Most violinists, when they essay playing the viola, have to use a smallish instrument and hence produce a modest tone. Busch was big enough in physique and had a sufficiently wide hand-stretch to manage quite a large viola, such as the ‘Paganini’ Strad on which he several times performed Harold in Italy. Another viola he occasionally played was the bastard instrument, owned by the Viennese collector Wilhelm Kux, which had begun life in 1715 as a Stradivari viola d’amore. Throughout his career, he owned violas: his father made him at least two; his father-in-law Hugo Gruters gave him one; he acquired an excellent 1783 Giovanni Battista Guadagnini; and in 1934 he bought Dea Gombrich a Vincenzo Panormo for ￡103. That year Fritz Baumgartner built him an instrument to order. He even kept a viola pomposa, constructed by Wilhelm Busch, and played it occasionally. His training at the Cologne Conservatory included a certain amount of viola-playing; and he appeared several times as violist of the Gurzenich Quartet. But those were the days when German orchestral musicians called the Bratsche the ‘Penzioninstrument’, as William Primrose pointed out:

Busch shared this rather denigratory view. ‘Only lazy violinists play the viola’, he would say;6 and he sometimes betrayed a casual attitude towards the instrument in his choice of violists. Violinists in the Chamber Players were expected to double on the viola, regardless of whether they had any special feeling for it – in the Sixth ‘Brandenburg’ Concerto, Busch used four or even five players for each of the two solo viola da braccio parts. Blanche Honegger, who had never studied the viola but would happily switch from violin to viola and back again during the course of an evening – she did so in all the concerts of the Trio Moyse – was his kind of musician. He would have endorsed her comment: ‘If you can play the violin, you don't have any difficulty playing the viola’.

On 12 August 1909 Adolf and Fritz presented a farewell musical evening at the Beckerath house in Pyrmont. Next morning Fritz was off to the rigours of a Latvian winter and Adolf was thrown into a panic: they had never before suffered a serious parting and he realised for the first time how much their careers would separate them. He still made sure he sent Frieda one of his compositions for her eighteenth birthday that day, a setting in A major of Gottfried Keller's poem Abendlied: there would be a similar present every year up to her 55th birthday, nine days before her death. Since the spring they had forged an understanding that they would marry as soon as Adolf's future was settled; but naturally the Grüters family were worried about an engagement between two teenagers, neither of whom had experienced a relationship with anyone else. Within a week of her birthday, Frieda's father was trying unsuccessfully to talk her out of committing herself to Adolf so early; and brother Otto told her point-blank that the first love of an eighteen-year-old lad was hardly likely to be his last. All such remonstrations were in vain and only a few days later Otto was noting in his diary: ‘Adolf and Frieda much together’. Later that year, the Grüters parents even forbade the pair to communicate directly, which increased Adolf's feeling of isolation. But love soon found a way to circumvent the ban – Frieda's best friend in Bonn, Hanna Zorn, became a willing conduit for letters and messages. There was no doubting Adolf's devotion: Hanna testified that one evening in the winter of 1910–11, when Frieda was staying with the Zorns to prepare for her exams away from the musical uproar of the Grüters home, Adolf stood outside in the deep snow with his violin, serenading his beloved. By then it was tacitly accepted that they would wed as soon as he had embarked on his career.

Through Eldering, Busch had come to know Brahms’ friend Dr Gustav Ophüls, a redoubtable pianist from whom he gleaned much information about the way Brahms liked his works to be played.

This edition provides semi-diplomatic transcriptions of the original manuscript correspondence of Lady Anne Percy, Countess of Northumberland, from 7 January 1570 until 25 December 1577. Anne's navigation of epistolary culture was dominated by men: all her extant letters were penned by one of two male secretaries, her surviving letters were addressed only to men, and they were intercepted and assessed for value by male intelligencers and agents. The twenty-five letters in total that it has been possible to identify are transcribed here, including sixteen letters in English sent from Anne to various recipients during her exile in Scotland and later in the Habsburg-ruled Low Countries. Also included are five Latin letters that Anne sent in collaboration with gentlemen exiles, a further Latin petition sent only from Anne, and three examples of correspondence addressed and sent to Anne during her years in exile. The letters are numbered and presented chronologically.

Two of Anne's letters have been edited previously. An address to the Duke of Alva by Anne on behalf of her husband's suit and declaring support for Mary, Queen of Scots, was published in French by Kervyn de Lettenhove in the Relations Politiques. Lettenhove dated this letter to ‘the end of October 1570’. This letter has not been included in the present edition as the original manuscript has not yet been located. Lettenhove's edition of the address to the Duke of Alva from late October 1570 does not record salutations or signatures, but rather summarises the text. It remains unclear whether the original manuscript letter from Anne to the Duke of Alva was itself written in French. Anne did have access to a French secretary, Dr Knott, who was recommended to her by Dr Nicholas Sander, but since the original manuscript is unavailable, this letter cannot be authenticated at present. Another letter, addressed from Anne to her husband the Earl of Northumberland dated 21 March 1572 (Letter 10) was edited and published in the first volume of Registrum Honoris de Mortum, in which many spellings were rendered and abbreviations expanded in Scots. In the present edition a new transcription from the original letter is included which reveals that these Scots spellings were an editorial decision rather than features of the original manuscript.

This crisis in his life – when he cut himself off from the landscape that had formed him and the tradition that was his main source of cultural nourishment – is perhaps the best point at which to consider Adolf Busch the man, through the perceptions of relations and friends. Like his brother Fritz, he was deceptively tall, a little under six foot (1.79 metres): his heavy build in adulthood made him appear stockier and his skiing accident left him with one leg slightly shorter than the other and an almost imperceptible limp. ‘He had a peasant figure – he wasn't slim and he wasn't fat’, his niece Hildegart Nicholas said. As Evelyn Rothwell saw him, ‘He was like a large, benign bear, slightly shaggy, always with his hair falling over his face – a round, highly coloured face and bright, piercing blue eyes. He was always warm, outgoing, interested, eager – almost like a child’. This view was echoed by Dea Gombrich: ‘It was almost a child's face’. Meeting him with his son-in-law in 1939, a journalist reported that ‘his unlined, pink face and athletic figure make him look almost as young as the slight, boyish Serkin’. In Toni Booth's eyes ‘He was tall, with very broad shoulders, and looked as if he liked running’. And Amalie Serkin saw him as ‘not at all clumsy in appearance but stately, though never pompous – just a tall, big, blond man’. As a boy he had fair hair but it had darkened to reddish-brown by his early twenties – although in his fifties he still struck the young Eugene Istomin as ‘a great blond giant’. In the late 1920s and early 1930s he sported such a short crewcut that on his second visit to America he was described as ‘bristly haired’. Robert Dressler, Busch's pupil in his last years, said: ‘To me he always looked perfectly healthy, hale and hearty. He had very red cheeks, which is typical of a certain type of mostly southern German’. Conte Enrico di San Martino, president of the Accademia di Santa Cecilia, wrote:

Adolf Busch was a towering figure in the musical life of the twentieth century. He was also one of the great individuals of his time, a man of unquenchable idealism, integrity and intellectual rigour who lived out his beliefs and often suffered for them. Now that we can see the twentieth century entire, it is difficult to think of a more important German musician than Busch (except, perhaps, Hindemith) from that era. As man and artist he put most of his contemporaries in the shade and his life was an expression of almost heroic honesty and simplicity.

Yet he is not as well known today as he should be. His career as violinist and composer, like those of so many central Europeans, was disrupted by two catastrophic wars; and his decision to boycott his native country in 1933, when he could easily have stayed and prospered as others did, further fractured his life. This one action made him an exile, cost him the precious cultural nourishment of his native land and deprived him of his most devoted audience, virtually ending his prospects as a composer. Five years later he renounced all his concerts in Italy, where he was hugely popular, in protest at Mussolini's anti-Semitic laws. In America, where he settled at the end of 1939, his kind of musicality – which placed vigour and expression above virtuosity – was not fully appreciated. Any one of these setbacks could have spelt death to such a sensitive artist; and yet he rose above even the mental devastation which went with being a German, in the knowledge of what his people were doing during the Hitler decade.

In one biography of Wilhelm Furtwängler, it is implied that the Busch brothers found it easy to leave Germany in 1933. In another, they are listed as ‘expelled artists’. In a study of Furtwängler's recordings, it is stated that in forsaking their native country they ‘did so not because they were better men than Furtwängler, or had greater foresight, but because they had different priorities’.

While the rest of Europe went to war, life continued relatively normally for the Busches and Serkins in neutral Switzerland, although it seemed far from certain that Hitler would respect that neutrality and refrain from invading. Frieda, chafing at the compromises she felt the Swiss were making with their Nazi neighbours, fired off a letter to Werner Reinhart in which she complained about the engagement of Furtwängler to conduct in Winterthur and the willingness of the Winterthur City Orchestra to continue giving concerts in Konstanz, on the German side of the border – and incidentally chided Reinhart for not supporting the Lucerne Festival. After an interval Reinhart wrote a seven-page rejoinder, setting out the Swiss policy of neutrality in music, as in other things, and questioning the validity of excluding artists such as Walter Gieseking from the Lucerne event on purely political grounds. Much of September was spent by the Busch party at the little village of Eriz near Thun, where the reality of the international situation could be held at bay for a few weeks. Joseph Segal, who stayed with his mother in the same small three-storey house as the Serkins, found that he was expected to have his violin lessons upstairs, while Serkin practised thunderously downstairs. ‘Play forte!’ was the riposte from Busch, who rode up the hill on a bicycle from his own holiday home for the lessons. ‘He would come in, panting very hard – he was quite a heavy man – and take his working violin straight out of its case’, Segal remembered. ‘He would play with me a bit here and there.’

This talented pupil, born in Haifa of Russian parents, came with the recommendation of Sir Adrian Boult, who rehearsed the Beethoven Concerto with Segal and the BBC Symphony Orchestra as part of the first prize that the then fourteen-year-old won in the 1938 British Empire Violin Competition. Busch relented in his opposition to teaching prodigies because he was so taken with Segal's father Levi – who was still based in Palestine most of the time, while Joseph was accompanied abroad by his equally pleasant mother, Yaffa.

ANIMALS AND PLANTS breathe in symbiosis. Intricate parts of a whole, woven into the extremities of the earth's living mantle, humans inhale as the forest exhales: plants, as Emanuele Coccia describes them, are the ‘breath of all living beings, the world as breath’, in which all earth's beings are immersed.1 Waving, not drowning – the forest and its trees dance counterpoint with human communities to the earth's hum. Exquisitely entangled, together, we stand the best chance of combatting the current global crises: climate change, loss of biodiversity, and emerging new diseases, according to a recent United Nations report. On the face of it, tragic panoramas of burning bush and wildfires in Australia (2019–2020), Russia (2021), and Europe (2022), still fresh in mind, sap resolve from even the most stalwart optimists of these posthumanist times. Trees cover only 31 per cent of the earth's surface and, despite declining rates of deforestation, that area is shrinking. Still, as humanity hurtles towards an alarming future, the forest and its trees – notably reduced in numbers – are perhaps our best allies. The promise of this alliance was recognised at the World Climate Summit in 2022, where world leaders pledged to eliminate forest loss and to support restoration and sustainable forestry. Their commitment to three ‘forest pathways’ promotes greater human engagement with forests, thus stimulating a return to historical levels of plant-human collaboration that bring to mind those experienced at the time of the European Middle Ages.

Human dependence on the surrounding forest was doubtless more evident to many populations in the past, when many more people lived in closer contact with it, drawing on it as a source of light and heat, for food, and for the raw materials necessary for building and crafting. We are, of course, equally dependent in the present. Indeed, ‘if plants disappeared from the earth tomorrow, human life would continue for no more than a few weeks […]. On the other hand, if we were the ones that disappeared, in a few years plants would repossess all the land previously taken over from the natural realm, and in a little less than a century every sign of our enduring civilisation would be covered in green’002E

The earliest descriptions of the island, compiled by mariners for whom it represented (often quite literally) a salvation, tend to open with an impression of its forbidding appearance from the sea followed by a progress up the well-watered Chapel Valley and the unfolding of the upland landscape into greenery. Peter Mundy, for example, observed in 1634 that:

By Mundy's day, however, the face of the island had already undergone far-reaching changes, directly or indirectly, at the hands of transitory seamen. Timber was a major requirement of the ships that touched there, many of which found themselves in immediate need of repairs – sometimes on a major scale – in order to complete the long voyage home from the East Indies. Native redwood in particular, once widespread on the island, was sought out by ships’ carpenters desperate for materials to see them through the remainder of the voyage to England.

With the permanent settlement of the island in the mid-seventeenth century (Chapter 4), consumption of timber for construction increased markedly and pressure on the forests rose in line with the growing demand for firewood. Domestic heating and cooking accounted for an increasing demand, but other factors are also singled out as having been particularly destructive. Yams, introduced particularly to feed the enslaved population (see below), required prolonged boiling over several hours to make them at all palatable, while the distillation of arak, to which large numbers of the white planters quickly became addicted, also consumed significant quantities of timber. With the passage of time, so much of the immediately available timber had been cleared that those gathering firewood (again slaves in particular) were having to walk for several hours into the interior to find new sources.

While there is no documented instance of deliberate clearance of woodland to make way for agriculture, one pernicious factor ensured that once trees had been felled the woodland would be lost forever – namely, the presence of numerous feral goats and other ruminants.

It was billed as a “musical event extraordinary” featuring “a Military Band without a rival,” albeit one that had never performed in public before. On the night of the concert, John Philip Sousa mounted the podium and faced his newly formed band of “fifty of the highest class artists and soloists.” Instead of opening with the first number on the program, the overture from Rossini's Semiramide, the men rose to their feet and played the somber strains of P. S. Gilmore's The Voice of a Departing Soul (1861). Originally an aria for bass, the lyrics declared with alarm, “Death's at the door! Keep him at bay! He's dress’d in deep black! To take me away!”

The “event extraordinary” at Stillman Music Hall in Plainfield, New Jersey, on September 26, 1892, was the highly anticipated debut of Sousa's New Marine Band, but the audience was understandably subdued. Two days earlier, while at the St. Louis Exposition with his band of one hundred, Gilmore, “the world's greatest bandmaster,” died unexpectedly in his hotel room. Upon hearing the stunning news, Sousa hurriedly wrote a band arrangement of Gilmore's song and made the last-minute change to his program. The day after the concert, the Plainfield Press reported that the performance of Gilmore's dirge “was intended as a tribute to the memory of the most distinguished band leader of this century.” Even before the downbeat of that mournful elegy at least one newspaper had already declared that, with the passing of Gilmore, Sousa was “now the greatest bandmaster in the country.”

An examination of the careers of these two musical giants during the period from 1885 to 1893 sheds new light on the various circumstances that converged for Gilmore to set the stage for Sousa's rapid ascendancy. These included Gilmore's successful but ultimately tenuous relationship with David Blakely (1834–96), his general manager, who went on to launch Sousa's Band; specific artistic and logistical clashes that led to the dissolution of Gilmore's profitable relationship with Blakely; Blakely's determination to engage a younger bandmaster who would rival Gilmore and prove to be even more lucrative as a business venture; and finally, Gilmore's sudden death.

The lengthy chanson de geste that mythologizes the life of the French knight Bertrand du Guesclin (c. 1320–1380) sends a strong message about military masculinities and the kind of man who is worthy of praise. It comes as no surprise, then, that du Guesclin responds quite firmly against a charge of cowardice levelled against him when he advises Henry of Trastamara against engaging in the Battle of Najera:

Consistently loyal to whichever cause he was fighting for, the historical Bertrand du Guesclin very much earned his reputation and the rewards that came to him. The poem that commemorated and mythologized his life has a strong message about military masculinities that shows why he was so respected. His unwavering loyalty meant that he could act as he saw fit, even when his actions were questionable. This loyalty is part of the poem's argument: those who are consistently loyal are the worthiest of praise. This article explores more of the poem's arguments about military masculinities.

The historical Bertrand du Guesclin (c. 1320–1380), a minor Breton noble, was one of the most famous of the French soldiers of his generation, valuable enough to be mythologized both in his lifetime and in subsequent centuries. He proved himself so useful that he served the last ten years of his life as Constable of France, a military position hitherto reserved for someone of the higher nobility. When the Hundred Years’ War between England and France escalated after 1369, he managed to retake much of the territory lost to the English after the Battle of Poitiers (1356) and the subsequent Treaty of Bretigny (1360).