams collaborated with the novelist E. M. Forster to create two such pageants: The Abinger Pageant (1934) and England’s Pleasant Land (1938). Drawing on a range of published and archival sources, this chapter challenges readings of these and other pageants as expressions of a reactionary and conservative artistic (anti-) modernism. It sets them in the context of Vaughan Williams’s involvement with the Folk Revival, and his conception of folk culture as of vital relevance to contemporary society and its problems. It argues that these amateur performances of local history should be seen as realizations of Vaughan Williams’s ideals for a national culture which rested on the revival of local communities through art that was made by those selfsame communities. Vaughan Williams’s historical pageants were consistent with his left-leaning reading of English history, and with his belief in the radical potential of art – and specifically art that drew on an autochthonous vernacular musical tradition – to enrich human experience in the here and now, and on into the future.

As a boy, Adolf Busch was expected to make even more of an impact on the world as a composer than as a violinist: admirers used phrases such as ‘a young Mozart’ to describe his facility in composition. Although he stole every minute he could for what he called ‘note-writing’, circumstances dictated that for most of his life he would be a summer and Sunday composer; his only other free time would be a couple of weeks at Christmas. Nevertheless he wrote an astonishing amount of music, in virtually every genre (his one attempt at an opera was abandoned). Like other composer-performers – Robert Casadesus, say, or Artur Schnabel – he had to live with the knowledge that most people would rather hear him interpreting other men's music than his own. Undoubtedly his compositional skill made him a greater interpreter, yet he had a real, continuing urge to express himself through writing music; and his efforts won the praise of many contemporaries. In the 1920s Wilhelm Stenhammar declared him to be the best composer then writing; and Donald Tovey took his music very seriously. In 1929 Karl Straube wrote to his friend the conductor and composer Siegmund von Hausegger:

Rudolf Serkin, who had a Busch composition performed at the Marlboro School of Music each year, on or near the composer's birthdate, felt that his father-in-law's craftsmanship was ‘first class’, although he was too close to him to assess his achievement objectively.

The Harz holiday caused Busch to miss his elder brother's opening performances as General Music Director of the Saxon State Opera – the season started on 13 August 1922 with Fidelio; then came Der Rosenkavalier, Die Meistersinger and Tristan. On 26 August the Adolf Busches, Rudi Serkin and Otto Grüters attended the dress rehearsal of Die Zauberflöte. Fritz was in his element, having captured perhaps the most desirable operatic job in Germany, held previously by Weber and Wagner. A post in Berlin might carry more glamour, through association with the capital, but in Dresden the director had an orchestra as fine as any in the world (Fritz compared it to a Stradivarius) and a cohesive company full of fine singers:

Hans Gál concurred:

During his tenure, with the backing of the sympathetic Intendant Alfred Reucker, Fritz established an artistic policy which was the envy of the world and raised the State Opera to its artistic zenith, only to see lesser men such as Karl Böhm and Karl Elmendorff reap the benefit of his labours. Three Busch brothers forged strong links with the Saxon capital: Fritz as its leading resident musician, Adolf as visiting soloist and composer, Herman as principal cellist of the city's second orchestra, the Philharmonic. In his first season alone, Fritz gave (in addition to the operas already mentioned) Otello, Boris Godunov, Palestrina (with Pfitzner present) and Arlecchino (with Busoni in attendance). He also took over the twelve subscription concerts of the Sächsische Staatskapelle, with conspicuous success.

Busch was too busy to be a pedagogue in the mould of Leopold Auer, Carl Flesch, Ivan Galamian or D. C. Dounis, and he resigned his masterclass at the Berlin Hochschule too soon to make his mark there. Only Dea Gombrich and Blanche Honegger were long-term pupils but he gave lessons to such violinists as Helen Airoff, Gosta Andreasson, Georg Beerwald, Frances Brockman, Alphonse Brun, Hermann Diener, Ernest Drucker, Stefan Frenkel, Arlie Furman, Stefi Geyer, Frederick Grinke, Gerhard Kander, Otto Kirchenmaier, Willy Kleemann, Elisheva Kramer, Dolores Maass, Frances Magnes, Yehudi Menuhin, Erica Morini, David Nadien, Bjorn Olafsson, Anna Radnitz, Ulrich Strauss and Charles Treger. Flesch thought that Busch ‘must be considered more of a suggestive influence than a real teacher’; and Boris Schwarz wrote:

Grinke, who had lessons from Busch and Flesch, was left with strongly contrasting impressions:

Joseph Segal moved in his mid-teens straight from one of these masters to the other:

The two pillars of Adolf Busch's musical faith were Bach and Mozart: he never lost an opportunity to express his reverence for them. He identified closely with Beethoven – as with Haydn, Schubert, Schumann, Brahms, Dvořak, Reger and Busoni – but his feeling for these composers was almost instinctive, a product of his background and training, whereas Bach and Mozart satisfied him on all levels, from the intuitive to the intellectual. ‘With Mozart and Bach there is no bad writing, only beautiful and more beautiful’, he said, ‘but with Beethoven there are some weak things.’ He knew virtually every work of his preferred composers and performed many of them as concertmaster, soloist, chamber musician or orchestra director. Bach was a favourite for home music-making and any work which could be adapted to the violin would be taken down off the shelf – Adolf Spemann recalled going through the Flute Sonatas with his namesake; and Dea Gombrich said: ‘Busch loved to play the Organ Sonatas on two violins and I often played them with him. Serkin or my mother would be at the piano and perhaps someone would play the cello’. As for Mozart, Busch singled out the B minor Adagio for piano, k540, and the Adagio introduction to the Rondo of the G minor String Quintet, k516, as the composer's most beautiful creations, adding: ‘I wish I had known Mozart, so that I could have told him I understood him’. After he and Serkin had spent a morning playing Mozart to Otto Gruters, Busch said: ‘Mozart is altogether the most cunning swine that ever existed; he knew more than the Lord God knew’. Later he added: ‘After Bach, Mozart knew the most about counterpoint’. And again: ‘At the beginning of the Armed Men I always come over all cold’. Yet when it came to public performances or recordings, he knew his own strengths, as Robert Dressler attested:

Adolf practises the whole day long’, Hedwig reported to Otto and Hanna Grüters from Riehen in September 1949. Busch began the season with a Bach evening in Zurich on the 25th: the two solo Concertos and the Double Concerto with Straumann and a reduced Tonhalle Orchestra. Then on the 28th he flew into West Berlin for a performance of the Beethoven Concerto with the Philharmonic under its young Romanian chief conductor Sergiu Celibidache, at its temporary home, the Titania-Palast. The airlift was still going on – although the Russians and their former Allies were reaching agreement and the last relief plane would fly to the beleaguered city on 6 October – and it was a grim experience to make music in a city unwillingly divided against itself. Busch appeared unaffected at his press conference, of which Rudolf Bauer reported: ‘Broad-shouldered the 58-year-old sits at the table; during the conversation warm good humour shines out of the blue eyes in the massive Westphalian face’. But Bauer, who went to the performance on the 29th, noticed that Busch seemed stirred by ‘deep and painful emotions’ during the orchestral introduction of the Beethoven, after the welcome given him by the audience:

Another critic reported from Busch's recital with Klaus Billing at the same venue that the violinist was at his best in pieces where he was ‘free of all technical inhibitions’:6 Reger's Aria from Op. 103, the Sarabande of Bach's D minor Partita and an encore, the Gavotte en Rondeau from the E major Partita.

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.

A musician like myself can speak most effectively about music and musicmaking to his students and friends. In discussing specific things in music itself, one feels a certain accomplishment, but it is not easy to address oneself to a more general public. Interviews and articles about music and musical education have a tendency to become negative, although that is utterly foreign to the speaker's intentions. It is very easy to take the good things for granted, and to speak almost exclusively of those conditions with which one is dissatisfied. For this reason I have always been reluctant to have statements published which might very easily misrepresent my true attitude.

There are limitless possibilities for musical development in America, and it must be exciting to every musician to observe the musical life of this land and to mark those elements in it which he feels will lead to the most good. With its unrivalled orchestras, its resources and good will there is every reason to believe that the best and truest in music will continue to thrive here. The past has shown that people always desire what is authentic in music as soon as they have been familiarized with it. America has inherited the great musical traditions of Europe as a part of her own active musical life. And we can see here developments parallel to those in the older countries.

Chamber Music Public Growing

To take a specific example, one in which I am deeply interested, there is a heartening growth in the interest of the public in chamber music. In a certain sense, the status of chamber music in a country is a measuring rod of its musical intelligence, for in chamber music we find the art in one of its purest forms. In former days my quartet used to tour throughout Germany and other countries, visiting scores of cities, large and small.

HEINRICH ANDERS, acknowledged by Busch as his first real violin teacher, was born Heinrich Schweinefleisch in Beuel on 24 April 1877 and studied at the Cologne Conservatory with Gustav Hollander, graduating in 1893. He led the Duisburg Symphony Orchestra and from 1902 was second concertmaster of the Cologne City Orchestra, becoming first concertmaster in 1910. He taught at the Conservatory until 1922 and led an eponymous quartet – with Max Topstedt, Jean Schmitz (later Focco Klimmerboom) and Paul Ludwig (later Karl Schafer) – which was well known in the Rhineland. Anders appeared as a soloist at the Gurzenich and directed many of the popular summer concerts there. On Good Friday, 19 April 1935, he was performing the solo in the Benedictus of the Missa solemnis, with Max Fiedler conducting, when he broke off playing and died onstage.

GÖSTA ANDREASSON, born in Gothenburg, Sweden, on 9 December 1894 as Gustav Adolf Andreasson, had his violin lessons seriously disrupted in his teens by a bout of tuberculosis which affected a hip, leaving him with a limp. He studied at the Royal College of Music in Stockholm (1913–18) with Julius Ruthstrom, a pupil of Burmester, Heermann, Moser and Joachim, played in Ruthstrom's quartet (1916–18) and won the silver medal. From 1913 to 1917 Andreasson attended Leopold Auer's summer courses in Dresden, St Petersburg and Oslo. He played at the Royal Opera, Stockholm (1917–18), and for the Gothenburg Orkesterforening (1918–19), before moving to Berlin in 1919 to study with Busch. Berlin changed the course of his life, as he met his future wife and found his métier for the next 25 years. First appearing with the Busch Quartet in autumn 1920, he at once proved the perfect ‘second fiddle’.

Now that the Nazi era and the Holocaust have passed into history, it is difficult to imagine a time when choices could still be made – when musicians, with their eyes on the approaching Brahms centenary in 1933, could keep their heads down and mutter, in effect: ‘I’m just a Musikant, I don't get involved in politics’. For Busch, Brahms loomed large without blotting out what was happening all around. Yet even he, who had so often warned about the onset of Nazism in Germany, could not know how close he was to the precipice over which his country, his profession and his own life would soon tumble. At the outset of the 1932–33 season, he stood at the pinnacle of his career. Virtually every work he composed was assured of performances and he featured in the catalogues of three leading publishers. Among German executant musicians, his distinction was rivalled only by Furtwängler, Walter and Backhaus. No Beethoven, Brahms or Reger festival was complete without him. ‘He was unquestionably the greatest German violinist’, Szymon Goldberg said, and Berthold Goldschmidt attested that: ‘Busch was always considered in Germany as a typical German musician and fiddler, the one and only interpreter of Beethoven and Brahms’. As the inheritor of Joachim's mantle, he had a bulging concert diary, in which the name Brahms appeared on virtually every page: apart from innumerable bookings at home and abroad for the Concerto – his edition, with cadenza, was being published by Breitkopf – he planned an exhaustive review of the chamber music.

For the Quartet and Serkin the season started in London, ushered in by Busch's first Promenade Concert engagements: the Brahms and Beethoven Concertos in Queen's Hall on 14 and 16 September respectively, with Sir Henry Wood and the BBC Symphony Orchestra. He confessed to friends that he was put off initially by the Promenaders milling about in the body of the hall, where the seats were removed for the Proms; and the composer Harold Truscott noted that he looked nervous in the opening tutti of the Brahms, transferring his violin from one hand to the other, placing it under one arm and finally playing along with the first violins – an old campaigner's stratagem for steadying nerves and checking tuning.

The musicianship of Adolf Busch was founded on a wealth of knowledge virtually unrivalled among performers of his era. His limitations of repertoire, such as they were, could be put down to choice rather than ignorance; and in his chosen field his erudition ran deep. His brother Fritz constantly sought his counsel on bowings and even tempi: when Adolf advised on a tempo for part of the final quartet in Act 2 of Die Entführung aus dem Serail, which seemed wrong in the Breitkopf edition, the first printing (by Andre) bore him out. With Toscanini he argued about a Beethoven piano sonata, only to be proved right; and a dispute over a Mozart quartet ended with ‘Tosca’ expostulating: ‘Only Mozart can decide that’. Busch investigated the autograph, discovered he was correct and copied the relevant passage on to a postcard, sending it to the Maestro with the legend: ‘Mozart has decided’. Hedwig Busch recalled her husband routing a critic who had objected to a detail in a Busch-Serkin performance of a Mozart sonata: ‘Adolf had looked at the manuscript’. The musicologist Frederick Dorian wrote:

Joseph Szigeti on Adolf Busch

A short time ago a woman violinist visited me, to play me the Bach G major Sonata from Adolf Busch's edition which was published in 1929 by Friedrich Blume. This afternoon would have been a complete waste of time, had it not brought home to me once more how present-day violin-playing is straying further and further away from the ideal which inspired Adolf Busch. The young lady did actually use a copy bearing Adolf Busch's indications, but had dismissed all the subtle phrasing and the fingering and bowing which were so characteristic of his style, and had set a pastoral tone to the piece! And gone was the profound expression, that deeply satisfying eloquence for which Busch gave the performer exact indications. In order to make this clear to readers who are non-violinists, I should like to emphasise just one characteristic of his style, namely the so-called reprise de l’archet – an almost inaudible lifting of the bow between two consecutive up- or down-bows, rather like the inaudible breath of a singer. For instance, if Bach wrote

then Adolf Busch's reprise de l’archet would imbue this fragment with the meaningful expression which is quite lost if it is disposed of as a smooth phrase, as is so common today, i.e.,

This and other aspects of his technique were, of course, not apparent to the listener who was not a string player. He would simply listen spellbound by the abandon, the unaffectedness and the sincerity with which this great musician played – and this was what I too experienced every time I heard Adolf Busch play.