Busch's 21st birthday was spent en route to Switzerland for a walking and climbing holiday with the Grüters family. He was already friends with two Swiss artists, Max Schulthess and A. H. Pellegrini (who had painted a portrait of Frieda for him), and had long wanted to see their country. He and Frieda were equally captivated by the landscape and the people and, perhaps because they were in love, that first visit inspired a devotion to Switzerland which would never flag. When the weather was good, they spent every possible moment outdoors; when it was bad, they made music in the hotel – fellow guests in their first base, at Les Plans, gave Adolf and Hugo two pictures of the locality in gratitude for renderings of Beethoven and Mozart sonatas. From Les Plans, at the southern end of the Bernese Alps, the party trekked to Trachsellauenen near the Jungfrau peak. They had a musical opus with them which matched the grandeur of their surroundings, as Hugo was studying the new Universal Edition full score of Mahler's Eighth Symphony. When he drew Adolf's attention to a particularly harsh dissonance, the younger man's only comment was that at least it would quickly be passed over in performance. Within little more than a year, this first all-choral symphony would be mounted by Hugo (in Bonn), Fritz (in Aachen) and Steinbach (in Cologne).

While on holiday, Busch was offered the post of first concertmaster of the Vienna Konzertverein Orchestra in succession to Max Grohmann. Both Grümmer and Karl Doktor (who had heard praise of Busch from Reger) had been urging the conductor Ferdinand Löwe to approach Busch as soon as the leader's chair fell vacant; and although Löwe had expressed grave reservations – which it would take him a year to overcome – on account of the candidate's youth, he had finally given in. Only in June, Busch had turned down a similar approach from Stuttgart, but Vienna presented an additional attraction: the orchestral board wanted the string principals to function as a quartet, which would be allowed to tour.

Holzdorf was again the scene of the Quartet's September rehearsals, as Dr Krebs did not take it amiss that the Busches had forsaken the house designed for them in Darmstadt. The sessions were evidently congenial: the four were photographed in various mock-acrobatic poses, including one where they pretended to stand on one another's shoulders – they found it hilarious that on their travels they were occasionally mistaken for employees of the famed Zirkus Busch. The more serious side of their work was interrupted by a trip to Dresden, to hear Fritz conduct Otello and give a morning run-through with the Staatskapelle of Adolf's new Symphony in E minor, which Fritz found ‘magnificent’. This rehearsal afforded the composer the opportunity to hear his music in conditions akin to a performance and make adjustments to the orchestration. Hans Gál, who was present, noted that Fritz had his own suggestions to make and was able to bring his practical experience to bear on Adolf's work, modifying the written dynamics in certain passages so as to clarify the texture and reveal the structure.

On 20 September, Wilhelm Schmitz-Scholl died in the Munich hospital; and around the time of the funeral, the Busches spent several days with his widow in Düsseldorf. The best of sponsors, who never made undue demands on his chosen beneficiary but was always inordinately proud of Adolf's achievements, Schmitz-Scholl had lived to see his judgment vindicated and his kindness bear abundant fruit.

The new concert season brought a novelty, Serkin's String Quartet in One Movement, a skilful construction packing a variety of moods into about a quarter of an hour. On holiday that summer, Busch had encouraged his protégé to write a work for the Quartet; and it received its premiere at the Berlin Singakademie on 14 October. A few more performances were given, including one in Darmstadt, and the piece stayed in the Quartet's repertoire for private occasions – it became quite a joke to say ‘Now we’re going to play Rudi's Op. 1’, the point being that there was never an Op. 2. But the lone opus had an excellent reception whenever it was aired and Serkin took the sallies about his compositional prowess in good heart.

The pig was everywhere in medieval Europe. It was commonplace. It was in the countryside, in the city, on the plate, and in the mind. One would not have to look far to see a pig. They might be eating under an oak tree or out on a grassy knoll. They might be walking in the street with the swineherd close behind at their heels. They might be dismembered, for sale in the butcher shop, a potentially delicious meal for dinner. They might be on the signs hanging from the house or under the choir stalls in the cathedral, dancing, playing the bagpipes, or suckling young pigs or people. Pigs were in all these places. But what was the pig's place? What role did pigs really have in medieval society?

Perhaps the comparison of pigs with prostitutes made by the York civic ordinances is the place to start. Like medieval prostitutes, the pig was both shunned and accepted; understood as necessary while not necessarily being understood. The pig's biological qualities – its eating habits, growth rate, and fecundity – were what made it desirable. But these same qualities also transgressed social norms, making the pig a target of moral condemnation. A paradox pervaded every place the pig went.

Pigs were visible in medieval society, much more so than in our own. Highly concentrated intensive confinement systems for swine are the norm in modern industrial production. Their bodies are disciplined and controlled far from sight of the average consumer. Rather than being tucked away out of sight in mass piggeries, medieval pigs were co-inhabitants of rural and urban settlements. Pigs and people lived side by side. Medieval pigs’ bodies were also disciplined and controlled, but this happened largely within view of the people who would later consume their meat. Large numbers of people had a pig living in a sty on their property. Owners fed their pigs, cleaned up dung, and drove them to the market. Swineherds led them to pasture, knocked down acorns, and kept a watchful eye over them. Butchers bled them, cut them up, and emptied their intestines. Cooks prepared the meat in pasties and stews and fried the bacon and lard. The medieval human–pig relationship was physical and visceral.

The relationship was also mental and emotional.

Pigs lived in the medieval countryside and city, but they also inhabited the medieval mind. Paradoxically, while the pig was a blessing, providing meat for the winter, it was also an animal representing sin and debauchery. Camille observed that images of pigs show ‘no distinction between sacred and profane’. This chapter explores the place of the symbolic pig in medieval society, focusing on these contradictions.

Medieval European Christian notions of the pig were founded on biblical gospel stories and the medieval theological interpretation of these. There are two well-known gospel stories about pigs. The first is that of Jesus driving a legion of demons from a possessed man into a herd of swine, who then leap off a cliff and drown (Matthew 8:28–32; Mark 5:1–13; Luke 8:26–33). In this story, often called the Miracle of the Gadarene Swine, the pigs were innocent bystanders feeding nearby on a hillside while being guarded by swineherds. St Augustine interpreted this as indicating that Christ did not equate humans with animals, since he allowed the pigs to be inhabited by the demons and die. In a later interpretation of the Gadarene Swine, the thirteenth-century philosopher Albertus Magnus noted that pigs were permitted as the demon host because the pig ‘is a filthy animal, by nature, by law, by custom’. He explained that the pig's nature (by which he meant its body) breaks the rules of animals: it has a divided hoof like cattle, but does not chew cud; has nipples along the length of the body, instead of under the hind legs like cows; gives birth to many babies, unlike sheep and cows; and has soft flesh covered with bristles, rather than soft hair. He then noted that by law under Leviticus 11:7 the pig is unclean. Finally, he explained that custom deems the pig unclean because it rolls in the mud, nourishing itself on the unclean.

The common pictural composition for the Gadarene Swine miracle includes Jesus exorcising the demons from the man and the pigs in the water, perhaps based on Ottonian representations from around the year 1000, which were probably, in turn, based on now lost Carolingian models. Such images appear, for example, in the Codex Egberti of the late 900s, the Aachen Gospels of Otto III from around the year 1000, and the Getty's Anglo-Saxon leaves of around 1000.

In Basel, that autumn of 1937, the Busch Chamber Players brought a Bach cantata and works by their leader's other professed favourite, Mozart, into their repertoire. Now that Mozart's music has become so accessible, it is surprising to discover how little of it was performed before the 1941 sesquicentenary of his death stimulated his rise in popularity. In the interwar years, even the Salzburg, Würzburg and Munich festivals did not probe far beyond the handful of familiar Köchel numbers. In 1917 Busoni complained to Volkmar Andreae: ‘Mozart is altogether terra incognita; for how much is known and played of all his 650 works? While not a single bar of Dr Johannes, for example, is overlooked, whether for clarinet or – contrabassoon!’ When Schnabel performed three of the piano concertos in Vienna in 1934, k503 in C major had not been heard in the city since the composer's time. When Serkin made his United States orchestral debut in 1936, the critic Lawrence Gilman described k595 in B flat as ‘a forgotten piano concerto’. And in 1935 Fritz Busch wrote to Adolf: ‘Do you know a Mozart quartet for flute, violin, viola and cello in D major? It is something especially beautiful’. He had clearly come across k285 for the first time. Even the land of Mozart's birth was slow to appreciate him: in the mid-1980s the Viennese essayist Hans Weigel, born in 1908, wrote:

In Austria everything happens belatedly, at second instance. Thirty years ago Franz Schubert barely existed, Mozart was only taking on his true dimensions when I was already in control of my conscious mind.

No wonder there was so little understanding of Mozart's style, let alone the difference between his and Haydn’s. Yet through the 1930s a quiet Mozartian revolution was going on, in which the Busch brothers played their parts. At Glyndebourne Fritz brought Così fan tutte to the fore, as he later did with Idomeneo; and although he was rightly criticised for omitting appoggiature from both recitatives and arias, he did offer an alternative to Furtwängler, who romanticised Mozart's scores, Beecham, who prettified them, or Walter, who treated them too lovingly. ‘Walter was inclined to over-sweeten Mozart and Busch reacted against that’, said Berthold Goldschmidt.

A butcher str addles the pig on the building floor, holding its front leg safely out of the way. With his knife, he slits the pig's throat with precision so that the precious blood gushes into a waiting pan held by a woman. The blood will be transformed into culinary treats and hearty meals. Next to the couple is another pair of butchers carving up a pig carcass. The slaughter, portrayed in a manuscript calendar for the month of December (Figure 14), takes place late in the year as a way of stocking the food stores and reducing the number of mouths to feed over the lean months. This is an image of medieval pig butchery to keep in mind in this chapter. It was a visceral, physical process with close contact between human and pig.

The late fourteenth-century French poet Eustache Deschamps wrote a ballad about pigs extolling their place in medieval society. Its refrain, ‘A pig does no good in its life’ (Pourcel ne fist bien en sa vie), sums up the medieval relationship with pigs. As demonstrated in the previous two chapters, pigs required much attention because they tended to behave badly if not controlled. Deschamps lists the many useful things from pigs, including pork back, neck, hams, sausages, lard, and pork fillets – all of which come from the dead pig. The pig may not have done good in its life, but it did come to do good in its death.

The demand for pork

The reason pigs were kept as livestock was to produce meat. Dietary records of medieval times indicate widespread consumption of pork. Archaeological data from medieval England indicates that pigs were consumed equally in both rural areas and towns. Pig bones occur less frequently than either cattle or sheep, but they are still significant, making up 10–20 per cent of the bones recovered. In Basque areas, pig bones are about 10 per cent of the total recovered bones. Norwegian excavations have similarly shown 5 to 15 per cent of the bones to be swine. Similar numbers are found in the Anglo-Saxon period: in Dorchester, England, from the sixth until the eleventh century 13 to 16 per cent of all animal bones in refuse were pig bones; at Cheddar, pig provided 30 per cent of the meat consumed from 980 to the eleventh century.

The earliest known public performance by Adolf Busch took place on 17 November 1895, in Siegen: before an audience of two hundred teachers, the four-year-old played a solo to Fritz's piano accompaniment well enough to earn a round of applause; a brief mention in the local paper; and, more to his taste, a fee of two frankfurters and a glass of milk. The boys’ first paid engagement was less formal, more in line with Fritz's comment that they ‘lived like real street arabs’. Adolf was having violin lessons from a tubercular young man on the other side of town and Fritz would walk with him to the teacher's lodgings, playing a six-keyed piccolo borrowed from their father's shop. Adolf required little encouragement to strike up on his fiddle and the two of them would give impromptu concerts in the market place, opposite the town hall. One day they got carried away, stayed longer than usual and provoked a kindly onlooker into taking a collection for them from their motley audience. When the boys proudly took home 2 Marks 17 Pfennigs, their parents were horrified and firmly forbade any further public displays of their artistry. Yet their fame was spreading in the locality and at an evening concert of the town choral society Adolf and Fritz both played solos, finishing with a joint rendering of variations on The Carnival of Venice. Bored by his simple accompaniment, Fritz began to improvise at the keyboard and Adolf was first amused, then enraged, as he lost his place in the music. He laid into Fritz with his bow, Fritz retaliated – and the curtain was hastily lowered on a furious fist fight. ‘Nowadays’, Fritz remarked later, ‘we settle our differences in a more intellectual fashion.’

Adolf showed other signs of temperament. When he was scolded for doing anything wrong, he was liable to bang his head against the wall in fury and frustration. He was the introspective half of the Busch ‘musical twins’, lacking Fritz's sang-froid: his self-confidence was harder won. When he started at the local school at Easter 1898, he was always in trouble with the staff, incurring regular thrashings until his class teacher discovered he was a violinist and asked what he could play. ‘The Concerto by Bériot.’ – ‘Then play it for us.

The pig was a commonplace animal in the Middle Ages and, like many commonplace animals, the medieval pig embodies paradoxes. The pig was a major food source in winter, yet pork was a food that carried the connotation of religious uncleanliness. The omnivorous pig was useful as a garbage recycler, but was also a dangerous eater who could steal food and even root up buried corpses. Some pigs were domesticated, while others ran freely through the woodlands. The pig larder was a blessing, but pigs were also believed to do the Devil's bidding. As art historian Michael Camille observed, ‘pigs were both celebrated and reviled in medieval culture’. This book will explore these paradoxes of the pig in medieval culture and practice as we journey together to the places the pig inhabited.

Human lives are, and have been, deeply entangled with animal lives. Humans have sought wild animals for meat, skins, and a myriad of other products – from beaver castoreum to whale ambergris – as long as humans have existed. Wild animals, from lions to kangaroos to bats, shape human culture through symbolism and social practices that incorporate them. Both livestock and pets are brought directly under human control, often living under the same roofs as people and dependent on them for food and care. Humans began domesticating livestock mammals such as goats, sheep, pigs, and cattle over 10,000 years ago; dogs were domesticated even earlier. In the domestication process, the genetic makeup of the animals was modified as humans bred them for economically advantageous traits (more milk production, better wool fibres, more strength, better stamina, etc.) and human cultural contexts were modified to accommodate the animals’ needs and wants. This closeness to animals is both physical and mental – as humans have interacted with animals, we have thought with and through them. In a book about animals, looking at animals involves looking at both them and ourselves.

This book looks at human–animal relations through one animal (the pig) in a particular time (the Middle Ages) in a particular geography (western Europe). Writing about pigs is nothing new. Scholars have written about Fascist Pigs, Capitalist Pigs, The Symbolic Pig, The English Pig, and Legions of Pigs. Even just The Pig.

The large, br istly pig leads the way on the street. The swineherd follows behind, holding on tight to a rope tied around the animal's back leg. He uses his stick to guide the pig, possibly striking it on the rump if it stops in an unwanted spot. They are probably on their way either to the city's market or the slaughterhouse. The artist drew this pig and his keeper in a manuscript in fourteenth-century France to depict snapshots of urban life, and naturally animals such as pigs were part of the scene (Figure 10). Pigs were as integrated into the cityscape as they were into the countryside of medieval Europe.

Pigs would have been brought on the hoof into cities and towns to be sold at markets. Manors around large urban centres such as Paris or London could be guaranteed to have outlets for selling excess swine. A study of manors in the London area around 1300 showed that over half of them sold pigs. Some of these estates made a significant income from selling pigs to urban markets. The mean sale price of non-breeding meat pigs was twice that of an adult sheep and two and a half times that for a beef calf. Pigs could be big business as marketed commodities.

Yet pigs were not just rural residents itinerantly in the city – they lived there all the time and many townspeople owned them. Owning one or two pigs was quite common for city dwellers: a taxation roll from 1297 for Reading, England, shows that 30 of the 102 assessed persons owned pigs, yet only six people had more than two. These pigs were raised and bred within the city walls. Medieval Turku, for example, had a ‘self-sufficient pig-raising system’ in which a portion were killed each year and others were allowed to mature and reproduce. The number of piglet bones found in Anglo-Scandinavian York likewise indicates that there were breeding sows in the town and some of the pig teeth recovered have wear patterns consistent with stalled pigs. Some governments restricted how many pigs urban households could have. In 1410 the local government of Ulm in Germany limited the number of pigs that a resident could own to 24, and limited the driving of pigs on the town roadways to one hour at midday.

It was Busch's ill luck to be based in Berlin during the years when the city was at its least attractive. When he and Frieda moved to Lichterfelde with Irene in September 1918, the war was drawing to its humiliating close and revolution was imminent in the capital. During the time they lived there, inflation – which made the German economy the sickest in Europe – grew progressively worse. The fevered artistic atmosphere which would pervade Berlin later in the 1920s had not yet begun to weave its spell: life was hard and uncertain, music in a state of decay. A concentrated effort was nevertheless made to keep concert life going; and even in the years immediately after the War, Berlin could boast two of the outstanding talents in German music, Strauss and Busoni. Strauss was in charge of the Hofkapelle (Court Opera Orchestra) concerts until the end of the 1919–20 season, to be succeeded by Furtwängler for two years and then – following a season's interregnum with Abendroth – by Erich Kleiber. Soon to become the Staatskapelle, this orchestra was the best in the city; but after Furtwängler moved to the Philharmonic on the death of Nikisch in 1922, he rapidly improved that organisation. The conductors beginning to make their names, as guests or residents, were Emil Bohnke, Franz von Hoesslin, Otto Klemperer, Hermann Scherchen, Georg Schnéevoigt and George Szell; and experienced men such as Leo Blech, Oskar Fried, Max von Schillings, Georg Schumann and (from 1923) Bruno Walter were active, as well as the choral specialists Bruno Kittel, Siegfried Ochs and Hugo Rüdel. Busoni, who returned in 1919 from his self-imposed exile in Switzerland, made memorable appearances as soloist and conductor. Others who graced Berlin's concert platforms were the pianists Eugen d’Albert, Wilhelm Backhaus, Eduard Erdmann, Edwin Fischer, Carl Friedberg, Walter Gieseking, Wilhelm Kempff, Leonid Kreutzer, James Kwast, Frieda Kwast-Hodapp, Elly Ney, Max Pauer, Egon Petri, Moriz Rosenthal, Emil von Sauer and Artur Schnabel and violinists Licco Amar, Carl Flesch, Fritz Kreisler, Alma Moodie, Mikhail Press, Alexander Schmuller, Emil Telmányi and Franz von Vécsey. Several talented violinists were emerging, such as Tossy Spivakovsky, Georg Kulenkampff, Boris Kroyt and Josef Wolfsthal.

As so often before, Busch sought a remedy for pain in work. An immense amount of repertoire had to be rehearsed with the Quartet, since the four were committed to a Beethoven cycle and other projects. Busch and Serkin had again been invited to play in Reykjavík and this time the pianist was able to go. They also persuaded Irene, against her better judgment, that it would be good for her to take a break from the sadness pervading Guilford and forsake the children for a fortnight; so towards the end of September the U.S. Air Force flew the three of them over to Iceland. On the 23rd the Duo opened a Beethoven cycle, rousing the audience to tremendous enthusiasm by playing, as their encores, two pieces by Helgi Pálsson which the composer had given Busch on his previous visit. They received equally rapturous applause for the Beethoven recitals on the 26th and 27th and then spent two weeks seeing something of Iceland. In a joint interview they gave to a local paper just before leaving, Busch expressed amazement at the number of Icelanders who enjoyed music, and Serkin said he would like to take a holiday in their country. Busch also acquired a pupil, as he invited Björn Ólafsson to study with him in 1947 and 1948.

But now, when the family were still trying to come to terms with Frieda's death, tragedy struck again: the fourth Serkin child, Susan Veronica, not quite a year old, had been left in the care of Irene's cousin Gertrud Cloos; and on 7 October, while her parents and grandfather were still away, she was accidentally strangled in her cot. ‘She was in a special crib for outdoor use, screened on all sides and on the lid, which was held down by a heavy spring’, her sister Elizabeth explained. ‘Somehow she wedged her neck between the lid and the bar, and although Gertrud left her unattended for only a moment, it was long enough to cut off her breath.’