"Everything So Perfect"

"Here," beamed moonfaced Conductor Fritz Busch, "is everything so perfect . . . If we miss a note now & then, is that so important? What counts is the enthusiasm." At Cincinnati's 38th biennial May Music Festival, famed Metropolitan Opera Conductor Fritz Busch was getting just about all the enthusiasm he could handle, and he enjoyed every decibel of it.

For some of the festival's choral numbers, he had assembled 1,800 singers, including some 600 children. Once the enthusiasm had to be coaxed out of the kids. Rehearsing Benjamin Britten's Spring Symphony, Busch urged the boys to make their whistling less "polite"; he promptly got a resounding wolf whistle, and smiled his appreciation. Said he: "They know their stuff. I bring it out of them."

As they have since the 1870s, music-loving Cincinnatians packed the flower-banked Music Hall (capacity 3,500) to hear and applaud everything. They got no beer & pretzels program from Busch. In five days and five concerts, he offered them dumpling-heavy portions of the music he loves best: Bach, Bruckner, Mahler Mozart, Verdi (the Requiem), Wagner. On the last night, the audience in the Music Hall stood up to close the festival by roaring out the "Hallelujah Chorus" from Handel's Messiah.

Said 60-year-old Fritz Busch, who had rehearsed his singers and players within an inch of their lives, "Yah, it's lots of work. But it's marvelous." One thing that delighted him was the fact that "this year we had 13 soloists and nine of them are American-trained. That couldn't have happened 25 years ago. It shows what festivals like this are doing."

Even more heart-warming to Conductor Busch, who 17 years ago took a stand against Hitler and consequently lost his job at the Dresden Opera, was the fact that in Cincinnati he found "community expression in the best sense of the word. Boys & girls, old ones and young ones, even the little kids, all join together and they don't bother about the races. Yah," says Fritz Busch, "it is great."

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