Aylmer Buesst was a conductor and scholar long associated with vocal music. His career dates from the end of the first decade of the twentieth century and includes recordings with Enrico Caruso, Richard Crooks, and Heddle Nash. His work with the latter extending to a 1927 recording for Britain's Columbia Records of Mascagni's Cavalleria Rusticana -- only the third ever done of the opera -- under the auspices of the British National Opera. Buesst's interests extended to scholarship and in 1932 he published Richard Wagner's The Nibelung's Ring: An Act By Act Guide to the Plot and Music in which each leitmotif was identified. The latter book, which went to a second edition in 1952, remains in print and was a standard reference to Wagner's operatic tetralogy in the twenty first century. During the 1940s and 1950s, Buesst was a teacher at the Guildhall School of Music in London; his conducting students included composers Buxton Orr and Robert Crawford. He was also noted for his extraordinary collection of books on heraldry.