Guila Bustabo

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Guila Bustabo (born February 25, 1916 in Manitowoc , Wisconsin ; † April 27, 2002 in Birmingham , Alabama ) was an American violinist with a remarkable career that was limited to Europe due to her naive political stance during World War II . Their playing was characterized by intensity and extraordinary playful ability.

Life

Guila Bustabo is the daughter of Alexander and Blanche (Kaderabek) Bustabo. She started playing the violin at the age of two. A year later the family moved to Chicago , Illinois so Guila could study with Ray Huntington at the Chicago Musical College . Not yet five years old she switched to Leon Sametini , a student of the great Belgian violinist and composer Eugène Ysaÿe . At the age of nine she made her first appearance with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and soon with the Philadelphia Orchestra .

Still at the age of a child prodigy , she studied at the Juilliard School of Music in New York City with Louis Persinger , who specialized in teaching gifted children. Yehudi Menuhin , who was the same age , was her classmate there.

Her career began as a child prodigy and was dominated and overshadowed by her extremely dominant mother until later years.

youth

At fifteen she made her debut at Carnegie Hall with Henryk Wieniawski 's Second Violin Concerto (D minor, Opus 22), and a year later she gave her first violin recital there, accompanied by Lous Persinger on the piano. Arturo Toscanini was among the audience and promoted her career from then on.

At the age of eighteen she toured Europe and Asia and received a 1736 violin from Guarneri del Gesù , the Muntz , which was very likely sponsored by a group of patrons that included personalities as diverse as Fritz Kreisler , Toscanini and the British aristocrat Lady Ravensdale. As a result, she gave concerts with top conductors, including Wilhelm Furtwängler , Herbert von Karajan , Willem Mengelberg and Sir Thomas Beecham .

Eminent composers praised her playing: Jean Sibelius is said to have said about her interpretation of his violin concerto on his estate in 1937 that she played it as he had dreamed of. Ermanno Wolf-Ferrari wrote his violin concerto for her and became her piano partner on extensive tours through Scandinavia , Germany , Italy and Spain .

Second World War

During this time she came increasingly into fascist and National Socialist circles. Her mother made the fateful decision that Guila would stay in Europe during the war years. The mother's lack of political judgment is probably also due to the fact that the eccentric, also world-remote and naive artist appeared without hesitation in Nazi Germany and the countries he occupied, as well as in fascist Italy and Spain - a fact that the US citizen after War was heavily blamed and severely affected her later career.

Her performances under Willem Mengelberg from this time later brought her into concrete difficulties. The Dutch conductor and his Amsterdam Concertgebouw Orchestra had given regular concerts in these countries since the beginning of the war, so that after the war he was banned from performing in the Netherlands .

post war period

When it became known to US General George S. Patton that Guila Bustabo had been the soloist at some of these concerts and had also given intensive concerts in these countries, she was imprisoned in Paris and subjected to a denazification process. The proceedings were later discontinued, but from then on the American concert world and a large part of the other concert scene remained almost completely closed to her. Only in Europe did she still find occasional opportunities to live out her gorgeous musicality, her technical perfection, brilliance and barely comprehensible lightness, her sometimes eccentric but also touching way of grabbing and her often almost animal-intensive tone.

Despite these qualities, both political and artistic reasons are likely to be responsible for the stagnation of her career after the war. Even at the age of fifty, Bustabo appeared mostly like a young girl, almost dressed up like a child prodigy, and could never escape the influence of her mother, who was with her every step of the way. The visual impression of a child who has grown old made it difficult to perceive her performance in concert as that of an autonomous artist, and in fact, in her interpretations, one could not notice much of the reflections, developments and often crisis-ridden maturation processes that the play of comparable other artists from the stage of child prodigies led out.

She once said: “Yehudi Menuhin was able to free himself from his parents. He got lucky. I never succeeded. "

professorship

In 1964, Guila Bustabo took over a professorship for violin at the Conservatory in Innsbruck , where she had performed particularly frequently and with great success in the previous years, and continued to give concerts for years, seldom but with unbroken brilliance. However, an increasing bipolar disorder forced her to suddenly give up her professorship in 1970. She returned with her mother and husband to the USA, where she was barely known, and played for five years in the violin group of the Alabama Symphony Orchestra and occasionally as a soloist with this orchestra.

She married the American military musician Edison Stieg in 1949 and divorced in 1976. When Guila Bustabo died in 2002 at the age of 86, she had outlived her mother Blanche by just ten years.

Discography

  • Beethoven, violin concerto, Concertgebouw Orchestra, Willem Mengelberg, live 1943, Tahra CD TAH 640.
  • Bruch, Violin Concerto in G minor, live, Concertgebouw Orchestra, Willem Mengelberg, 1940 .. Rococo LP 2029, republished Music and Arts CD-780, “Willem Mengelberg Public Performances, 1938-1944.”
  • Chausson, Poeme, Berliner Symphoniker, conductor "Gerd Rubahn", 1952 LP Royale 1339. The violinist, probably but not definitely Bustabo, is sold under the pseudonym Karl Brandt. The recording is of dubious origin. "Gerd Rubahn" is a pseudonym that Royale and affiliated labels used to cover up traces of unauthorized publications.
  • Dvorak, Violin Concerto, NWDR Symphony Orchestra, Hamburg, Hans Schmidt-Isserstedt live 1955, Tahra CD TAH 640.
  • Paganini, violin concerto in D major (arrangement. August Wilhelmj), Berliner Städtisches Orchester, Fritz Zaun, LP Rococo 2031.
  • Paganini, Violin Concerto No. 1 in D major (arranged by August Wilhelmj) 1952 LP Royale 1339, the orchestra wrongly called the “Berliner Symphoniker”, with “Gerd Rubahn” as conductor. Bustabo, here the soloist, is led under the pseudonym "Karl Brandt" (see above, Chausson, Poeme). Publication of a pseudonym by a RRG (Reichs-Rundfunk-Gesellschaft) recording from April 1943: Bustabo with the orchestra of the Reichssender München under Bertil Wetzelsberger .
  • Sibelius, Violin Concerto, Berlin City Orchestra, Fritz Zaun. LP Rococo 2031 with additional material.
  • Ermanno Wolf-Ferrari, violin concerto, Munich Philharmonic, Rudolf Kempe, live Herkulesaal Munich, November 1971, A Classical Record CD
  • Various pieces by Sarasate, de Falla, Mendelssohn, Chopin, Kreisler, Rubinstein, Suk, Debussy, Pugnani, and Novacek, with Gerald Moore on piano. Once available together with the concerts of Sibelius, Paganini, Wolf-Ferrari and Nussio in the later discontinued CD series “The Bustabo Legacy” on A Classical Record ACR 37, 1993.
  • Various pieces by Novacek, Mendelssohn, Kreisler, Sarasate and Paganini with Gerald Moore and Heinz Schröter at the piano, on CD Symposium 1301. Together with the first movement of the above-mentioned recording of the Paganini Violin Concerto No. 1 with the conductor Fritz Zaun.

swell

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Guila Bustabo; Violinist, 86th New York Times, May 2, 2002, accessed February 16, 2011 .
personal data
SURNAME Bustabo, Guila
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American violist
DATE OF BIRTH February 25, 1916
PLACE OF BIRTH Manitowoc , Wisconsin
DATE OF DEATH April 27, 2002
Place of death Birmingham , Alabama