Underrated Classical Musicians: Fritz Busch

Fritz Busch is not so much forgotten as lost in the shuffle. That tends to happen when you're your country's #5 conductor of your generation... but when so many cults have formed around less deserving contemporaries, it begins to look like a minor injustice.

People tend to forget, except for Furtwangler, the batons who stayed in Germany were fundamentally regarded as the second-tier, promoted to the biggest appointments because the all the anti-Nazis left. People also tend to forget that, except for Walter, the conductors who stayed in America were also regarded as the second tier.

Regardless of your political views, if you were a German musiclover of 1950, taking musical jingoism into account..., you would have admitted a begrudging adoration of Toscanini, but you probably would have regarded the five best conductors to be Furtwangler, Walter, Klemperer, Kleiber, and Busch. And you would have felt as though all those excellent concerts under collaborators in Germany and refugees in America to be a form of settling for second best, and would bore younger listeners with tales of the 'good old days'... And yet today, there are at least a dozen a dozen other German-trained conductors of that generation who have vocal followings larger than Fritz Busch who were thought not quite of his calibre in his own day. Except in the Mozart operas, people seem to forget that Busch recorded some of the greatest of all orchestral performances.

This Brahms 4 is one of two Busch recordings made with the Wiener Symphoniker right before his death - Beethoven 7 being the other. The Beethoven is good, but the Brahms 4 is in contention for THE Brahms 4. Busch is usually regarded as a classicist, but that strikes me as a misnomer. He's a romantic who approaches music so from the inside out that he can easily be mistaken for a classicist. No one, and I mean no one, gets the Brahms idiom this well. No faux Wagnerian grandiosity, but also no faux Mendelssohnian lightness. Propulsive enough to always have forward motion, but rubato enough to never feel as though the structure inhibits the music's expression. So natural and secure is the pacing that all sorts of little details of idiom: phrasing and balance and rhythmic schwung, are added on top of an impeccably solid structure. It feels as though played by folk musicians from an inexplicable oral tradition.

You can go to Reiner or Szell for virtuosity, you can go to Knappertsbusch and Abendroth for Wagnerian grandiosity, Scherchen and Rosbaud for modernity, Bohm and Krauss for gemutlichkeit, but Busch was just pure music.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ngi73eohGM8