Pages from a Musician's Life. By Fritz Busch. (Hogarth Press.
18s.)
GLYNDEBOURNE made Fritz Busch a familiar figure to hundreds of English singers and orchestral players and to thousands of English music-lovers, making Germany's loss more unequivocally England's gain than in perhaps any other case. This auto- biography, alas ! only brings the narrative of the musician's life up to the day in 1933 when he left Germany, and thus leaves no record of the fruitful later years of Busch's life nor of his work at Glyndebourne, his association with which started in 1934. He had, apparently, planned a second volume but no traces of it were found when he suddenly died two years ago.
Nothing is more delightful in this volume than his account of his childhood and family life, his early struggles and his achievement of an honourable position among the musicians of what now appears to 'us as the last generation of wholly sane Germans. He and his brother Adolf were early marked out as exceptionally talented even in a society where music was still a major preoccupation among cultivated and uncultivated alike. Once success was achieved, the story is not so very different from that of many other famous musicians —much travelling, many disputes with small-minded officials, and above all plenty of hard work. The chapter which he devotes to his years at the Dresden Opera is full of shrewd and affectionate reflections on the character and music of Richard Strauss. The chapters in which he recounts his experiences as a soldier in the 1914-18 war and his final " discussion with National Socialism " do credit to the bigness of his character and make an interesting contri- bution to social and political, as well as to purely musical, history. The whole book is rich in amusing anecdotes of the famous, the obscure and the infamous and it is much to be regretted that Busch never lived to give us his reflections on the last years of his life, so full of events for himself, his art and his country,
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