Fritz Busch (13 March 1890 – 14 September 1951) was a German conductor. Busch was born in Siegen, Westphalia, to a musical family, and studied at the Cologne Conservatory. After army service in the First World War, he was appointed to senior posts in two German opera houses. At the Stuttgart Opera (1918 to 1922) he modernised the repertory, and at the Dresden State Opera (1922 to 1933) he presented world premieres of operas by Richard Strauss, Ferruccio Busoni, Paul Hindemith and Kurt Weill among others. He also conducted at the Bayreuth and Salzburg Festivals. Being an ardent Anti-Nazi, Busch was dismissed from his post as director at Dresden in 1933 and made most of his later career outside Germany. He conducted in New York and London, but his main bases were Buenos Aires, where he was in charge at the Teatro Colón for several opera seasons in the 1930s and 1940s; Copenhagen and Stockholm, conducting the Danish Radio Symphony Orchestra and the Stockholm Philharmonic; and Glyndebourne in England, where he was the founding musical director of Glyndebourne Festival Opera working together with the stage director Carl Ebert. Busch disliked showmanship, and was known as a scrupulous musician who strove to do justice to the composers whose works he conducted. He died in London aged 61. Life and career Early years Busch was born on 13 March 1890 in Siegen, Westphalia, the eldest of eight children of and his wife Henriette, née Schmidt. Wilhelm was a carpenter, violin-maker and music-shop keeper; his wife was an embroiderer. It was a musical family; Wilhelm and Henriette supplemented their incomes by performing dance music at weekends. Their other children were the violinist Adolf Busch, the actor , the cellist Hermann Busch, and the pianist and composer . As a boy, Busch took music lessons with his father and others, and in 1906 he entered the Cologne Conservatory, studying harmony and counterpoint with , piano with Karl Boettcher and later Lazzaro Uzielli, and conducting with the principal, Fritz Steinbach. His relations with Steinbach were edgy, but he acknowledged the older man's influence on him. Steinbach was highly regarded by conductors as different as Arturo Toscanini and Adrian Boult; Busch thought him outstanding as an interpreter of Beethoven, Boult admired his Bach and all three put him at the top of Brahms conductors. In 1909 Busch spent a season as conductor at the Deutsches Theater,