It was Busch's ill luck to be based in Berlin during the years when the city was at its least attractive. When he and Frieda moved to Lichterfelde with Irene in September 1918, the war was drawing to its humiliating close and revolution was imminent in the capital. During the time they lived there, inflation – which made the German economy the sickest in Europe – grew progressively worse. The fevered artistic atmosphere which would pervade Berlin later in the 1920s had not yet begun to weave its spell: life was hard and uncertain, music in a state of decay. A concentrated effort was nevertheless made to keep concert life going; and even in the years immediately after the War, Berlin could boast two of the outstanding talents in German music, Strauss and Busoni. Strauss was in charge of the Hofkapelle (Court Opera Orchestra) concerts until the end of the 1919–20 season, to be succeeded by Furtwängler for two years and then – following a season's interregnum with Abendroth – by Erich Kleiber. Soon to become the Staatskapelle, this orchestra was the best in the city; but after Furtwängler moved to the Philharmonic on the death of Nikisch in 1922, he rapidly improved that organisation. The conductors beginning to make their names, as guests or residents, were Emil Bohnke, Franz von Hoesslin, Otto Klemperer, Hermann Scherchen, Georg Schnéevoigt and George Szell; and experienced men such as Leo Blech, Oskar Fried, Max von Schillings, Georg Schumann and (from 1923) Bruno Walter were active, as well as the choral specialists Bruno Kittel, Siegfried Ochs and Hugo Rüdel. Busoni, who returned in 1919 from his self-imposed exile in Switzerland, made memorable appearances as soloist and conductor. Others who graced Berlin's concert platforms were the pianists Eugen d’Albert, Wilhelm Backhaus, Eduard Erdmann, Edwin Fischer, Carl Friedberg, Walter Gieseking, Wilhelm Kempff, Leonid Kreutzer, James Kwast, Frieda Kwast-Hodapp, Elly Ney, Max Pauer, Egon Petri, Moriz Rosenthal, Emil von Sauer and Artur Schnabel and violinists Licco Amar, Carl Flesch, Fritz Kreisler, Alma Moodie, Mikhail Press, Alexander Schmuller, Emil Telmányi and Franz von Vécsey. Several talented violinists were emerging, such as Tossy Spivakovsky, Georg Kulenkampff, Boris Kroyt and Josef Wolfsthal.

As so often before, Busch sought a remedy for pain in work. An immense amount of repertoire had to be rehearsed with the Quartet, since the four were committed to a Beethoven cycle and other projects. Busch and Serkin had again been invited to play in Reykjavík and this time the pianist was able to go. They also persuaded Irene, against her better judgment, that it would be good for her to take a break from the sadness pervading Guilford and forsake the children for a fortnight; so towards the end of September the U.S. Air Force flew the three of them over to Iceland. On the 23rd the Duo opened a Beethoven cycle, rousing the audience to tremendous enthusiasm by playing, as their encores, two pieces by Helgi Pálsson which the composer had given Busch on his previous visit. They received equally rapturous applause for the Beethoven recitals on the 26th and 27th and then spent two weeks seeing something of Iceland. In a joint interview they gave to a local paper just before leaving, Busch expressed amazement at the number of Icelanders who enjoyed music, and Serkin said he would like to take a holiday in their country. Busch also acquired a pupil, as he invited Björn Ólafsson to study with him in 1947 and 1948.

But now, when the family were still trying to come to terms with Frieda's death, tragedy struck again: the fourth Serkin child, Susan Veronica, not quite a year old, had been left in the care of Irene's cousin Gertrud Cloos; and on 7 October, while her parents and grandfather were still away, she was accidentally strangled in her cot. ‘She was in a special crib for outdoor use, screened on all sides and on the lid, which was held down by a heavy spring’, her sister Elizabeth explained. ‘Somehow she wedged her neck between the lid and the bar, and although Gertrud left her unattended for only a moment, it was long enough to cut off her breath.’

A slimmer Busch approached the 1934–35 season, having taken a four-week cure at a sanatorium in Karlsbad (Karlovy Vary). ‘How many tons have come off?’ inquired Fritz from Buenos Aires. The answer was seven kilos. Visits to the East Bohemian spa town, nestling in beautiful countryside, were made virtually every summer during the 1930s. Frieda went with Adolf to take the waters and lend him moral support, as he was too weak with hunger to do any composing. Towards the end of each cure, Irene and Rudi arrived in the car to stay for a couple of days before taking their elders home. ‘At dinner, all the other guests looked at us with disgust and almost hate’, Irene wrote, ‘because we got a full, regular dinner, while everyone else was starving and looking at the neighbors’ plates with envy.’ On this 1934 visit George Szell and his parents were staying at the same sanatorium, so Busch and Szell amused themselves by pushing slips of paper with obscure musical quotations under each other's doors. As Irene recalled,

At Bruno Walter's request, Busch joined the Association in Aid of German Scholars in Exile; and he did what he could for other refugee organisations. In Basel Frieda organised tableaux vivants of four episodes from The Sleeping Beauty at the Konservatoriumssaal, in aid of emigrant children: Björn Andreasson narrated, more than 100 children took part and the Quartet provided the music, with Irene sitting in for Doktor – they played Bach, Haydn, Mozart and Mendelssohn movements, as well as a march specially composed by Busch. A more orthodox Geneva recital saw the Quartet return to the Ravel F major after a seven-year gap, for their first performance of it with Herman: it was heard between Schumann's work in the same key and Beethoven's Second ‘Rasumovsky’.

Wilhelm Schmitz-Scholl was only the first of many who were to play the role of Maecenas in Busch's career. He offered to have the boy educated in either art or music and, although Adolf loved drawing and painting and kept up connections with art and artists to the end of his days, he unhesitatingly chose music. And so on 16 September 1902 his father and Fritz delivered him to the Cologne Conservatory, where he was to study violin with Willy Hess, piano with Paul Flasche, theory with Franz Bölsche, chamber music with Friedrich Grützmacher the Younger and, in the fullness of time, composition with Fritz Steinbach – successor as Director of the institution to Franz Wüllner, who had died suddenly, only a week before Busch's arrival. His general education was entrusted to a grammar-school master, with whose family he was boarded; but this teacher seemed more interested in money than in education and Adolf, moreover, could not bear to be separated from Fritz. He never forgot calling home and hearing his mother, unused to the newly acquired telephone, ask repeatedly: ‘Who is that?’ – ‘Well, actually, it's Adolf’, he responded plaintively, blurting out how homesick he was.2 Thus in December the violin and embroidery shop in Siegen was sold and the Busches moved to Siegburg, near Bonn, where they took an apartment at 63 Königstraße. Adolf could now go home for weekends and his siblings were always so pleased to see him that when Sunday came and it was time to return to Cologne, he sometimes faked a fever so as to delay his departure by a day. When at home he could help the family finances – even more straitened than usual, since the lawyer entrusted with the sale of the shop had run off with the proceeds – by playing in the Kapelle Busch. Such moonlighting was strictly against Conservatory rules but the authorities turned a blind eye, as did Schmitz-Scholl, who had initially made it a condition of his largesse that Adolf should not be distracted from his studies in this fashion.

For the first time, Busch found himself in a major cultural centre. Cologne, the jewel of the Rhineland until the devastation of World War II, had inspired such artists as Heine and Schumann to some of their finest work.

Adolf Busch was fond of saying ‘I am not a violinist, I am a musician who plays the violin’. To Blanche Honegger he remarked: ‘You and I play the violin because we love music, but so many people play music because they love to play the violin’. On other occasions he said: ‘An artist should never make you think of the beauty of his playing, but only of the beauty of the work he is interpreting’. He expressed such sentiments so often that some people took him at his word and a critical consensus developed, labelling him as an inspired musician but a less than first-rate instrumentalist. Hans Keller held that ‘as a fiddler, Adolf Busch was an anti-talent’. Sir Ian Hunter took an impresario's viewpoint: ‘If any great violinist becomes too involved in chamber music, the character of his solo appearances can suffer’. Szymon Goldberg felt that ‘Busch was a tremendous personality. He was not a born violinist but his shortcomings were made up by personality and powerful persuasion’. Isaac Stern drew attention to a congenital drawback in Busch's physical make-up, which many violin pedagogues would have thought an insuperable handicap: ‘He was extraordinarily dexterous, when you consider the size of his fingers – those weren't fingers he had, they were sausages’. Four American writers agreed closely with one another. Eric Salzman: ‘Busch was not a great virtuoso fiddler. He was, rather, a consummate musician with a mission to revive the great old traditions of German music’. Harris Goldsmith: ‘Busch differed from Huberman and Szigeti […] in that he probably never was or much wanted to be a great virtuoso’. Joseph Horowitz: ‘His performances were fiercely pure, denuded of superfluous detail. Like Schnabel, he was in every sense not a virtuoso’. Boris Schwarz summed up this transatlantic view:

THE BUSCH QUARTET was, to all intents and purposes, founded in 1912, although for its first six years it was the official ensemble of the Vienna Konzertverein Orchestra under the title Vienna Konzertverein Quartet. In the summer of 1912 the position of first leader of the orchestra fell vacant and Busch was recommended by numerous people, among them the principal viola Karl Doktor and principal cello Paul Grummer. The conductor Ferdinand Lowe and the directors of the new Konzerthaus wanted to start a quartet, based on the orchestral principals; and as Busch was known to be planning his own ensemble, it seemed an ideal arrangement. Although in the event the leader gradually scaled down his work with the orchestra, he made a considerable impact on Viennese musical life with the Quartet. He accepted Doktor and Grummer – despite initial misgivings about the violist – but brought in Fritz Rothschild as second violinist. After intensive rehearsals, the Vienna Konzertverein Quartet were first heard on 25 May 1913, playing Haydn on an outing to Eisenstadt. Their official debut came on 3 August at Lilli Lehmann's Salzburg Festival – Busch's leadership having aroused considerable expectations – with Beethoven's F major Quartet, Op. 59, No. 1, and Schumann's A minor, Op. 41, No. 1: critics compared them with the Joachim Quartet. The concerts which followed were equally successful but just before the outbreak of war in the summer of 1914, Rothschild was dismissed; early in 1915 Doktor was called up; and a year later the replacement second violinist Emil Hauser was also commandeered by the army. Busch and Grummer, both unfit for military service, kept the Quartet going until the end of the 1916–17 season, using various players (at one stage the second violinist was Alfred Klietmann, at another Alphonse Brun). It is known that Doktor was not always available, but no evidence has come to light about substitute violists: Ernst Groell may have been one. No string-quartet concerts have been discovered from the 1917–18 season – as Doktor performed piano quartets with the Lowe-Busch-Grummer Trio, it may be that the lack of a good regular second violinist kept the Quartet dormant.

Our first place to look for medieval pigs is in the countryside. The landscape of medieval Europe, before industrialisation and mechanisation enabled large-scale forestry or sweeping agricultural clearances, was significantly more wooded than it is today. But that does not mean that woodlands were unused, or dark places where only big bad wolves lurked. In fact, everyone's life in medieval Europe depended on wood: firewood was critical as an energy source for cooking and heating, and timber was the most common building material. Woodlands also provided areas for livestock grazing. While woodlands could be imagined as wilderness in medieval writing, they were very much cultivated as domestic landscapes. It made sense to keep some woodlands intact near settlements to provide for domestic needs. Over the course of the Middle Ages demographic pressures and demand from urban settlements led to more commodification of woodlands and shifts in tree management practices to maximise the production of desirable wood. This led to some changes in woodland cover, but it did not change the fact that woodlands were embedded in medieval agricultural and economic systems.

In the Middle Ages pigs could be found in woodlands and wooded pastures across Europe. There is a simple reason for this: pigs are animals that need to stay cool – they quickly die of sun exposure if not shaded from the sun at temperatures above 35oC – and thus wild pigs are most common in woodlands, where they seek the shade of trees and bushes, or moist micro-environments where they can cool off in the mud.

But before we look to the focus of this book, the domestic pig, we need to take a short detour to the wild boar that roamed the same forests. The wild boar and the domestic pig are genetically the same species and in the Middle Ages had similar body conformations, but that does not mean that people thought of them as the same animal. Instead, they were placed in separate intellectual categories. To medieval writers the boar was the epitome of wildness. Isidore of Seville and the later bestiaries from the twelfth century associated the boar with ferocity: ‘Of the boar. The boar gets its name, aper, from its wildness, a feritate, the letter f being replaced by a p; for the same reason, it is called by the Greeks suagros, meaning wild.

Personnel

The Busch String Quartet:

BADG = A. Busch, G. Andreasson, K. Doktor, P. Grummer (1920–30)

BADB = A. Busch, G. Andreasson, K. Doktor, H. Busch (1930–44)

BDGB = A. Busch, E. Drucker, H. Gottesmann, H. Busch (1946–47)

BSGB = A. Busch, B. Straumann, H. Gottesmann, H. Busch (1947–51)

The Busch Piano Quartet:

SBDB = R. Serkin, A. Busch, K. Doktor, H. Busch (1930–44)

SBGB = R. Serkin, A. Busch, H. Gottesmann, H. Busch (1946–51)

The Busch Trio:

R. Serkin, A. Busch, H. Busch (1926–51)

Record Catalogue Codes (Prefixes, Numbers and Suffixes)

0825646000000: Warner CD set

10 400: Capriccio CD

11000: Victor 78 rpm discs

11000-D: American Columbia 78 rpm discs

12 PAL: Electrola LP (special pressing)

12000: Victor 78 rpm discs

14000: Victor 78 rpm discs

15000: Victor 78 rpm discs

15000S: Victor 78 rpm disc (single-sided)

16000: Victor 78 rpm discs

17000: Victor 78 rpm discs

17000-D: American Columbia 10-inch 78 rpm discs

1C: Electrola LP

2-47000: DG/Polydor 10-inch 78 rpm discs

20000: DG/Polydor 10-inch 78 rpm discs

204000-308: History CD set

205000-303: History CD set

221000-349: Worten Classico CD set

222000-444: Quadromania CD set

222300-354: Artone CD set

231800: Membran CD set

266000: Argentine Columbia 78 rpm discs

2C: Pathe Marconi Références LP

20AC : Japanese CBS/Sony LP

2900000: Pathe Marconi Références LP

3 60000 2: EMI ‘Great Recordings of the Century’ CD

30000: Japanese Polydor 10-inch 78 rpm discs

32: Columbia/Odyssey LP

33CX: Columbia LP

40000: Japanese Polydor 78 rpm discs

456: Philips CD

5100002: French Sony CD

53: La Voce del Padrone or Italian Columbia LP

5 09600 2: EMI CD

5 65300 2: EMI CD

60000-D: American Columbia 78 rpm discs

60300: Seraphim LP

61000: European CBS LP

62000: DG/Polydor 10-inch 78 rpm discs

65000: DG/Polydor 78 rpm discs

66000: DG/Polydor 78 rpm discs

67000: DG/Polydor 10-inch 78 rpm disc (single-sided)

68000: DG/Polydor 78 rpm disc (single-sided)

600000: Documents CD set

71000-D: American Columbia 78 rpm discs

72000-D: American Columbia 78 rpm discs

73000-D: American Columbia 78 rpm discs

72000: DG/Polydor 78 rpm discs

7400: Victor or Japanese Victor 78 rpm discs

7500: Victor 78 rpm discs

76000: European CBS LP

777 000-2: CPO CD

7900: Victor 78 rpm discs

80200-2: Biddulph CD

8.110000: Naxos CD

8200: Victor 78 rpm discs

8300: Victor 78 rpm discs

8553000: Avi-Music CD

8800: Victor 78 rpm discs