Guila Bustabo (February 25, 1916April 27, 2002) was a prominent American concert and recital violinist.
Guila Bustabo was born in Manitowoc, Wisconsin, in 1916[1] as Teressina Bustabo.[2] She began playing the violin at age two. At age three, she played privately for Frederick Stock, the conductor of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.[3] At age three, her family moved to Chicago so that she could study with Ray Huntington at the Chicago Musical College. Before she was five, she was studying in Chicago with Leon Samétini, a former pupil of the 19th-early 20th century virtuoso and composer Eugène Ysaÿe. By age nine, she performed with the Chicago Symphony and as a young prodigy she also performed with the Philadelphia Orchestra and the National Orchestral Association. Still a prodigy, she then studied at the Juilliard School under Louis Persinger.
Her career was always tightly controlled by her mother, Blanche (1895–1992). Guila Bustabo once said, "Menuhin got away from his parents. He was lucky. I never got away from mine." Yehudi Menuhin was one of her Juilliard classmates.[4]
She made her Carnegie Hall concert debut at age fifteen, playing the Wieniawski Violin Concerto No. 2.[5] [6] A year later, she made her Carnegie Hall recital debut with Louis Persinger at the piano, to an audience that included Arturo Toscanini.[7] At age eighteen, she toured England, continental Europe and Asia. That same year, she acquired a Guarneri del Gesu violin. Her acquisition of this rare instrument is variously attributed to help from a group of professional musicians including Toscanini, to Fritz Kreisler, and to the British aristocrat Lady Ravensdale. It is possible that all were involved. In 1938 and 1939, she returned to New York, giving "poised and expressive" performances with the New York Philharmonic.
Bustabo toured Europe and Asia. She performed under top-rank conductors, including Sir Thomas Beecham, Issay Dobrowen, Albert Coates, Hermann Abendroth, Wilhelm Furtwängler, Oswald Kabasta, Herbert von Karajan and Willem Mengelberg. Blanche Bustabo decided that Guila would remain in Europe and perform in Germany and Nazi-occupied countries during World War II.
Her performances under Mengelberg during that period caused her difficulties at the end of the war. The Dutch maestro had performed in Germany with his Amsterdam Concertgebouw Orchestra from the onset of the war through 1942 and thereafter continued performances in other occupied lands, resulting at the end of the war in a ban on his performances in the Netherlands for five years. This, in turn, resulted in Bustabo's arrest in Paris, when U.S. Army General George S. Patton discovered that she had played as soloist under Mengelberg during some of the performances in question, as well as other concerts in occupied territory.[8] [9] Her association with the conductor Oswald Kabasta, if it was known to Patton, could not have helped Bustabo's case, as Kabasta was known to be an ardent Nazi. These charges, part of the denazification program, were later dropped. However, because of this situation a career in the US was essentially closed to her. She continued to perform in Europe during the 1950s and 1960s.
Contemporary composers admired Bustabo's work. Jean Sibelius reportedly said of her performance of his own violin concerto at his estate in 1937 that she played it just as he "envisioned it when I composed it". Ermanno Wolf-Ferrari composed a concerto for her. He then became her recital partner on tours of Scandinavia, Germany, Italy and Spain. The less prominent composer Otmar Nussio also composed a concerto for her. These three concerti are among her recorded performances that have been made available on CD. Bustabo's recorded live performance of the Bruch Violin Concerto No. 1 with Mengelberg and the Concertgebouw Orchestra is considered one of the finest recordings of that work ever made.[10] At one point in her career, Bustabo was a Columbia Records artist. Columbia issued several Bustabo studio recordings of short violin recital pieces.
In 1964, Bustabo became professor of violin at the Innsbruck Conservatory, appearing occasionally in concert. During this time period, she sold her Guarneri del Gesu violin and purchased an apartment house in Innsbruck. Bipolar disorder forced her to retire from her position in 1970. She returned to the United States, accompanied by mother and husband, where she played for five years in the violin section of (and as occasional soloist with) the Alabama Symphony Orchestra. Her medical care while in the U.S. was graciously provided by physician and friend, Dr.Ralph Tieszen, M.D. of Birmingham.
Guila Bustabo's 1948 marriage to Edison Stieg, an American military musician, ended in divorce in 1976. She outlived her mother by sixteen years, dying in Birmingham, Alabama, in 2002, aged 86.