History
Foundations
In 1912, the position of concertmaster of the Wiener Konzertvereinorchester fell vacant. Many people, including principal violist Karl Doktor and principal cellist Paul Grümmer, recommended the 21-year-old German violinist and composer Adolf Busch for the role. After Busch's appointment, conductor Ferdinand Löwe and the directors of the new Konzerthaus wanted to start a string quartet based on the orchestra's principals, and as Busch was planning his own ensemble, it seemed an ideal arrangement. He accepted Doktor and Grümmer as quartet partners and brought in Fritz Rothschild as second violinist.
After intensive rehearsals, the Wiener Konzertvereinquartett was first heard on 25 May 1913, playing Haydn in a private concert in Eisenstadt. Its official debut came on 3 August at Lilli Lehmann's Salzburg Festival with Beethoven's F major Quartet, Op. 59 No. 1, and Schumann's A minor Quartet, Op. 41 No. 1. The new ensemble received immediate acclaim, with critics comparing it with the Joachim Quartet. The concerts that followed were equally successful. Rothschild was dismissed shortly before the outbreak of war in the summer of 1914, while in early 1915 Doktor was called up. A year later the replacement second violinist, Emil Hauser, was also commandeered by the army. Busch and Grümmer, both unfit for military service, kept the quartet going until the end of the 1916-17 season with a revolving cast of players.
Early years
On 27 May 1919 the Busch Quartet was founded in Berlin, where Busch was a professor at the Hochschule. Grümmer remained the cellist, but as Doktor had not yet been demobilized, the budding conductor and composer Emil Bohnke stood in for him on viola. The temporary second violinist was Karl Reitz, a friend and colleague from Busch's student quartets in Cologne, who was really a viola specialist. The ensemble began rehearsals on 1 July and made a quiet début on 21 October in the Rittersaal at Düsseldorf, with further appearances that year in Cologne, Bonn, Breslau, and Frankfurt. By the next season, when they gave their first of many Beethoven cycles—beginning with one in Beethoven's birthplace, Bonn—Reitz and Bohnke had dropped out and the inner parts were being played by Busch's Swedish pupil Gösta Andreasson and the stopgap violist Ernst Groell. At the end of November 1920, visiting Vienna for a series of concerts, Busch and Andreasson rehearsed with the Vienna-based Doktor and Grümmer, and on 6 December the Busch Quartet, with Doktor at last back in the fold, began a Netherlands tour at the Amsterdam Concertgebouw's Kleine Zaal. This first program by the group's 1920s formation, featuring music by Mozart, Reger and Beethoven, received a tumultuous ovation. Early the next year the four made a tour of Italy.
International prominence
Although Germany in the interwar years had many excellent quartets—including the Klingler, Wendling, Dresden, Gewandhaus, Gürzenich, Havemann, Deman, and Amar—Busch and his colleagues quickly established themselves as the best. All four members of Busch's ensemble were soloists in their own right, with a large repertoire of concertos and sonatas, and their fees reflected this status. But impresarios found that an entire subscription series could be sold by including the Busch Quartet. Engagements followed with dizzying rapidity, especially for the leader, who had the busiest solo career.
During the 1920s the Busch Quartet steadily built a reputation as the finest string quartet in Europe and, in effect, the world. Among European chamber-music aficionados, the quartet's performances acquired an almost mystical aura. For the likes of Isaiah Berlin, their performances had a philosophical force over and above purely musical considerations. They were particularly successful in Italy, where they toured at least once a year, playing Schubert for Eleonora Duse, Dvořák for Maxim Gorky, and Beethoven for Arturo Toscanini; they even gave a command performance for Pope Pius XI. Their other main centers of activity were Germany, Austria, Switzerland and the Netherlands, although they roamed fairly freely across Europe. One of their greatest fans in Berlin was Albert Einstein, who attended every Busch Quartet concert he could.
Yet there were tensions with Grümmer, and in 1930 he was replaced by Busch's younger brother Herman (né Hermann). This change ushered in the quartet's most successful period. On 24 October 1930 it made its British debut in Oxford, and in September 1932 it began its series of HMV recordings at Abbey Road Studios in London, recordings that have never left the catalogue. Soon the Busch Quartet became virtually a London institution, its recitals frequented by the likes of Samuel Beckett, Leonard and Virginia Woolf, Victor Gollancz, and Michael Tippett.
The war years
It should have been a notable era for the Busch Quartet in Germany, too, but the rise of Nazism had already caused Adolf and Frieda Busch to move to Basel in 1927. By the time Adolf Hitler came to power in 1933, the four men found themselves in an agonizing situation. On 1 April, the day of the Nazi boycott of Jewish businesses, they played Haydn's Seven Last Words in a Berlin church, and afterward decided unanimously that they had given their last concert in Nazi Germany. Despite the losses this decision entailed, not least in revenue, they never regretted it. Two weeks later they were off on a brief American tour, making their U.S. debut in the Coolidge Chamber Music Festival at the Library of Congress. Upon their return Andreasson and Herman Busch also moved to Basel. Thereafter the quartet confined its activities mainly to Britain, Austria, Italy, and Switzerland.
In Vienna the quartet had been the de facto resident ensemble at the Konzerthaus since 1919, giving regular recitals in the medium-sized room now known as the Mozartsaal, but following the rise of Nazism in that city, it quietly withdrew after 1935. In 1938, with the Anschluss in Austria and the adoption of antisemitic laws in Italy, the quartet boycotted those countries. Its members led the string sections in the orchestra at the 1938 and 1939 Lucerne Festivals, and in the latter year the quartet traveled to the U.S., giving four recitals—each including a late Beethoven quartet—in Carnegie Hall's chamber music room. This visit's success was a factor in Busch's decision to emigrate to the U.S. when war came, the four having been disappointed in their attempts to come to Britain. After several setbacks they reunited in New York in June 1940, but Busch's heart attack later that year forced his colleagues to take orchestral and teaching jobs. They resumed concerts and recordings in 1941 and had further successes in both spheres, before Andreasson's teaching commitments and the illnesses of both Doktor and Frieda Busch caused the ensemble to lapse in 1944. For the 1943-44 season the ailing Doktor was replaced by the sole woman to play in the group, Viennese-born Lotte Hammerschlag.
Postwar and dissolution
In 1946, Adolf and Herman Busch started a new Busch Quartet with Ernest Drucker (father of future Emerson String Quartet violinist Eugene Drucker) as second violinist and Hugo Gottesmann as violist. Its first public engagement was a Beethoven cycle at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. In 1947, despite Busch's ill health, it made a triumphant tour of Britain and renewed acquaintance with Switzerland and Italy before visiting Iceland. Drucker had to leave the quartet that summer for family reasons, but by the end of the year he had been replaced by Bruno Straumann and the quartet gave a concert with Busch's son-in-law Rudolf Serkin in New York. Thereafter it divided its activity between the U.S. and Europe, appearing at the Strasbourg and Edinburgh Festivals in 1949. A European tour in early 1950 had to be canceled because of Busch's illness, but that September the quartet visited South America. In January 1951 it made an emotional return to Germany, touring for a month and giving 20 concerts, including one in Basel.
Their last Beethoven cycles followed in April and May 1951 in Italy and England, and the quartet finished its career as it had started 38 years earlier, with a private reading of a Haydn quartet, this time at the home of English friends. But there was a coda: a single performance in Vermont at which Philipp Naegele stood in for Gottesmann. A long German tour was planned for 1952, but at the end of 1951, Busch's retirement due to illness ended the quartet's career.
