The Forgotten Violinist
In the last decades of the twentieth century, a peculiar character lived in the Young Women’s Christian Association facility in downtown Birmingham, Alabama. This woman, once considered the “greatest woman violinist in the world,” according to a poster advertising one of her performances, now walked the streets of Birmingham with her belongings in a grocery cart, wearing ill-fitting, baggy clothes. One would not be able to tell from looking at her that Guila Bustabo had once traveled the world, earning praise and recognition from the greats of classical music. Bustabo’s fall from fame can not be attributed to a decline in her skills or talent; rather, the cause was her performance record in Nazi Germany. Bustabo, born in Wisconsin, was an American citizen whose desire to create music in prestigious halls with famed conductors overshadowed her willingness to denounce the horrors of the Third Reich. Bustabo’s story evidences a trend in Nazi musicians’ careers after World War II. Denazification boards in Europe and Western orchestral institutions alike did not ultimately hold artists like Guila Bustabo accountable for their passive support of a totalitarian regime, but the American public did.
Childhood
Bustabo’s story begins in the town of Manitowoc, Wisconsin. The Italian-Bohemian violin prodigy was born as Guila Adelina Theressina Bustabo on February 25, 1919, to Alexander and Blanche Kaderabek Bustabo. When Bustabo was two years old, the family moved to Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Guila Bustabo described her early interest in the violin.
“My father was more or less a professional violinist, and mother had studied the violin earlier in her life so she knew the rudiments of it. And I saw a violin around me all the time and heard daddy and mother occasionally playing. I wanted to play too.”
Alexander Bustabo responded by making a violin out of a cigar box with a stick attached to it for the neck. His daughter was frustrated that the instrument did not look like a violin or make any sounds, and she threw it on the ground and stamped on it. Blanche Bustabo found someone who would make a violin small enough for her daughter, paying only five dollars for the tiny instrument. Mrs. Bustabo helped her daughter’s musical advancement in other ways while Guila Bustabo was still very young. The mother and daughter would sit together in the child’s sandbox while Blanche Bustabo drew musical symbols like sharps, flats, and clefs in the sand.
Guila Bustabo studied violin with her father until she and her mother moved to Chicago, Illinois, to pursue study with Léon Sametini, a master violinist who had studied with the Belgian violinist and composer Eugène Ysaÿe. In Chicago, the young violinist played in the Chicago Symphony under Dr. Frederick Stock, performed with the Chicago Grand Opera Company, and studied at the Chicago Musical College. After a few years in Chicago, Bustabo and her mother moved to New York City, where she studied at the Juilliard School under Louis Persinger alongside Yehudi Menuhin.
On November 2, 1929, at only 10 years old, Guila Bustabo had her major solo debut. At a Saturday morning Children’s Concert of the New York Philharmonic Orchestra at Carnegie Hall, Bustabo was a featured soloist, performing the first movement of Wieniawski’s Violin Concerto №1 in F-sharp Minor. A year later on December 6, 1930, Bustabo rejoined the New York Philharmonic, performing as a soloist for the first movement of Mozart’s Violin Concerto №5 in A Major. On December 15, 1932, at the age of thirteen, Bustabo performed her first major solo recital at Carnegie Hall. The young violinist was on a meteoric trajectory that led to greater opportunities.
World War II and European Tours
In November of 1934, at the age of fifteen, Bustabo left the United States with her mother for a European concert tour. Over the next three years, Bustabo performed in England, Holland, France, Italy, Germany, Austria, Sweden, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary. Her career blossomed as her playing improved.
It was during this tour that Bustabo acquired a Guarnerius violin. Irene Curzon, Baroness Ravensdale of Kedleston, lent the instrument to Bustabo for her first London performance in 1934. The young violinist fell in love with the instrument and was sad to have to return it after the concert. A few days later, Lady Ravensdale invited Bustabo and her mother to a dinner and announced she had a surprise for Bustabo. She gave the Guarnerius violin to Bustabo to continue to use on her European tour and afterwards. The instrument was worth $25,000 in 1934, which would be almost half a million dollars today due to inflation. She performed with this violin across the globe for the next few decades and would use it in the several recordings made of her playing.
In 1937, she performed Jean Sibelius’s violin concerto for the composer himself, and Sibelius praised her interpretation as “exactly how [he] imagined it when [he] wrote it.” He called her the “most brilliant violin star of today.”
During 1938 and 1939, Bustabo returned to the United States for brief periods, performing the Dvorak Violin Concerto in A minor, the Sibelius Violin Concerto, and the last two movements of the Beethoven Violin Concerto as a soloist with the New York Philharmonic. The young prodigy’s performance skills and musicality propelled her among the ranks of the great violinists of the twentieth century. Her blossoming career and international prestige excited Bustabo and her mother, which may explain the hazardous choices they made next.
When Hitler invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, he propelled Europe into the Second World War. France fell to Nazi forces on May 10, 1940, and rather than return to her home in the United States, Bustabo and her mother settled in Nazi-controlled Paris. Bustabo continued to build her career and perform throughout Axis territories during the war, performing as a soloist with the Berlin Philharmonic under Wilhelm Furtwängler and performing the Beethoven and Bruch concertos under Willem Mengelberg as a soloist with the Concertgebouw Orchestra in Amsterdam under Nazi occupation. She claimed later in life to have performed a concert at which Adolf Hitler himself was present.
Bustabo was so excited by her musical success in Europe that she often seemed oblivious to the political turmoil that surrounded her. This is evident in correspondence between Bustabo and Hans Rosbaud, an Austrian conductor who was the general music director in the city of Münster, Germany at the time. In a letter to Rosbaud that she wrote from the Hotel Imperial in Vienna, Austria, on February 13, 1941, Bustabo gushed about the reception of her past performances and her excitement for future ones, neglecting to mention that anything catastrophic was going on around her. “Vienna has been lovely,” she wrote, “and the public was most enthusiastic over the Brahms — I had 9 recalls.”
This image of Bustabo as naive, bubbly, and excited about her music fits descriptions of her from a later student, Hilarie Harp Rivas. According to Rivas, Bustabo was like a child, obsessed with the excitement of holidays and totally entranced by normal things like watching a movie in a theater, as if she had never had those experiences in her childhood. Bustabo’s childlike naivety that Rivas remembers so clearly might be more properly attributed to poor mental health. Dr. Tieszen, Bustabo’s healthcare provider in Birmingham, diagnosed her with bipolar disorder that only worsened as she got older.
Her performance record during the war, and specifically those performances under Mengelberg in occupied Amsterdam, led to her arrest in Paris alongside her mother in 1945 at the hands of General Patton with the Allied forces. The United States never prosecuted the Bustabos, and they were released soon after. That September, General Patton recruited Bustabo to perform a three-month series of concerts in Europe for multiple divisions of the Seventh Army. The high-ups of the United States military easily forgave Bustabo for her Nazi associations because of her musical gifts. However, this association with the Nazi party would prove detrimental to Bustabo’s reputation with the American public.
The New York Philharmonic Conflict
In 1948, Bustabo performed the second and third movements of Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto in E minor with the New York Philharmonic as part of the Young People’s Concerts series that had featured her debut performance in 1929. This prestigious performance was a contentious one. Two documents in the New York Philharmonic’s archives of business records shed light on the controversy.
The first of these is a copy of a letter written after Bustabo’s performance in February 1948 by General Robert McClure with the United States War Department’s Civil Affairs division. After an inquiry into Bustabo’s involvement in Germany, McClure shared the conclusion:
“Bustabo was blacklisted by the [Information Control Division of OMGUS] in fall of 1945 and is still on blacklist. Investigation at that time showed that she had given concerts in Germany and German-occupied countries with special permission of Nazi Propaganda Ministry and had permitted her talents to be exploited for Nazi propaganda.”
While Bustabo never explicitly voiced her support for the Nazi Party, her many performances with prominent musicians of the regime and her willingness to build her career in Germany and its territories shows a passive permission to be used for propaganda.
McClure’s letter is followed in the New York Philharmonic’s records by a different letter, written by Mrs. Melvin Sawin, the chair of the Young People’s Concerts Committee. In this letter, Sawin defends the NYPO’s decision to host Bustabo despite claims of Nazi affiliation. First, she quotes Colonel Henry C. Ahalt, the G-2 military intelligence official in charge of Bustabo’s case: “I believe Guila Bustabo to be unquestionably loyal to her country, and this decision was made after a careful investigation in Europe of all available evidence.” Following this declaration of Bustabo’s innocence, Sawin wrote, “If this had not been so, she would have never been permitted to return to the United States.” She went on to describe Bustabo’s sentimental connection to the series where she had made her debut. Sawin defended the board’s final decision: “The Committee acted in perfectly good faith, and will continue to feel that in view of all information obtainable, they are in no way to blame.”
Obviously, the decision to let Bustabo perform was a controversial one, and it proved to be the last of Bustabo’s major performances in her lifetime. After that 1948 performance, the American public turned a cold shoulder to the artist they once claimed as their own, and her career never recovered.
Birmingham Years
Bustabo, finding it difficult to maintain steady performance gigs in the United States, lived in Europe with her mother for the next several years. She taught at Innsbruck Conservatory in Austria from 1964 to 1970, but retired due to her struggles with bipolar disorder. After making her final recording in 1971 of Emmanuel Wolf-Ferrari’s Violin Concerto that he wrote for her, Bustabo would never again grace the international spotlight.
In 1978, she moved to Birmingham, Alabama, with her mother at the request of Amerigo Marino, the conductor of the Alabama Symphony Orchestra. Marino invited Bustabo to join the ranks of the orchestra in the first violin section. She played with the orchestra for a few years, but she did not fit in well. Trained as a soloist, Bustabo had never played the violin sitting down before, practiced sight-reading music, followed bowings given to her by a concertmaster, or learned how to blend her sound with the section. Additionally, Bustabo gave a bizarre impression to her colleagues in the Alabama Symphony. Bustabo’s mother always accompanied her middle aged daughter to rehearsals, helping her comb her hair and apply her makeup — usually too bright rouge and bright red lipstick — in the concert hall. Despite her peculiarities, many of the members of the Alabama Symphony Orchestra respected her musical talents, and some of them even studied violin with her. However, because of her inability to blend with the ensemble, Bustabo’s contract with the ASO was terminated early in 1983.
After being let go from the Alabama Symphony Orchestra, Bustabo played for Saint Paul’s Catholic Church in Birmingham, which was near the YWCA where she took up residence with her mother in 1983. During this period, Bustabo gave up the expensive Guarneri violin that she had acquired in London many years ago. Bustabo, always scattered and forgetful, locked the instrument in a locker at the train station one evening. The next morning she returned to discover that she had locked an empty locker and left the priceless violin unprotected. After that incident, Bustabo returned the violin to Lady Ravensdale in London, and from that point on, she played what could only be described as a “clunker” of an instrument. Here is the image of Bustabo that paints such a stark contrast against the glory days of her career: wearing ill-fitting clothes, pushing her belongings around in a shopping cart, and carrying all of her music around in a clear plastic bag, Bustabo walked the streets of Birmingham. The woman who was once considered the greatest female violinist in the world was financially devastated and lacked the performance opportunities that her talent warranted.
It was also during this period that Bustabo taught two young violinists in Birmingham: Stefan Tieszen and Hilarie Harp Rivas. Tieszen’s father, Dr. Ralph Tieszen, was interested in Bustabo for the musical guidance she could offer his son, and in return, he provided her medical care while she lived in Birmingham. Rivas studied with Bustabo from 1984 to 1987. Every Wednesday, Rivas and her parents drove to the YWCA to pick Bustabo up and carry her to the University of Alabama in Birmingham Hospital. Dr. Tieszen allowed Bustabo to use a conference room in the hospital to teach. Bustabo charged a reasonable fee, only $25 per hour, but she would hold Rivas in her lessons for hours at a time. Even though Bustabo was incredibly gifted as a musician, Rivas recounted later that Bustabo was not the best teacher — she never really taught the skill of performance beyond just learning the notes of a piece. That came so naturally to Bustabo that she never quite figured out how to articulate that ability as a teacher.
Guila Bustabo lived out the rest of her life in Birmingham, poor and unknown. After her mother’s death in 1986, Bustabo’s mental health worsened, and her manic and depressive episodes became more intense. According to Bonnie Feruto, Bustabo’s friend and former stand partner in the ASO, when her mother died, Bustabo was distraught, called Feruto to tell her the news, but refused to accept any help or comfort. She was withdrawn and had a difficult time trusting others.
When Guila Bustabo passed away in 2002, only a handful of people attended her funeral. A string quartet performed the music for the ceremony. In the wake of Bustabo’s death, several national and international newspapers published obituaries for her. Many of these obituaries mention Bustabo’s time in Axis controlled territories and depict her as the unknowing victim of her domineering mother, Blanche Bustabo. Her mother did push the young prodigy’s career as far as she could, accompanying her during the extent of her European tour and for decades afterwards and exhibiting controlling behavior until Blanche Bustabo’s death. In one of her obituaries, Bustabo was quoted saying about her colleague at the Juilliard School from when she was a young girl, “Menuhin got away from his parents. He was lucky. I never got away from mine.” However, it is unfair to excuse Guila Bustabo of all blame. While she was eccentric and naive and dealt with mental illness, she was at the same time a genius at her craft who obviously enjoyed her musical pursuits. Her career took a dark turn when she pursued musical opportunities in Germany rather than refuse to perform for an authoritarian, destructive regime.
Nathaniel Vallois said in his biographical article about Bustabo, “For many in the United States, the choice of an American citizen to settle in an enemy land and embrace a hostile and murderous regime was an unforgivable betrayal.” Bustabo did not have the same chance to recover her past success at home after World War II in the same ways as her European counterparts. The story of Guila Bustabo is an unfortunate case of a talented musician who, in her desire to create music in famous halls with prestigious conductors, entangled herself in a political situation that would lead to her own destruction.
Conclusions
In the time I have spent researching and recounting Bustabo’s story, I find myself wondering whether she is a violinist better left forgotten. I believe that Bustabo’s fall from fame was an undoubtedly deserved one, and that no matter how talented, a musician who knowingly played for Nazis should not be glorified. So why share Bustabo’s story?
Firstly, I think her story highlights an important idea that is still relevant today: that an artist’s voice matters and that they have a responsibility to use it for good. Herbert von Karajan, the eventual conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic, defended himself when interrogated for his musical activities under the Nazi regime: “I did not want anything apart from the chance to make my music in peace.” He also said, “One either makes music or politics.” This position, that music can exist in a vacuum, performed for its own sake, is naive at best. Musicians have some power to shape culture, and to pretend otherwise is dangerous.
Secondly, Bustabo’s story highlights a historical and current problem within American classical music institutions: a willingness to feature musicians despite any harm they may have caused. Guila Bustabo was invited to play with the New York Philharmonic as a soloist even while “blacklisted” during denazification, and similar stories arise across the country when looking at the post-war lives of Nazi-affiliated conductors like Wilhelm Furtwängler and Herbert von Karajan. These musicians were generally met with protests from the American public after warm welcomes from professional orchestras.
While times have changed, classical music institutions have not in some ways. “No artist in the 137-year history of the Met had as profound an impact as James Levine,” Peter Gelb, the Met’s general manager, said after the famous conductor’s death earlier this year. “He raised the Met’s musical standards to new and greater heights during a tenure that spanned five decades.” Levine was fired from the Met Opera in 2018 for multiple counts of sexual abuse, and this statement shows a willingness to overlook that abuse out of reverence for musical skill. As this research shows, intentional oversight in platforming of people who have perpetuated real harm is not a new phenomenon among American classical music institutions, and neither is the power of audiences to protest that choice.
Note: Several of the primary sources for this research come from the Hans Rosbaud papers (1899–1973) at Washington State University Libraries: Manuscripts, Archives, and Special Collections. This research also includes material from interviews with Hilarie Harp Rivas, Bonnie Feruto, and Jeffrey Flaniken.
This research was originally part of my undergraduate senior thesis for my BA in History at Samford University, advised by Dr. LeeAnn Reynolds: “The Reharmonization of German Society: Denazification, Musicians of the Third Reich, and the Story of Guila Bustabo.” It was also presented at the American String Teachers Association 2019 Conference in Albuquerque, New Mexico as the poster: “The Forgotten Violinist: The Story of Guila Bustabo.”
References
Bustabo, Guila. Interview of Guila Bustabo by the Doctor Tieszen. Great Performers: Guila Bustabo. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=de-fpf_rQ3E.
Hans Rosbaud Papers, 1899–1973. Cage 43. Manuscripts, Archives, and Special Collections, Washington State University Libraries, Pullman, Washington.
Karajan, Herbert von. “Karajan’s deposition to the Austrian denazification examining board, 18 March 1946.” in Richard Osborne. Herbert von Karajan: A Life in Music. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1998.
Kellogg, Louise Phelps. “The Society and the State.” The Wisconsin Magazine of History 21, no. 4 (1938): 463–72. https://content.wisconsinhistory.org/digital/api/collection/wmh/id/11370/download
The Manitowoc Herald-Times. Manitowoc, Wisconsin.
New York Philharmonic Leon Levy Digital Archives. https://archives.nyphil.org/.
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Douglas, Jack. “Sir Thomas Beecham: Reluctant Beethovenian? A Survey of His Beethoven Performances and Recordings.” The Beethoven Journal 13, no. 2 (Winter 1998): 58–61.
Gottlieb, Jane. “The Juilliard School Library and Its Special Collections.” Notes 56, no. 1 (September 1999): 11–26. https://www.jstor.org/stable/900470.
Osborne, Richard. Herbert von Karajan: A Life in Music. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1998.
Monod, David. Settling Scores: German Music, Denazification, and the Americans, 1945–1953. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005.
Vallois, Nathaniel. “Hostage to Fortune.” Strad 115, no. 1366 (February 1, 2004): 128–132. https://login.ezproxy.samford.edu/login?qurl=https%3a%2f%2fsearch.ebscohost.com%2flogin.aspx%3fdirect%3dtrue%26db%3df5h%26AN%3d12124858%26site%3deds-live%26scope%3dsite.
