Ferruccio Busoni (1866-1924) Ferruccio Busoni: Master of All by Robert Rimm (This article first appeared in the January 2004 issue of International Pianomagazine. Parts of it were adapted from the author's book, The Composer-Pianists[Portland, OR: Amadeus Press], 2002.) Music history abounds with the illustrious and ill-tempered, the prodigious and portentous, the lofty and lesser. Among the hundreds to have made their mark, one of the most extensively portrayed and debated remains arguably the one major figure least known to the wider musical public. His father, a virtuoso clarinetist, gave Ferruccio Dante Michelangelo Benvenuto Busoni, born in 1866, those three telling middle names; entering adulthood, Busoni would inherit the spirit of those great Tuscan masters, becoming one of the extraordinary renaissance men of his era. Contrary to standard practice of the day, and much closer to the repertoire of today's aspiring virtuosi, young Ferruccio grew up on the works of Bach, Mozart and Beethoven, and was forced to practice four hours daily. His mother, a noted concert pianist of German descent, had played for Liszt at his home, thus stoking in the young composer-pianist an early love of the flamboyant Hungarian composer. Before his tenth birthday, Busoni accompanied his father to Vienna for an audition with Anton Rubinstein, followed by the widely reported triumph of his Viennese debut. Johannes Brahms took notice, provided his influential endorsement and became something of a mentor. Busoni settled in Graz, where beginning in 1878 he studied harmony and counterpoint for four years with Wilhelm Mayer. At age 20, he broke free from his father's stultifying grip and settled in Leipzig, where he exchanged ideas with Grieg, Tchaikovsky and Mahler, among many others. In 1888 he began to teach at the Helsinki Conservatory; there he met Sibelius and also his future wife, Gerda Sjöstrand. They came to enjoy a lifelong love affair. "I think of you every hour," Busoni would write, "especially if I see something beautiful or am with good people." She both enabled and ennobled her husband, balancing Busoni's often ascetic life and remote personality with warmth and love. At age 24, while continuing to strengthen his skills as editor and transcriber, until that point mainly with the music of Bach, Busoni began a troubled stint at the Moscow Conservatory. He was given a large workload that collared his compositional and performance aspirations. His inability to play Russian politics as a native left him vulnerable to xenophobia, and the country's unstable financial situation further complicated matters. He discovered at that time the innate need for personal and professional freedom that was to govern the rest of his life. Concurrently, Busoni developed a reputation as uncompromising. He simply could not tolerate circumstances that inhibited his liberal philosophies. After barely a year, he left for Boston's New England Conservatory; following the birth of his son Benvenuto, he moved to New York, devoting himself largely to his concerts. Berlin followed. Busoni's peripatetic existence in part grew out of his search for a teaching environment that allowed him freedom from the restricting curricula of conservatory life at that time. All the while, he kept up his concert touring in a wanderlust reminiscent of Liszt. Busoni well knew that his father—through profligate and grossly irresponsible behavior with the large sums that passed through his hands—abused his position with impresarios and a public eager to help the young prodigy. Later, as Busoni's finances improved and his career flourished, he held true to the belief that mercenary motives had no place in his life. "The worthiest things, as art and philosophy, love and nature, good taste and inner satisfaction, are independent from [money]." As a matter of principle, he accepted no fee from his private students. Busoni detested the combination of art and commerce on a pathological level: "As soon as I make my aim a profitable one, as soon as there begins to be a practical advantage in doing a thing, something in me begins to bleed, a kind of disablement overtakes me, and it is only with pain and effort that I can carry through what, otherwise, I could achieve easily, happily and better." As with any performing musician, then and now, there are times when inspiration does not meet the concert date, and Busoni tried to avoid those days whenever possible. "If I am playing only because of the fee I always play badly, worse than the average pianist; besides this, I am always ashamed while I am playing and afterwards too, and that is distressing." Later, when World War I brought about unprecedented global tensions, Busoni continued to play upon the theme of freedom. "When one is no longer master of one's own freedom of movement, life has no further value. No matter whether it is the result of sickness, old age, imprisonment or—the glorious matters of the present time." Conversely, Busoni well knew that his need for complete personal and artistic autonomy sacrificed nothing by way of discipline and hard work. He plainly made his case: "If a doctor advises the enjoyment of wine, he does not wish his patient to become a drunkard. The state of freedom must not be confused with anarchy, because in anarchy, every individual is threatened by the other. Magnanimity is not the mania of prodigality and free love is not prostitution. Moreover, a good idea is not an artistic creation, someone with talent is not a master; a seed of corn, however strong and fruitful it may be, produces no harvest for a long time." Busoni was one of the first pianists to go beyond an exclusive reliance on his talent in pursuit of perfection, becoming a pianistic scientist of the highest order. He ceaselessly studied the mechanics of technique and saw any limitation as a weakness to overcome. Busoni lived by the credo that everything was possible on the piano. He performed on a long concert bench to focus on the upper or lower register by subtly shifting his body to the right or left. In matters of pedaling, touch and awareness of his own physique, Busoni knew precisely how much distance and weight would produce the desired effect. Along with these advanced precepts, he acknowledged the pianist's more mundane tasks: "There is still presence of mind which is also to be desired, control over moods in irritating conditions, the ability to rouse the attention of the public, and finally in 'psychological moments' to forget the public." Busoni is the father of what is generally called the modern Italian school, exemplified by Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli and Maurizio Pollini. While not precluding the loftier goals of musical expression, their clear emphasis on technical perfection, intellectual depth and structural cohesion came straight from Busoni. Many critics have observed in their music-making an overly calculated approach, but music speaks to the widest range of human responses; what is too perfect or intellectual for some may be intensely stimulating to others. Busoni defended his preoccupation with refining even the smallest details of the piano's expressive capabilities by citing a conversation with a stained-glass artisan, who demonstrated that only a fragment was needed to judge the greatness of a window. Busoni could afford to focus on details and a deeper awareness of his art. His prodigious memory and capacity for knowledge allowed him to master a gargantuan repertoire. Along the way, he performed many lengthy, neglected works, taking particular pleasure in introducing audiences to Alkan, Liszt and other then-unfamiliar music. Busoni empathized with Liszt's outsider status as a composer and sought to redress it in 1904 with a series of Liszt recitals in Berlin. The critics were appalled. Several years earlier Busoni had attempted Alkan's resurrection by playing eight of that composer's most important works and received even more venomous criticism. Significantly, given his background, Busoni found it natural to play Bach publicly, long before it became de rigueur to do so. His Bach editions are probing, highly personal guides to points of interpretation, musical analysis and technique. Although never a historical-music purist, Busoni could be counted upon for the highest level of scholarship and research. He intended his edition of Book 2 of Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier to "concern itself with the profundities of polyphony, the roots of melody and the innermost workings of compositional mechanisms." Busoni analyzed and dissected the forty-eight preludes and fugues of the Well-Tempered Clavier as no other musician had ever previously attempted. He also attributed apt, colorful concepts to the set, calling the first four preludes, "the four elements—water, fire, earth and air." Among the primary objects of his study, high within the hierarchy of his pianistic priorities, were the piano's pedals. He poetically attributed to the piano "one possession wholly peculiar to itself, an inimitable device, a photograph of the sky, a ray of moonlight—the Pedal." The perfection of his pedal technique—acquired through constant study, application and experience—became legendary. Here and in the larger quest for elemental musical truths, Busoni relentlessly pursued supremacy: "I never neglect an opportunity to improve, no matter how perfect a previous interpretation may have seemed to me. In fact, I often go directly home from the concert and practice for hours upon the very pieces I have been playing, because during the concert certain new ideas have come to me. Those ideas are very precious, and to neglect them or to consider them details to be postponed for future development would be ridiculous in the extreme." Sviatoslav Richter, for one, also followed a similar routine. Rare are musicians with the kind of obsessive dedication to their art that compels them to work for hours late into the night after a concert. Among major contemporary pianists, Krystian Zimerman and Evgeny Kissin belong to a select group striving for the kind of absolutes that Busoni espoused. The perfectionist often walks hand in hand with the workaholic. "It is the old story," he wrote to Gerda. "I can sleep after I have done good work; if I do no work, I become nervous." He called the real artist someone "who has formed the habit of stopping at nothing short of his highest ideal of perfection." Writing in the preface to a collection of exercises, Busoni well realized that "technique is not, and never will be, the alpha and the omega of piano playing. . . . A great pianist has to be a great technician. But technique, being only one part of the art of a pianist, lies not only in the fingers and in the wrists, or in the force or endurance; the even more important technique lies in the brain." Busoni took every opportunity to expound upon his philosophy, as it contradicted prevailing attitudes: "During the lifelong course of his pianistic studies the editor has always endeavored to simplify the mechanism of piano playing and to reduce it to what is absolutely indispensable in movement and expenditure of strength. His mature opinion is that the acquirement of a technique is nothing else than fitting a given difficulty to one's own capacities. That this will be furthered to a lesser extent through physical practicing and to a greater extent through keeping an eye on the task mentally is a truth which perhaps has not been obvious to every pianoforte pedagogue, but surely it is obvious to every player who attains his aim through self-education and reflection." His playing of Liszt rose far above the vulgar display of those pianists whose complete focus on virtuosity allowed them nothing more. "Before everything there must be technique," Busoni explained. "The difficulties must be hidden, in order that the musical thread, of which the player holds one end and the listener the other, may remain taut." He believed that performers should be concerned above all with spirituality over notes and their instrumentation. As a result, he made subtle changes even to well-established scores, sparingly adding notes, changing dynamics and altering phrasing. Busoni codified many of his ideals in Outline of a New Aesthetic of Music, first published in German in 1907. This short book is the product of a first-rate intellect, although its fascinating material occasionally suffers from a somewhat stilted presentation. He realized that the book lacked sufficient clarity. At the same time, he viewed music as the most enigmatic of the arts, not readily susceptible to tangible description. "The function of the creative artist," Busoni wrote, "consists in making laws, not in following laws already made. He who follows such laws ceases to be a creator." But throughout history, creative artists have borrowed from the past while expanding upon the limits it has set. Musically speaking, Busoni insisted: "Never, never, can one set up a rule when it is a question of art. Every stroke of the pen demands its own conditions. . . . In new works one avoids the old mistakes but makes new ones again, because the problem is always changing·. With the beginning of every new thing one is timid and awkward again." Students worldwide were drawn to the musical reformer in Busoni; he became one of the most sought-after teachers of his time. However, because he never felt completely happy in academic settings, he failed to establish a base from which he could cement his artistic legacy. Although he felt that working with students kept his piano playing fresh, Busoni became increasingly disenchanted with teaching, repeatedly covering the same paths he himself had crossed so often and usually with greater results. As an educator, Busoni was forward thinking and held no deep ideological bias against those contemporaries moving in different directions from his own. While not always agreeing with the latest advancements in music theory, nor initiating such codifiable new techniques as Schoenberg's atonality, he became fascinated by modern music. Upon hearing Stravinsky's Histoire du soldat for the first time, Busoni stood up in his box and shouted, "Masterpiece! Masterpiece!" amidst all the laughing and hissing around him. Fully confident in his own aesthetic values, he took an almost perverse satisfaction in publicly proclaiming his views. At the same time, during the early part of the twentieth century, Berlin reveled in its burgeoning reputation as the center of experimentation in the arts, which Busoni found enormously stimulating. Through his concerts and writings, he constantly challenged convention. Although he gave more than lip service to the new music of Bart—k and Schoenberg, it was to past masters—including Alkan and others he felt were unfairly neglected—that his affinities drew him. Modernism took decisive turns at the beginning of the twentieth century through the pioneering work of Scriabin, Schoenberg, Stravinsky and others. Busoni himself understood tradition as "a plaster mask taken from life, which, in the course of many years and after passing through the hands of innumerable artisans, leaves its resemblance to the original largely a matter of imagination." At the same time, his respect and love for tradition may be seen in his repertoire, which took in practically the whole Bach keyboard canon, much Mozart and Beethoven, selected works by Alkan, Chopin, Schumann, Liszt and a wide range of other composers. Busoni spared no effort defending his beliefs. He summarized his creed in an open letter, responding to a polemic by the Belgian critic Marcel Rémy: "You start from false premises in thinking that it is my intention to 'modernize' the works [that I play]. On the contrary, by cleaning them of the dust of tradition, I try to restore their youth, to present them as they sounded to people at the moment when they first sprang from the head and pen of the composer. [Beethoven's] Pathétique was an almost revolutionary sonata in its day, and ought to sound revolutionary. One could never put enough passion into the Appassionata, which was the culmination of passionate expression of its epoch. When I play Beethoven, I try to approach the liberty, the nervous energy and the humanity which are the signature of his compositions, in contrast to those of his predecessors. Recalling the character of the man Beethoven and what is related of his own playing, I have built up for myself an ideal which has been wrongly called 'modern' and which is really no more than 'live.'" Busoni's reputation as a penetrating thinker complemented his grand, romantic playing style, one that caused waves of criticism in his adopted country, more used to sober-minded pianists such as the reigning Germans Artur Schnabel and Edwin Fischer. Moreover, Busoni's few recordings betray certain modifications to the scores, which aroused additional reservations. However, given the limitations of the medium, he never recorded the greatest works that most engaged him as a performer—Bach's Goldberg Variations, Beethoven's "Hammerklavier" Sonata and "Diabelli" Variations, Liszt's Sonata, Brahms's Variations on a Theme of Paganini, and his own Fantasia contrappuntistica. The critical take on Busoni has always been that his Italian-German lineage shaped his romantic/classical personality. That is an easy handle for music historians to hold, yet it is simplistic. Busoni developed naturally into a breed apart, not readily given to typecasting of any kind. His peers—those in the best position to judge—considered him among the most persuasive of the piano's exponents. Isidor Philipp, for many years a professor at the Paris Conservatoire who explored several of the same ideas concerning the piano's potential at the same time Busoni did, often in discussions with him, said that he "never played anything twice in the same way. He relied on the inspiration of the moment, and when he was inspired he did amazing things." He called Busoni "the most extraordinary of them all—his face, his hands, everything about him spoke of nobility." The composer-pianist and Busoni authority Kaikhosru Sorabji labeled him "an artistic and intellectual titan like those divine men of the Renaissance, da Vinci or Buonarroti." Indeed, Busoni considered himself a Renaissance man. A great admirer of Leonardo da Vinci, he intended to write an opera on that master's life. The philosopher-scholar in Busoni appeared to know no limits. Sorabji wrote of Busoni's "extraordinary cold white fire of intellectualized emotion . . . a command of variegated tone quality that could leave one gasping breathless at the black magic that could make an indifferent piano an instrument." Pianist Arthur Rubinstein called Busoni "a towering personality, a shining example to all musicians for the noble way in which he pursued his career so uncompromisingly, for the high standard he set for his own compositions and for his general culture, so rare among artists." With a thriving career and given Gerda's love and companionship, Busoni's emotional calendar was always full. Notwithstanding these circumstances nor the constant praise he was accorded, and despite the wide professional and social network he cultivated, Busoni instinctively reacted against anyone who could be considered a rival. While having achieved what few ever could, and against the backdrop of a healthy ego, Busoni never felt completely secure with his position in life. Surely he had every outward reason not to feel threatened. Emotionally, however, he never quite lost the harmful imprints of an exploited prodigy, feeling used and on display, which led to subtle but real insecurities later in life. Busoni's wariness of any competitor was demonstrated by an unpleasant, very public row. In 1909, the great composer-pianist Leopold Godowsky succeeded Busoni as director of Vienna's prestigious Klaviermeisterschule. Busoni had been disappointed with most of his students, and the hours his teaching required limited time for composing and performing. Godowsky was approached to fill the position, and as soon as his services were secured, the powers that be canceled Busoni's contract. The Vienna press had a field day at his expense, claiming that he ignored his responsibilities. Although Godowsky's own actions were nothing less than forthright, as the resulting situation was beyond his control, Busoni never forgave him. He quickly moved on. "There is nothing worse than looking back," Busoni insisted, "or than places, people and facts that lead one to do so." Although he feared old age and its inevitable cold hands upon his cherished freedom, Busoni became stoic and accepting: "I am beginning to understand . . . late, in the twilight of my life—that, as one cannot form the world according to one's own ideas, one has to form oneself—in accordance with the world." A very Buddhist thought. Busoni wrote these words before his forty-seventh birthday, a time in his life when he felt an increasing necessity to create. He wrote to Egon Petri: "The composer [in me] has rested too long, here too an urgent inner voice is summoning me to unilateral action and will hear nothing of postponement." Busoni continued to compose ardently, while keeping up his touring and maintaining a small network of private students. Inevitably, toward the end of his life, Busoni came in contact with the nascent recording industry. Despite his interest in the medium, he well realized that the process was fraught with compromise and limitations. Busoni's few recordings, made in London in 1919 and 1922, reveal enough about his style to cast him as one of the major pianists of his era; however, their poor sound quality conveys little of the wide timbral variety and sophisticated pedal techniques he cultivated. While historically engaging, these recordings are not overwhelming. Busoni confessed: "My suffering over the toil of making gramophone records came to an end yesterday, after playing for 3 hours! . . . Since the first day, I have been as depressed as if I were expecting to have an operation. To do it is stupid and a strain. . . . They wanted the Faust waltz (which lasts a good ten minutes) but it was only to take four minutes! That meant quickly cutting, patching and improvising, so that there should still be some sense left in it; watching the pedal (because it sounds bad); thinking of certain notes which had to be stronger or weaker in order to please this devilish machine; not letting oneself go for fear of inaccuracies and being conscious the whole time that every note was going to be there for eternity; how can there be any question of inspiration, freedom, swing or poetry?" During a long illness, culminating in his death in 1924, Busoni tried to work as much as he could. He also maintained a keen interest in current events, and greatly enjoyed the company of visitors. Although he possessed no false modesty, his hundreds of extant letters reveal a questing and sensitive artist, alive to his surroundings. He could be aloof—a trait often mistaken for arrogance—but his writing displays no such remoteness. (At the same time, musicians whom he considered less than faithful to their art provoked an anger he scarcely bothered to conceal.) Busoni considered himself a musician and creative artist above all, not wanting to be viewed merely as a pianist. He took nothing for granted and sought higher truths through study, emotion and intellect. His natural inclination toward perfection and discovery, combined with complete self-discipline toward his craft, led to experiments and breakthroughs that should be required study for all serious students of the piano. Although Busoni the pianist was universally acknowledged to have few peers, judgment of his compositional talent came more slowly and less decisively. He was fully aware of the uphill battle he faced to be taken seriously as a composer, simply because he happened to play the piano so well. In a barely veiled musing directed at himself, Busoni acknowledged that the fame enjoyed by Liszt and Saint-Sa‘ns as pianists obscured their reputations as composers. Busoni looked to one of his musical icons to guide him through the critical shoals: "For his contemporaries, Beethoven was chiefly an amazing curiosity—a concert at which the Fifth and Sixth Symphonies and the G major Pianoforte Concerto were performed for the first time left the public quite unmoved. Fidelio was a fiasco twice, the Violin Concerto was described as being unmelodious and forced." Within the piano's domain, Busoni produced no modern body of piano sonatas that continue to give such resonance to 20th-century composers such as Prokofiev, Scriabin and recently, to Medtner. He produced no evergreen miniatures—a Prelude in C-sharp minor or Minuet in G— that provided Rachmaninov and Paderewski such early renown. He composed no orchestral novelty work—a "Paganini" Rhapsody or "Nursery" Variations—that conveyed such luster to Rachmaninov and Dohnányi. Where was his Gaspard de la Nuit or Petrushka with which virtuosos eagerly spread the names Ravel and Stravinsky? Without a handful of big romantic hits or easier short morceaux that can be included in collections, Busoni's name has not endured as well as others. Withal, he remains one of the absolute figures in all of classical music, well beyond his enduring reputation as a colossal pianist. Curiously, Busoni performed his own works relatively infrequently. Doing so was, and largely still is, the best way for composer-pianists to promulgate their music. Rachmaninov, Scriabin and Dohnányi, for example, repeatedly performed their works in concert to great acclaim. In Busoni's case, he appears to have grappled with the knowledge that his music was not merely modern, but ahead of its time and thus less effective on fin de si�cle concert stages. Clearly, though, he was not afraid to program 19th-century music that he knew would receive intense criticism: witness his Alkan and Liszt recitals. Busoni wrote his first four opus numbers before he was thirteen years old. Tellingly, his Op. 3 comprises five pieces for piano—Prelude, Minuet, Gavotte, Étude and Gigue—that represent the young man's homage to Bach, a kind of Italian Suite that in spirit could have fit among Bach's French or English Suites. Elements of dance rhythms and complex contrapuntal styles abound in Busoni's earliest works. Worthwhile among his youthful efforts, if filled with few of the innovations marking his mature works, are the Six Études and Étude en form de variations, Opp. 16 and 17, dedicated to Brahms; an F minor Sonata—only recently published by Breitkopf—dedicated to Anton Rubinstein; and the Variations and Fugue in C Minor on Chopin's Prelude No. 20, Op. 22, composed when Busoni was eighteen. He also wrote a set of twenty-four preludes following the examples set by Alkan and Chopin, and composed seven volumes of études after Bach. In addition, Busoni wrote variants of a number of Chopin études as exercises to enhance their technical value, predating Godowsky's landmark Chopin studies. The Second Ballet Scene, Op. 20, is the work with which the 18-year-old Busoni secured Breitkopf & Hþrtel as his publisher, a lifelong and profitable association on both sides. Dedicated to his "beloved mother and teacher Anna Weiss-Busoni," he frequently performed it as an encore. The pieces chosen for consideration within this article represent a cross-section of Busoni's greatest piano music. Readers and pianists alike are encouraged to explore further a large and substantial body of work. Busoni devoted a substantial portion of his activities to deciphering the universality of Bach, whose compositional style—stressing counterpoint and an often motoric sense of rhythm—lends itself particularly well to complexity and rigorous intellectual probity. "Bach-Busoni" has become a byword for musical transcription. Busoni's initial impetus to transcribe Bach's organ works came from his friend Kathi Petri (the mother of one of his students, the pianist Egon Petri). After they heard an organist play the Prelude and Fugue in D Major at Bach's Thomaskirche, she suggested that Busoni arrange the work for piano. A week later it was finished. This experience opened rich new areas for Busoni to explore: the possibilities of the piano's pedals and touch that were to give his playing such distinction. Alexander Pasternak recalled: "Busoni was an especially fine interpreter of Bach. The exceptional sounds and the unusual richness of tone he extracted from the instrument gave the impression of an organ performance. When he played Bach he seemed to be in a special mood, as if improvising, playing at a slower tempo than was usual with other pianists." Busoni's years of analyzing and playing Bach permanently influenced his creative efforts, all tempered by an increasingly determined search for new sounds, polytonality and modern modulations. Notwithstanding his famous and oft-performed transcription of Bach's Chaconne (the final movement of his Second Violin Partita), Busoni is best known for his transcriptions of Bach's ageless organ masterpieces, ingeniously imitating their characteristic textures and effects through changes in color, register and the use of monumental, organ-like climaxes. Busoni insisted on the universality of great music, believing the printed note and its subsequent performance often represented an incomplete expression of material sound; it was the spiritual essence behind the concept that was of surpassing significance. Following in the tradition of Busoni as a world-class pianist, conductor, composer, writer and critic, Zoltán Kocsis concurs with Busoni that "the essence of music is much more important than the final form in which it emerges. I am in the camp that says that if Bach knew the modern piano, he would certainly use it. I do much historical work on original instruments, but if Bach had the possibilities of the pedals, for instance, he would definitely use them. They greatly extend the range of sonority, especially in recalling orchestral colors and illusions." Busoni's own extensive study of the pedals proved enormously helpful in his transcriptions, manifested in a widespread use of the piano's middle pedal, used to sustain bass notes without the overtones of the middle and upper keyboard registers. Mozart—through his clarity and economy of expression—supplemented Bach's role as Busoni's compositional angel. Ever the independent, Busoni wrote, "Mozart! The seeker and the finder, the great man with the childlike heart—it is he we marvel at, to whom we are devoted; but not his Tonic and Dominant, his Developments and Codas." Not for Busoni the tried and true: he possessed the true spirit of the explorer. He wrote with profound simplicity, "There is no new and old. Only known and not yet known. Of these . . . the known still forms by far the smaller part." And then, Beethoven. "Bach is the foundation of piano playing. Liszt the summit," Busoni wrote. "The two make Beethoven possible." In his capacities as pianist, conductor and composer, Busoni thoroughly studied Beethoven's music. He felt drawn to its monumental and spiritual qualities. Beethoven's works, however, were continuously performed after his death, unlike those of Bach, Mozart and Liszt—a situation generally unchanged until Busoni's unflagging efforts on their behalf. The Italian writer Piero Rattalino succinctly observed, "Busoni was the protagonist of three crucial moments in the history of concert music: the discovery of Liszt the musician, the complete rediscovery of Bach, and the recovery of Mozart placed on the same level as Beethoven." Armed with these influences, the twenty-four-year-old Busoni won first prize in the inaugural Anton Rubinstein competition, for his KonzertstŸck for piano and orchestra. Dedicated to Rubinstein, the work bears the influence of the D Minor Piano Concerto by Busoni's only mentor, Brahms. Despite his early promise as a composer, Busoni soon recognized the extreme difficulty of maintaining the highest artistic standards as both composer and pianist: "My development as a composer would already be at quite a different stage if it had not been for the long interruptions and having to gather up the threads again so laboriously. I have only four months in the year in which to produce some better work and then I have to take a little step backwards again." (The composer-pianists Rachmaninov, Scriabin, Godowsky and Feinberg recorded similar thoughts.) In the decade between his twenty-fifth and thirty-fifth birthdays, starting with his Moscow period, Busoni generally chose the concert stage. When he returned to serious composition, his works moved away from the chromatic, tonal harmony characteristic of Chopin and into new, experimental realms. He used major and minor chords simultaneously—a technique originally explored by Alkan—and blended different keys within the same measure or beat, resulting in an indefinite haze of sound reminiscent of Scriabin. "Strange, that one should feel major and minor as opposites," Busoni explained. "They both present the same face, now more joyous, now more serious; and a mere touch of the brush suffices to turn the one into the other. The passage from either to the other is easy and imperceptible; when it occurs frequently and swiftly, the two begin to shimmer and coalesce indistinguishably." Busoni also explored the intervals of the second and the fourth, finding in them innovative approaches to modulation. His radical use of scales grew well beyond the different modes used in medieval church music, Far Eastern harmonies, and other world influences. In fact, his experiments led to the existence of over a hundred different scales, compared to those traditional in Western harmonic theory. He also utilized Persian, Chinese, Turkish and Native American themes at various times, in addition to the many Bach quotes incorporated within his music. As such, Busoni became one of music's great alchemists. His compositional advances represent what we would today consider technological advances: each new miracle is made possible by what has come before it. In 1902, Busoni organized and conducted a seven-year series of concerts devoted to new music. During this time, he performed a pivotal work in his canon, the epic, late-romantic Concerto for Piano, Orchestra and Male Chorus. But for the necessity of its concluding male chorus, the work would be performed far more often. (Busoni constantly struggled with this impracticality and abbreviated the concerto four years after its premiere, making what he called an "Emergency Exit" for the work. He later decided against it; the revised version remains unpublished.) Infused with the infectious melodies and rhythms of Italy, including three actual Italian folk songs, it is replete with indigenous turns of phrase. The work contains discernable elements from Beethoven, Liszt and Berlioz, but one must look to the Mahler symphonies for more accurate reference models. The Concerto's symphonic scale, use of voices and the evocation of distant memories through both original and folk themes may be heard in parallel throughout Mahler's output. Busoni referred to it as his "Skyscraper Concerto." As in many of his works, the virtuosity is brilliantly folded into the musical fabric, rendering its difficulties largely hidden, unlike in the Liszt concertos (although that composer's Totentanz and Faust Symphony did influence him). Initially decried as ugly music, barren of invention and senselessly modern, the concerto enjoyed much success a decade later, after the efforts of Scriabin, Schoenberg and Richard Strauss made the new seem acceptably modern. Busoni had originally wanted to write an opera based upon Aladdin, by the Danish poet Adam Oehlenschlþger, but instead used the text in the finale of the five-movement concerto. Three years after the concerto's premiere, Busoni's compositional style leapt forward with the seven Elegies for piano. They brilliantly fuse contrasting and highly distinct musical lines. Using his own scientifically advanced pedal techniques, an ingenious distribution of parts between the hands, and harmonic clashes of unusual beauty, Busoni achieved extraordinary levels of technique and originality. The 42-year-old composer wrote that his vivid, mystic Elegies "signify a milestone in my development. Almost a transformation." He considered these compositions, each of which is dedicated to a young pianist he admired, his most mature to that point. Alternately sensual, vivid, withdrawn and mystic, they refute the classic Greek meaning of "elegy" as a song of lamentation and instead point to Goethe's passionate work. "A German should at least know his Goethe," Busoni wrote to his colleague José Vianna da Motta, "and are this prodigy's 'Roman elegies' songs of lament? Practically the opposite." The second, All'Italia! (In modo Napolitano), is based upon music from the Piano Concerto. Its superimposed major and minor arpeggios are entirely characteristic of Busoni's mature style. He later used the third, Meine Seele bangt und hofft zu dir (Chorale Prelude)—his fondest and among the most forward-looking of the Elegies—within the Fantasia contrappuntistica. The fourth and fifth, Turandots Frauengemach (Intermezzo) and Die Nþchtlichen (Waltz) derive from his orchestral suite inspired by Carlo Gozzi's Turandot fable, well before Puccini produced his masterpiece on the same material. The sixth, Erscheinung (Nocturne), hints at fluid Lisztian textures, its mysticism restrained and iridescent, aided by the pedal's subtle blend of Busoni's harmonic language. The last of the Elegies, composed several months before his mother died, is the Berceuse, its remote, disembodied sound gently expressive. Upon her death he transcribed its material into the Berceuse élégiaque for chamber orchestra, in its way every bit as moving as the magnificent Fantasia after J. S. Bach, written after his father died and dedicated to him. Both these quiet works cast elysian, vulnerable and consolatory moods. The Fantasia—equal parts transcription, recomposition and original music—incorporates material from three of Bach's chorale-based organ pieces. The four works comprising An die Jugend followed the elegies by a year. The second, Preludio, fuga e fuga figurata, is based upon the D Major Prelude and Fugue from Book 1 of Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier. Busoni actually combines the prelude and fugue in the fuga figurata section. In the third of the set, Giga, Bolero e Variazione, Busoni combines and arranges two works by his beloved Mozart, the Gigue for piano, K. 574 and material from Act 3 of Le nozze di Figaro. The fourth, Introduzione, capriccio ed epilogo, begins with a free fantasy on a Paganini theme in the manner of Liszt, this time for left hand alone, then gallops through a virtuosic capriccio and a thoroughly original epilogue. The left-hand section is reminiscent of the groundbreaking works by Alkan, Scriabin and Godowsky for that hand alone. Considering the Fantasia contrappuntistica among the most important contemporary piano works in the literature, Busoni based it upon several fugues from Bach's Art of Fugue, which he referred to as Bach's last and greatest work. This Fantasia poses significant intellectual challenges to the pianist, running the gamut from great bravura to abstraction and mysticism. Busoni wrote that it "grew out of the attempt to complete J. S. Bach's last unfinished fugue. It is a study. (Every self-portrait of Rembrandt's is a study; every work is a study for the next one; every life's work a study for those who come after.)"[41] <#_ftn41> He also reiterated his belief that music is absolute: "[It] is thought of neither for pianoforte nor organ, nor orchestra. It is music. The sound-medium which imparts this music to the listener is of secondary importance." (It is still unclear for which instrument[s] Bach wrote the Art of Fugue. Busoni likely would have revisited the Fantasia had he lived longer; despite its various iterations, he never had time to complete an orchestral version as he desired.) The Six Sonatinas, composed from 1910 through 1921, brilliantly represent his last period. The most personal of his works, they play upon Busoni's brand of mysticism, all profoundly expressive, dark and otherworldly, and all ending quietly. The word "Sonatina" was likely a private musical joke on Busoni's part. He clearly believed that music is more important than any given title, and it represented a further chance for him to scandalize the critics. He likely had Alkan's gargantuan Sonatine in mind as well. Although smaller in scale than that by Alkan, Busoni's Sonatinas surely belie their diminutive name. The Sonatina Seconda, written in 1912, joins the later Scriabin sonatas in its journey outside the bounds of traditional tonality and harmony. Written without time or key signature, with sharps and flats inserted as needed, its complexity and forward thinking refined Busoni's reputation as a futurist as he grappled with the complexities of atonality. Busoni's compositional and personal freedoms assumed equal priority in his life. He believed, "It is just as impossible for sounds to be 'wrong' in music as it is for stones, plants or formations in a forest. We just have to learn to discern harmony away from the textbook." In a postcard to his friend and student Egon Petri, he wrote that Bretikopf & Hþrtel's engravers "have thrown up their hands in despair at the distribution of the accidentals" in this work. For the disciplined pianist, however, it is richly worth the effort to decipher. Busoni had become interested in occult matters (one notes the first use of the indication occulto in his music); he felt that clairvoyance and telepathy were quite real, if undeveloped traits of mankind. This prophetic piece, beginning Il tutto vivace, fantastico, con energia, capriccio e sentimento hints at the kind of saturated heat achieved by Scriabin. In much altered form, parts of it were later used by Busoni in the first prologue to Doktor Faust. Busoni is Faust, transformer of the human soul through musical truth and inevitability. Busoni had met Scriabin in St. Petersburg during this time, where both Mephistophelean composers had the opportunity to exchange ideas. Scriabin's Ninth Sonata (the "Black Mass," 1912) became a particular inspiration for Busoni's works of the period. Busoni dedicated the fourth, Sonatina in diem nativitatis Christi MCMXVII ("Christmas"), to his 25-year-old son Benvenuto. Busoni considered it a true Christmas piece—replete with distant tolling bells—in its simplicity, earnestness and outward serenity. Its gentle opening motif reappears slowly and poignantly at the end, quasi transfigurato. The Sixth Sonatina, famously subtitled "Chamber-Fantasy after Bizet's Carmen" is a brooding, mystic commentary on Bizet's masterwork. Although difficult to play well, the work stands aloof from the overt virtuosity of Liszt's operatic paraphrases. Its meditative ending, riding the crest of Busoni's indication visionario, presents the pianist little opportunity for the Grand Conclusion. Along with All'Italia and Turandots Frauengemach, the "Carmen" Fantasy has become a favorite romantic virtuoso piano piece. Further exploring ideas that Busoni had earlier written into the Indian Fantasy for piano and orchestra, his Indianisches Tagebuch (Red Indian Diary) comprises short rhythmic pieces based upon North American Indian melodies and folk songs. He referred to its "poetic simulations, such as the melancholy of the race; a glimpse of the Mississippi caught in passing; a hint of warlike proceedings; exotic coloring." Busoni had become drawn to the native spirituality and wistfulness of American Indian melodies, feeling a natural and immediate kinship with Indian culture and its lack of commercialism, reinforced by his longstanding distaste for mercenary matters. In these four pieces, Busoni first presents their melodies simply, and then colors them with his unique brand of mysticism. Sorabji commented on their Indian themes: "They are not developed, in the ordinary sense, so much as haunted by a strange powerful entity that overshadows them, and so takes possession of them that · they take on an aspect, hallucinated and obsessed. It is a spectacle for the ear of boundless fascination for those who are in tune with Busoni's strange genius and who are privileged to enter that peculiar world in which his mind lived and moved. It is a necromantic magical world." The explosive Toccata, Busoni's last major work for solo piano, evolves from a minor third and dotted rhythm into a dark, powerful and ingenious creation. Its bleak ending relates to themes of evil found within his operas Die Brautwahl and Doktor Faust. In words that could well be applied to the Toccata, Busoni responded strongly and personally to the works of E. T. A. Hoffmann, writing of his "veil of mysticism, the secret harmonies of Nature, the thrill of the supernatural, the twilight vagueness of the borderland of dreams·" Busoni's music is not easily classified as romantic in the manner of a Chopin or a Rachmaninov. Given the parameters of his own language, however, Busoni squarely falls within the romantic tradition. His hundreds of letters to Gerda speak volumes about the ardency of his emotions and the immediacy of his responses to the world. The mystical cast, the occult intimations, the chiseled architecture, and the intellectual and physical challenges embedded within Busoni's best works all combine to focus prismatic new light on the essence of music. Bibliography Beaumont, Antony. 1985. Busoni the Composer. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. ---------. 1987. Ferruccio Busoni: Selected Letters. New York: Columbia University Press. Busoni, Ferruccio. 1938. Letters to His Wife. Translated by Rosamond Ley. London: Edward Arnold. ---------. 1957. The Essence of Music and other Papers. Translated by Rosamond Ley. New York: Philosophical Library. ---------. 1911. Sketch of a New Aesthetic of Music. New York: G. Schirmer. Reprint, New York: Dover Publications. [Author's note: Schirmer's original volume used this title; however, a more accurate translation replaces the word "Sketch" with "Outline."] Cooke, James Francis. 1917. Great Pianists on Piano Playing. Philadelphia: Theodore Presser. Dent, Edward J. 1933. Ferruccio Busoni. London: Oxford University Press. Goebels, Franzpeter, comp. N.d. The new Busoni: Introductory notes. The Collected Exercises and Studies for the Piano, part 1. Wiesbaden: Breitkopf & Hþrtel. Kammerer, Rafael. 1955. Philipp compares pianists: Past and Present. MusicalAmerica 75: 16. Pasternak, Alexander. 1972. Skryabin: Summer 1903 and after. Musical Times (December):1173. Rattalino, Piero. 1989. Da Clementi a Pollini: Duecento anni con i grandi pianisti[From Clementi to Pollini: Two Centuries with the Great Pianists]. 3d ed. Milan:Ricordi/Giunti. Rubinstein, Arthur. 1973. My Young Years. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Schonberg, Harold C. 1951. Recalling Busoni. New York Times, 7 October. Sorabji, Kaikhosru. 1924. The death of Busoni. New Age, 14 August, 189. ---------. 1934. Concerts. New English Weekly, 25 October, 41--42.