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“My style takes everyone aback: too young for the old, insufficiently mindless for the young, it constitutes a clear-cut chapter in the disorder of our times. −Inasmuch, it will hold its own better with subsequently fluctuating later generations.”
Ferruccio Busoni 1922

Ferruccio Busoni is born on 1 April, 1866, in Empoli, Italy, and only a few years later, his prodigious talent earns him the reputation of a wonder child. He shows equal natural gifts as instrumentalist and composer. He grows to adulthood and becomes the most acclaimed virtuoso pianist of his time. When George Bernard Shaw suggests Busoni compose under an assumed name, the advice is ironic prophecy. As with Franz Liszt, Busoni’s interpretive and performing genius overshadows his life as a composer. In contradiction to his popular legacy, from the time he is a child, Busoni never doubts that composition is his truest artistic mission.

Sprawling pages of testimonials describe a Busoni piano recital as a spiritual catharsis. He mesmerizes his audiences. The lush Italian cantabile interpretations of German Baroque and Classic repertory defy accepted practices. His color palette hypnotizes, yet his overwhelming sense of architecture is inarguable. Often dissatisfied with his ability, he works to refine the very nature of his communicative skills, changing constantly. Busoni frequently says that artists must be occupied with new problems and ideas in order to grow. He discards the wisdom of countless experiences as his intellect roots out the weaknesses of every composer. The staggering breadth of his repertory testifies to an irrepressible appetite.

Busoni’s innovative technical studies provide many idiosyncratic style characteristics within his compositions. Striking harmonic passages are often the result of pianistic experiments utilizing specific keyboard hand positions. As an instrumentalist, the piano aids his need for a deeply individual musical voice, and fortifies his search for artistic perfection. The cosmopolitanism forced on a world-renowned artist influences his theoretical writings; he encounters shocking provincialism and comes to see borders of countries as detrimental. Discouraged by the limitations of nationalism, Busoni seeks to encourage and create a ‘Universal’ language of music.

The life of a virtuoso robs the composer of concentrated time. His two careers are in constant opposition. Even as Busoni surmounts the heights of pianism, he feels the loss of time and fears the waste of his best years. In 1904, Busoni describes Manchester, England as, “a refinely contrived department of Dante’s Inferno, where traveling Virtuosi, who threw away the best part of life because they were covetous for fame and money, grind their teeth.” And he writes to his wife Gerda, from Boston, in 1911, “I am like one who is obliged to lie with a broken leg: but who has nothing else wrong with him, and waits until he can walk and move about again. I say once more, I must not throw away my good years. The position in my development as a composer would already be quite different if it had not been for the long interruptions.”

‘The attainment of mastery’, and ‘the quest for fulfillment’, ruin and redemption, are recurring themes, played out in his opera Doktor Faust, and pointedly so, considering he will not live to finish this work, born of the need to represent his innermost artistic philosophy. Busoni writes to Egon Petri in 1912: “If I could only rid myself of this feeling of shame at playing in public! I think my playing has become different again. I observed myself and collected (my own) criticism. Something is still wanting...Life becomes shorter and shorter - the goal even farther off; what an inhuman task!” Ten years afterwards, in 1922, Busoni laments, “The higher my reputation rises as a pianist (and it seems still to be on the increase), the more unjust is the opinion of me as a composer. By trying to help myself, I am working against my own interests.”

Liszt’s pupils compare Busoni to their venerable master. Anton Rubinstein was more the model for Busoni the pianist, however, Liszt serves as model for Busoni’s piano writing. As artist and man, Liszt’s psyche encompasses the religiously divine and profane. Busoni’s duality also embodies the divine, as in a magnificent transcendence. But his profane is not the romantic Satan of Liszt’s era. His evil is a condensing of the sinister forces that live in the soul of humankind, an uneasiness that causes nightmares, the turbulence beneath a deceptively smooth surface. Musically, these subtle forces will shadow many lighter compositions.

With the monumental Piano Concerto of 1904, signaling both the height and end of his Romantic period, Busoni moves from the vanishing world of Yesteryear, where he performs for Brahms and Tchaikovsky. His mounting attraction to revolutionaries, including Schoenberg and Bartók, sparks a growing need for a radical transformation, a surprising metamorphosis when considering the careers of some of his contemporaries. Tremendous capacities for regeneration and growth define Busoni’s art and can be traced to his childhood. He remains forward looking, a survivalist and an affirmer of life. As he grows, the futuristic aspects of his personality nourish his mystical affinity and direct this 20th century visionary. In 1912, from his essay Self-Criticism, he writes, “There is no new and old. Only the known and not yet known. Of these, it seems to me that the known still forms by far the smaller part.”

Busoni’s brilliant and insightful essays illuminate his far-reaching legacy as theorist and philosopher. From his miraculous beginnings, to the very end of life, he labors, defining and affirming his aesthetics for the future of music, hoping to direct younger generations of composers. Busoni’s groundbreaking publication, Outline of a New Aesthetic of Music, 1907, proclaims his vision. Calling for freedom from ‘shackles of law-givers’, he challenges traditional notation, harmony and key structures, so that the young history of music will continue to grow. He is always quick to counter, “An intentional avoidance of the laws cannot masquerade as creativity.” In his teachings, he strenuously advocates experimentation, shuns the commercial exploitation of compositional devices, and insists all innovations synthesize with integrity. He abhors the constraints of organized schools and movements, believing they replace one iron rule with another. He would never waiver from this position. In 1919, Busoni writes from Zurich, “Each person should try his best on his own behalf, without relying on groups or communities; then everything would be more genuine and honest.”

Arnold Schoenberg hopes for some commendation when he sends Busoni his Op.11 Piano Pieces in 1909. Busoni responds: “The ‘asceticism’…of the piano writing seems to me a pointless avoidance of foregone achievements. You are proposing a new value in place of an earlier one, instead of adding the new one to the old. You will become different and not richer.” The tonality does not shock Busoni, this he prophesied. The compressed form and density of information, in his view, does not provide a listener adequate space and time to digest the music. He disagrees with the un-pianistic writing because it limits a full projection of melodic and harmonic elements. In 1921, he writes, “The so-called ‘new ways’ are today no longer new. The epoch of experiments and of the overrating of means of expression at the expense of content and artistic durability is rapidly drawing to a close.” History is never a barrier for Busoni; his philosophy of art does not allow for the destruction of masterful accomplishments. He is convinced that creation does not demand a complete break with the past. In his late essay, published posthumously, What is Happening at the Present Time, he writes, “The newcomers deceive themselves, too, in thinking they can break, or have broken with their predecessors. This is not the case, in spite of their unshakable conviction, for every child has a mother to whom it is still attached...even after birth.” Busoni understands masterpieces as creatively potent, and maintains that future generations should “rise on the shoulders of the past.”

Busoni believes music is an art still in infancy, and explains, in his Outline of a New Aesthetic of Music, that the binding rules of lawmakers are not appropriate for a child. Perhaps they work for an adult. He dares artists to create their own rules, and never follow established precepts. He encourages young progressionists to command all laws and experience them first hand, before any renunciation. Busoni further clarifies this philosophy in his concept, ‘Young Classicism’. He writes from Zurich, January 1920: “By ‘Young Classicism’ I mean the mastery, the sifting and the turning to account of all the gains of previous experiments and their inclusion in strong and beautiful forms. This art will be old and new at the same time at first. We are steering in that direction.”

Busoni envisions an end to categories: Past and Future, God and the Devil, Church and Chamber music. His ‘Oneness’ is an attempt to unify art by forging a balance with nature. In Busoni’s important compositions, past and future co-exist and tie to his concept, the ‘omnipresence of Time’. He understands time as a part of nature, not linear but spherical: “I have not found out why we humans think of time as a line going from backwards, forwards, whilst it must be in all directions like everything else in the system of the world.” He identifies with Hoffmann’s Serapionsbrüder; the hermit Serapion eclipses time and place. Busoni channels this supernatural time traveler and blurs the lines between reality and dream, most notably in Die Brautwahl and Doktor Faust. Busoni sees all categories as impediments, they constrict composers’ abilities to notate authentic inspiration, and at the conclusion of Outline of a New Aesthetic of Music, he features a quote from Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil: “I could imagine a music whose rarest magic should consist in its complete divorce from Good and Evil - only that its surface might be ruffled, as it were, by a longing as of a sailor for home.” Busoni embraces ancient melodies as he searches for this pure music. “Their intensity of feeling,” and “absolute” beauty, better exemplify his philosophy of ‘Universal Music’. He struggles to clarify this celestial music, a music which will convey the feeling state of the ‘essence of music’.

For Busoni, masterworks are fragments of divine music, gleaned from an infinite sounding universe, his mythic ‘Realm of Music’. A composer might reap a part of this ageless ‘sounding organ’ through brief enlightenment, at times of heightened perception. However, strict laws regarding key structures, notations, and harmony obscure the path: “My final conclusion…is this: Every notation is, in itself, the transcription of an abstract idea.” In his view, music is alive in a composer’s mind, and prior to the act of notation, a composition “exists whole and intact before it has sounded and after the sound is finished. It is, at the same time, in and outside of Time.” Busoni understands the imperfect mechanics of notation as a further transcription: “Notation, the writing out of compositions…an ingenious expedient for catching an inspiration, with the purpose of exploiting it later. But notation is to improvisation as the portrait is to the living model. It is for the interpreter to resolve the rigidity of the signs into the primitive emotion.” Busoni argues that notation is not, nor could ever be, the music itself, and therefore one correct interpretation is impossible. He cites many instances where composer-performers contradict their own scores. Busoni regards the attitude of performers as yet another transcription. Within his theory, he considers a collaborative partnership of composer, transcriber, and instrumentalist. Countering disfavor with the art of transcription, Busoni mentions the respected variation-form, and points out that a ‘borrowed theme’ produces whole series of arrangements.

A youthful Busoni adores analyzing thematic origins. As this precocious pastime develops it becomes an intrinsic thread in the composer’s theories and publications. He conceptualizes an ‘Eternal Calendar’ of music, and in essays, lists numerous examples of melodies transcending time, form, occasion, country, and ethnicity. He references composers incorporating historically extant music for glaringly divergent purposes. While investigating thematic material found in Liszt’s Spanish Rhapsody, Busoni reveals compositions by Mozart, Gluck, Corelli, Glinka, and Mahler, as well as his own.

Busoni’s artistic imperative is methodical and deliberate: ‘The creation of sublime music’. The unification of a spiritual and cognitive intensity lies at the core of each mature composition. Although he believes the essence of a masterwork is intuitively divine, he refutes endeavors that do not include conscious and rigorous scrutiny. At the same time, he takes for granted that art must be beautiful. Despite a phenomenal intellect, a massive accumulation of knowledge, and a lifelong mastery of technique, Busoni’s approach remains intuitive. His close friend, the Dutch composer Bernard Van Dieren, explains that although much is written of Busoni’s intellect, austerity and serenity, the composer is never so forbidding as his commentators make out. In recorded conversations with Van Dieren, Busoni dismisses his many “intellectual flatterers” as proof of achievement: “All we do with those brains we are so proud of means little compared to the feeling which at once recognizes the note of truth in a work...But this mysterious, sudden surrender of a listener who is guided by emotion alone is our greatest reward. We have touched the heart and senses of those whose judgement we most cherish. It means that I have succeeded...only this finally matters.” Busoni adds, “Not as if intellectual grasp comprises all the mysteries of sentiment. I believe on the contrary that ‘the fullest understanding’ born from the heart reveals all the mystery of technical structure, all the intricacies of organic build...the emotion of a moment does not suffice.”

Busoni has his own ‘timetable of systematic progress’. His compositions and writings display an ever-widening and cohesive search for his ‘Ideal’. His intentions are neither reactionary nor contradictory, and yet there are times when firmer styles arise out of his need to steer a worthier course for future generations.

His search merges with an impassioned need to shape the future of music, an ‘Ideal’, which he hopes will guide other artists. He undertakes his tasks tirelessly. Bernard Van Dieren writes, “He had a horror of dissipation in any form. Every waking hour was devoted to work.” Busoni writes from Chicago, January 1911, “I have some few hours of Sunday repose. The traveling bag, which contains my work, lies at the station; there is no pianoforte in the room, so I am thrown on my own thoughts.” With these few hours, he pens a timely and concise essay, The New Harmony, for the periodical Signale, Berlin. The discussion concerns the current “searchings and gropings.” Busoni delineates five paths, and determines that, as of this time, no composer succeeds toward a viable end. He comments on the first, chord formation according to customary scales: “Debussy, out of 113 scales which I have compiled, only employs the whole tone scale, and that only in the melody.” Bernhard Ziehn shows Busoni the second, the symmetrical inversion of harmonic order. The third has voices independent of each other, in polyphonic compositions. Busoni relates, “I have, as an experiment, constructed a five-part fugue in which every voice is in a different key so that the harmony flows in quite new chord successions.” He describes the fourth road as anarchy: “An arbitrary placing of intervals, next and over one another, according to mood and taste. Arnold Schoenberg is trying it; but already he is beginning to turn round in a circle.” Busoni writes, “The fifth will be the birth of a new key system, which will include all the four afore-mentioned ways.”

In 1919, Busoni writes, “Many experiments have been made in this young century; now, from all our achievements - older and newer - it is time to form something durable again. This is my goal. Accomplished creation and the joy of making music must come into their own once more.” That he could not, and will not, be classified, is a consequence of his philosophy of art: anti-categorical and unconstrained. This holds true today. Busoni consumes teachings of all artistic disciplines. His biographer and disciple, Hugo Leichtentritt, chronicles the composer’s process in Music History and Ideas, 1938: “He tried out all the new tendencies, reducing them to an extract which gave a strange flavor to the fundamental substance of his natural and individual manner of expression without seriously affecting it. By this long process of distillation he finally arrived at a highly concentrated essence of the really valuable constituents. This constant refining, this spirituality and concentration, this absence of anything inessential and commonplace, this simple presentation of extremely difficult and complicated problems gives his style a certain severity and exclusiveness. Popular traits are almost entirely absent, save in the occasional allusion to some gay Italian tune.”

From his essay, Simplicity of Music in the Future, 1922, Busoni describes the numerous portraits of Edgar Allen Poe in his treasured editions. They are detailed and carefully executed. “But a picture of Poe by Manet, etched with a few strokes, sums up all the other pictures and is exhaustive. Should not music also try to express only what is most important with a few notes, set down in a masterly fashion?” Pointedly, he asks, “Does my Brautwahl, with its full score of seven hundred pages achieve more than Figaro with its six accompanying wind instruments? It seems to me that the refinement of economy is the next aim after the refinement of prodigality has been learnt.”

Although Busoni’s mature style period clearly portrays his psychology, it is the manifestation of an artist’s journey, rather than the emotional investigations of expressionism. He disdains sensuality, sentimentality, and rejects “brooding and melancholy and subjectivity.” His art will not, however, be unaffected by life. The war changes him. At its conclusion, Busoni writes to Isidor Philipp, “For four years, I have lived in a state of inward hostility towards this remote world, from which I have shut myself off. While judging it to have become uncivilized, I have perhaps become uncivilized myself. On the other hand I think my art has become more subtle, and that it expresses all that remains ‘good’ within me.”

While aiming for artistic perfection, Busoni acknowledges the limitations of any singular life span, and a human’s finite capacity for discovery. He becomes severely critical and often rewrites or destroys compositions. He has long understood his philosophical searchings will culminate in the realization of a great masterwork, “for which all previous achievements are intended.” The consummation of this quest is Doktor Faust, a quasi autobiographical-allegorical theater piece, with his own libretto. Throughout the opera’s slow and meticulous development, many Faust ‘studies’ appear, and are published. These fully independent compositions contain potent Faust material, and in some cases, their conception and integration into the opera’s score is simultaneous. The composer, able to determine their quintessential value over time, explains, “The studies were absorbed motivically and stylistically into the score, where they fulfilled their preparatory nature in terms of stimulation, scale and atmosphere.”

Suffering from chronic inflammation of the heart and kidneys, Busoni insists to look forward. His biographer, Edward J. Dent, affirms, despair was alien to this composer’s personality, and any habitual melancholy irritated him. Faust’s words, “Only he is happy who looks to the future,” becomes one of Busoni’s favorite refrains in later years. Although bedridden in his final months, he anticipates recovery and dreams of new beginnings. He fights bitterness and resignation. Busoni, the boundless explorer, lives his creative philosophy through to his final days, even though his body can no longer serve as vessel for the search.

On his birthday, 1 April, 1924, Busoni sketches a plan for the missing scene of Doktor Faust. He is too ill to implement the ideas. In early May, Busoni writes to his friend Jella Oppenheimer, “Temporarily the remainder of the work is ‘within the soul of its creator’ — assuming that he still possesses a soul.” Unfinished, Doktor Faust personifies Busoni’s ‘unattainable Ideal of Beauty’. On July 8th, a few weeks before his death, Busoni dictates his revelatory essay, The Essence of Music: A Paving of the Way to an Understanding of the Everlasting Calendar. In this poetic and lucid discussion, Busoni defines the ‘Ideal’ of his Helena as ‘the essence of music’. With his ever-optimistic personality, the influential mentor advises artists, and elaborates on the privilege of a reverential, expansive quest. He begins, “I have gradually been forced to the opinion that our conception of the essence of music is still fragmentary and dim; that only very few are able to perceive it and fewer still to grasp it, and that they are quite unable to define it.” In the final paragraphs of this beautiful essay, Busoni writes, “At times, and in rare cases, a mortal is by listening made aware of something immortal in the essence of music that melts in the hands as one tries to grasp it, is frozen as soon as one wishes to transplant it to the earth, is extinguished as soon as it is drawn through the darkness of our mentality. Yet enough still remains recognizable of its heavenly origin, and of all that is high, noble and translucent in what surrounds us and we are able to discern; it appears to us as the highest, noblest, and most translucent.”

Man Ray’s late photographic portrait of Busoni, Paris 1923, shows the composer peering into his eternal and infinite dream world. He has already entered his Sounding Universe, free of worldly burdens, a soaring galaxy of resonate harmony and perpetual exploration. The ‘Realm of Music’ he created for all, is home-like. At last, Busoni is one with his spiritual journey.

When Faust is confronted with Helena’s image, he shrinks away, exclaiming, “Man is not able to attain perfection. Then let him strive according to his measure and strew good around him, as he has received it.” Faust renounces all hope of the ‘Ideal’, and at death, he bequeaths his soul to serve the future of humanity, thereby defeating the devil, and vanquishing the pretext of ‘Good and Evil’. Faust contemplates: “I, wise fool, hesitator and waster, have accomplished nothing; all must be begun afresh; I feel as if I were drawing near to childhood again. I look far out into the distance; there lie young fields, uncultivated hills that swell and call to new ascent. Life smiles with promise.”

Busoni writes to Philipp Jarnach, July 1923: “The greatest continue to develop until their death, and leave behind unfulfilled expectations.”

The poet speaks to the onlooker:

Still exhausted all the symbols wait
That in this work are hidden and conceal’d;
Their germs a later school shall procreate
Whose fruits to those unborn shall be reveal’d.
Let each take what he finds appropriate;
The seed is sown others may reap the field.
So, rising on the shoulder of the past,
The soul of man shall reach his heaven at last.

Doktor Faust, Ferruccio Busoni

“On the shoulders of the past, the future will rise.” - Ferruccio Busoni
[1 April, 1866 - 27 July, 1924]

Red Indian Diary: Book One. 1915

Four studies on motifs of the North-American Indians.

In 1910, Busoni is engaged on one of his lengthy concert tours of America. While in New York, he attends a performance of his Turandot Suite, conducted by Mahler, and meets his former student, Natalie Curtis. Natalie Curtis, a gifted concert pianist, studied harmony with Busoni in 1891. Her career turns to ethnomusicology after she becomes acquainted with the Hopi people. Her inspiration leads her to collect and catalog various songs and legends of the Indigenous Peoples. At this time, their music is restricted, forbidden by federal bans, and outlawed in government schools. Her recordings are made on the reservations in secret, the Indigenous Peoples are afraid their singing will cause difficulties with authorities. Natalie Curtis presents Busoni with her recently published, The Indians’ Book, understanding that the composer has a special relationship with mysticism and otherworldly beauty. Busoni writes, “Natalie Curtis...has devoted the whole of this year to the study of Red Indian songs and has brought a beautiful book out. She gave it to me ‘In remembrance of the first performance of Turandot in New York’...The Red Indians are the only cultured people who will have ‘nothing to do with money’, and who dress the most everyday things in beautiful words.”

Natalie Curtis’s efforts encourage Theodore Roosevelt to legalize and sanction the music. She includes a letter from President Roosevelt in the preface to her book, dated May 1906, “These songs cast a wholly new light — on the depth and dignity of Indian thought, the simple beauty and strange charm — the charm of a vanished elder world — of Indian poetry.” In the introduction to The Indians’ Book, Natalie Curtis writes, “In the Hebrew ‘Genesis’ the creating word is spoken – ‘And God said, Let there be Light’. In nearly every Indian myth the creator sings things into life.”

Busoni is haunted by the Indigenous Peoples’ melodies, and struggles to convey their message. He relates that his efforts are, “not very fruitful or productive.” He writes to the song-maiden, the Indigenous Peoples’ spirit of inspiration, and seeks help selecting the motives best suited for expansion into viable forms. At the same time, he searches for the themes that might best convey their spiritual essence. From April 1913, through February 1914, he composes the Indian Fantasy op. 44, for piano and orchestra, and dedicates the composition to Natalie Curtis. The American premiere has Busoni as soloist, with Leopold Stokowski conducting the Philadelphia Orchestra, on 19 February, 1915.

Natalie Curtis describes the morning’s rehearsal at The Academy of Music in Philadelphia: “Madame Busoni on one side of me, and on the other Percy Grainger…Stokowski lifted his baton…With the first bars of the orchestral introduction…the walls melted away, and I was in the West, filled again with that awing sense of vastness, of solitude, of immensity. The spirit of the real America (a spirit of primeval, latent power), Busoni had felt while travelling across the continent, and had tried to reproduce.” Curtis writes, “[The Indian Fantasy is] by far the most important effort ever yet made in any use of our native music material.” Curtis continues, “Indian music compels its own treatment, remaining unalterably Indian, standing out with its own sharp rhythmic and melodic outline on the background of the composer’s thought, like sculptured bas-relief.” Natalie Curtis relates: “Before [Busoni] put pen to paper he said that he would not overlay the Indian themes with any feeling of European culture nor ‘develop’ them according to the usual standards of composition.”

Busoni continues to refine and sift through the music. He writes from Berlin, 22 July, 1913: “The Red Indians are passing by, and thoughts begin to move. To-day, I began putting down some thoughts about melody again.” In this essay, Busoni defines these motives as perfect examples of ‘Absolute Melody’: “A row of repeated ascending and descending intervals, which are organized and move rhythmically. It contains in itself a latent harmony, reflects a mood of feeling. It can exist without depending on words for expression and without accompanying voices. When performed, the choice of pitch or of instrument makes no alteration to the nature of its being. Melody, independent at first, joined the accompanying harmony subsequently, and later melted into inseparable unity with it. Recently, it has been the aim of polyphonic music…to free itself from this unity. In contradiction to points of view which are deeply rooted, it must be maintained here that melody has expanded continuously, that it has grown in line and capacity for expression and that in the end it must succeed in becoming the most powerful thing in composition.”

Busoni identifies with the Indigenous Peoples’ spirituality, and successfully retains the melodies simple and organic qualities. In June through August 1915, he composes Red Indian Diary: Book One. Four studies on motifs of the North-American Indians. He dedicates the volume to Helen Luise Birch. For the first, third, and fourth movements, Busoni extracts music directly from his Indian Fantasy for piano and orchestra. The second movement is newly composed for his Red Indian Diary.

The four piano pieces are solemn, ceremonial and melancholic. In a contemplative atmosphere, the first study opens with semi-tones, thirds, and languid slurs. Chromatic and modal scale motifs bridge sections, the writing is clear and sparse. The second study takes the form of an intense toccata, while maintaining a mostly sotto voce dynamic range. This material is from a traditional Cheyenne dance, depicting the victorious return of warriors. The entire piece is constructed of thirds and semi-tones. The third piece, Blue Bird, is a popular song of the Indigenous Peoples, a timeless hymn, reminiscent of African American spirituals. The music expresses serene settings, gentle breezes, and a yearning for ‘Homeland’. The fourth study is an overtly patriotic anthem, ‘The Indigenous Peoples’ National Anthem’, and honors the qualities of bravery and valor.

The four movements are untitled, however the melodic origins can be traced to several Indigenous Nations:

1. He-Hea Katzina Song. Hopi
2. Song of Victory. Cheyenne
3. Blue Bird Song. Pima
   Corn-Grinding Song. Lagunas
4. Passamquoddy Dance Song. Wabanakis 
   He-Hea Katzina Song. Hopi

Katzina is a Hopi term for a spirit that takes prayers from people to the gods.

Busoni conceptualizes the possibilities of a music which will transcend all boundaries; ethnic, nationalistic, cultural and religious. From his essay, The Essence and Oneness of Music, 1921, Busoni writes: “The time has come to recognise the whole phenomenon of music as a ‘oneness’ and no longer to split it up according to its purpose, form and sound-medium.” The Red Indian Diary exemplifies his philosophy, the ‘Oneness of music’. Busoni believes music, born of a free and beautiful voice, elevates humanity, and encourages balance and goodness.

Elegies

Nach der Wendung

With the publication of Outline of a New Aesthetic of Music (1907), Busoni’s role as a leader of Germany’s avant-garde is undisputed. That same year, he completes a set of six piano pieces, referring to them as Nach der Wendung (After the Turning). This set is published in 1908, titled Elegies, 6 new piano pieces. In 1909, he adds a seventh, and renames the collection, Elegies, 7 new piano pieces, one of his finest and most revealing compositions. The pivotal nature of these pieces, in terms of his growth as a composer, does not escape him when he writes: “My entire personal vision I put down at last and for the first time in the Elegies.” The work as a whole is dedicated to the future, and each Elegy is inscribed to an accomplished young pianist; Gottfried Galston, Egon Petri, Gregor Beklemmischeff, Michael von Zadora, O’Neil Philipps, Leo Kestengberg, and Johan Wijsman. Busoni gives the first performance at the Beethovensaal, Berlin, 12 March, 1908.

The expressions of Angst und Glauben, written on the manuscript of the third Elegy, reveal the composer’s emotional state. Busoni hopes and longs for the future, and at the same time, acknowledges his fear and doubt at the prospect of humankind’s evolution.

In these works of humble proportion, Busoni emphasizes emotional state and expression over form. Color, light, the fantastical and macabre, the sensory and holy, are all present. He writes, “I have expressed the very essence of myself in the Elegies. I am in fact particularly proud of the form and clarity.” Later he adds, “The Elegies signify a milestone in my development. Almost a transformation. Hence the title, ‘nach der Wendung’. And this is most completely apparent in nos. 1, 3 and 6. – of these I am fondest of the third.”

Busoni defines his new style by transforming the language of several earlier pieces. He uses his original music solely as a sketch, or basic outline. The old and the new are both present, the new building on the older material. The Elegies demonstrate a future path for music, and they are the composer’s self-realization of growth.

The first Elegy, Nach der Wendung. Recueillement (After the Turning. Resolution), is spun from a single motive; the C major triad is outlined C–E–G and the triton (F#) follows. Busoni begins with basic harmonic language, the major chord, and moves to the tri-tone, the point furthest from certainty. This movement forward, away from any discernible center, and the flow of a dream-like prayer, presents the listener with a questioning benediction for the remaining six pieces. Fluid use of the pedals, a trademark of Busoni’s mature style, colors the welding continuity of shifting harmonic centers, creating the half-veiled and subdued world of the first Elegy. The chromatic takes precedence over the diatonic, and further obscures tonality. Dent describes the first Elegy: “It is intended to express the pause for meditation which followed on the change of musical outlook which Busoni had experienced in these recent years.”

The second Elegy, All’ Italia! In modo napolitano (To Italy! In Neapolitan style), is characterized by Lisztian bravura and the roots of Busoni’s Italian heritage. Several Italian folk songs weave through this evocative and dramatic barcarole. The Elegy’s title, All’ Italia!, is adapted from All’ Italiana, the fourth movement of the composer’s monumental Concerto for Piano (1904), a work Busoni describes as, “the results of my first period of manhood.” Busoni incorporates musical material from several movements of the Concerto. He is not transcribing or arranging, rather, he reworks and transforms the earlier material into completely new tableaux.

The Elegy begins ‘in modo napolitano’, with the dark and brooding movement of the water, evoking an irretrievable past. This thematic material is from the second movement of the Concerto. The dissonance of major minor bi-tonal arpeggios saturates the texture with a rich luminosity, and creates a lambent glowing quality. Exotic scales accompany the Neapolitan melody. The tarantella from the fourth movement of the Concerto is reworked for the bravura, ‘three-hand’, three-stave, middle section. In the Concerto, this theme is harmonized in a straightforward manner. In the Elegy, Busoni subjects the material to a whirl of triads, producing ever shifting key centers. The final section draws a melody from the third movement of the Concerto; the long lyric lines are now muffled and subdued.

The third Elegy, ‘Meine Seele bangt und hofft zu Dir…’ Choralvorspeil (‘My Soul fears and hopes for you…’), is the climax of the seven pieces. The tribute to Bach and Liszt is apparent. Busoni uses the Lutheran chorale, ‘Allein Gott in der Höh sei Ehr’, to begin this highly impassioned essay on fear, belief, hope and longing. The markings, ängstlich(fearful), implorando, höchster Angst (in greatest fear), describe the artistic and spiritual growth Busoni hopes for himself, and humanity. The struggle creates a penetrating tension and drama. In a revelatory bi-tonal section, Busoni emphasizes the tri-tone as an E flat pedal supports an A major chorale. An agitatissimo climax is reached when tides of Lisztian broken octaves rise in the base, surging under an adamant fragment of the chorale. Dissipating and calmer, the chorale transforms as a barcarole, and bleeds into a poignant cantando. The ending is transcendental; the final moments leave a dark and unanswered question. With a few exceptions, this Elegy closely follows the first ten pages of Busoni’s 1910 version of his magnificent Fantasia Contrapuntistica.

The fourth Elegy, Turandot’s Frauengemach. Intermezzo (The boudoir of Turandot.), is a brilliant virtuoso piece, derived from Busoni’s Turandot music. The Turandot Suite is written before the Elegy, in 1905, and the opera Turandot, ‘a Chinese Fable’, appears later, in 1917. Dancing staccato passages imitate the lute players, and the ambiguities of key give way to stunning variations on Greensleeves. This melody appears in both the suite and the opera. In the Elegy, the tempo quickens and the tune is more prominent. Phrases end in questions, as riddles are posed. Busoni never fully confirms the keys of G major or E minor throughout, and the final E major chord comes as a marvelous surprise.

Accounts affirm Busoni sees the famous William Ballet manuscript when he visits Trinity College in 1903. It is also possible, while in Dublin, he is told the song has some associations with public executions, and he refers to Turandot as “The lady with the green sleeves” in his diary. Busoni’s use is also symbolic: Green is the color of hope, growth and renewal.

The fifth Elegy, Die Nächtlichen. Walzer (The Nightly.), is a fantasy improvisation on Nächtlicher Walzer, from Busoni’s Turandot Suite. Again, the original music is re-visioned. The Suite has a fortissimo dynamic and is marked Düster, kraftvoll und bewegt, whereas the Elegy is marked Rapido, fuggevole e velato, and the dynamic marking never increase above piano. Busoni exploits many of his 113 modes: He weaves invisible webs from one to the other, creating a phantasmagorical shimmer of apparitions and ambiguity, in this ghostly waltz. The fleeting images of night creatures are light, haunting and fragile.

The sixth Elegy, Erscheinung. Notturno (The Vision.), is written as a study for Busoni’s opera Die Brautwahl. The music is from a scene in Act 1, part 1 and accompanies a vision of the heroine Albertine. The opera is based on a story by E. T. A. Hoffmann, and the subject matter includes alchemists, mysticism, the occult, and the forces of good and evil. With restrained dynamics, the tender flame of passion and the sinister glow of alchemy are accompanied by a determined pulse, the beat of a heart, three times. Ornamental figures adorning the melody are in constant chromatic flux, and shower the texture with unearthly atmosphere. The final pages of this encapsulated opera fantasy give way to a rich chorale, graced by the phosphorescent trace of ascending pianissimo right-hand scales. The heartbeat returns, restless, to end the work, followed by a brief restatement of the theme from the first Elegy, Nach der Wendung, now marked visionario.

Busoni writes to Egon Petri, “I am particularly proud of the form and clarity, for instance, the structure and proportions of the ‘Erscheinung’ seem exemplary.” He explains his creative process in a letter to Robert Freund, 1908, “The ‘Erscheinung’ is the condensed paraphrase of a scene from ‘Die Brautwahl’, the ‘vision at the town-hall window’. From the point where you found it pleasing it follows the text of the opera almost exactly. You see that an individual style is superimposed upon Verdi and Mozart…who will prove to be my models in this work.”

Berceuse (Lullaby) is composed in June 1909, and added to the set as the seventh Elegy. Leo Kestenberg gives the first performance at the Choralionsaal, Berlin, in March 1910. The Berceuse is, in many ways, a prophetic composition. The listener hears a child-like lullaby singing over a gently oscillating base, a calm dream-like tide, with only slight variations of timbre and dynamic range. In one startling a-tonal passage, marked sempre i due Pedali tenuti, improvisatory broken chords disturb the surface, the tri-tone is prominent, the third is obscured. Busoni’s stream-of-conscious style suspends regular concepts of time and space. The portal frees his resonant dream: “On first hearing… my friends were greatly startled. I, however, considered it one of my most successful piano pieces.”

In October 1909, Busoni reinvents the Berceuse into the orchestral masterpiece, Berceuse élégiaque, subtitled, The man’s cradle-song at his mother’s bier. In Memoriam Anna Busoni, neé Weiss, 3 Oct. MCMIX. The composition is longer than the Elegy, and Busoni is able to achieve colors and atmospheres with a chamber orchestra that are not possible on the piano. He explains its genesis: “My spirits returned to the strange mood of the Berceuse; I took up the composition again, penetrated deeper into it and conceived the extended orchestral arrangement of the little work…I was compelled to write the score, frequently working until deep in the night, in order to free my mind of it.” Two years after the Berceuse élégiaque is completed, Busoni observes, “With this piece…I succeeded for the first time in hitting upon my own sound idiom and in dissolving the form into the feeling.”

Chaconne from Partita in D minor for solo violin

Johann Sebastian Bach

Transcribed for piano by Ferruccio Busoni

Busoni adds his transcription of the Chaconne to the organ transcription series. Bach’s violin work becomes a double transcription, imagined on the organ, and finally transcribed for the piano. Busoni writes, “[I] treated the tonal effects from the standpoint of the organ-tone.”

He addresses the criticism:

“This procedure, which has been variously attacked, was justified, firstly by the breadth of conception, which is not fully displayed by the violin; and, secondly, by the example set by Bach himself in the transcription for organ of his own violin-fugue in G minor. On this head Griepenkerl remarks: ‘It is important to observe, that the Fugue by J. S. Bach was, in all probability, originally written for violin. In this form it is found among the well-known six sonatas for solo violin, and in the key of G minor; whereas it had to be transposed for organ to D minor, for the sake of effect and of ease in execution...and in the Fugue all passages peculiar to violin technique have been altered to suit the organ-keyboard; aside form these deviations, however, the resemblance is extremely great’.”

The Chaconne is a tour de force, wonderfully effective on the piano, while remaining faithful to the spirit of the original work. In this personal recasting, Busoni adds textual alterations, voices, chords, as well as phrasing indications to Bach’s masterpiece. He expands the range of color and sonority, creating profoundly inspired settings. The orchestral textures have a spatial majesty, and call to mind brass choirs and the unlimited resources of magnificent organs. Busoni performed the Chaconne in Boston in 1893, although Edward J. Dent lists 1897 as the date of first publication. The Chaconne is found in Volume 3 of the Bach-Busoni editions.

Bach’s solo Violin Sonatas and Partitas date from the Cöthen epoch, the earliest autograph is thought to be from 1720. A chaconne is an old dance form, characterized by 3/4 rhythm, and a recurring theme, usually 8 bars in length. Albert Schweitzer describes Bach’s Chaconne: “Out of a single theme Bach conjures up a whole world. We seem to hear sorrow contending with pain, till at last they blend in a mood of profound resignation.” He writes, “[The Violin Sonatas and Partitas] depict soul-states and inner experiences, but with force in place of passions.”

© 2004, 2015 by Jeni Slotchiver

“My style takes everyone aback: too young for the old, insufficiently mindless for the young, it constitutes a clear-cut chapter in the disorder of our times. −Inasmuch, it will hold its own better with subsequently fluctuating later generations.”
Ferruccio Busoni 1922

Ferruccio Busoni is born on 1 April, 1866, in Empoli, Italy, and only a few years later, his prodigious talent earns him the reputation of a wonder child. He shows equal natural gifts as instrumentalist and composer. He grows to adulthood and becomes the most acclaimed virtuoso pianist of his time. When George Bernard Shaw suggests Busoni compose under an assumed name, the advice is ironic prophecy. As with Franz Liszt, Busoni’s interpretive and performing genius overshadows his life as a composer. In contradiction to his popular legacy, from the time he is a child, Busoni never doubts that composition is his truest artistic mission.

Sprawling pages of testimonials describe a Busoni piano recital as a spiritual catharsis. He mesmerizes his audiences. The lush Italian cantabile interpretations of German Baroque and Classic repertory defy accepted practices. His color palette hypnotizes, yet his overwhelming sense of architecture is inarguable. Often dissatisfied with his ability, he works to refine the very nature of his communicative skills, changing constantly. Busoni frequently says that artists must be occupied with new problems and ideas in order to grow. He discards the wisdom of countless experiences as his intellect roots out the weaknesses of every composer. The staggering breadth of his repertory testifies to an irrepressible appetite.

Busoni’s innovative technical studies provide many idiosyncratic style characteristics within his compositions. Striking harmonic passages are often the result of pianistic experiments utilizing specific keyboard hand positions. As an instrumentalist, the piano aids his need for a deeply individual musical voice, and fortifies his search for artistic perfection. The cosmopolitanism forced on a world-renowned artist influences his theoretical writings; he encounters shocking provincialism and comes to see borders of countries as detrimental. Discouraged by the limitations of nationalism, Busoni seeks to encourage and create a ‘Universal’ language of music.

The life of a virtuoso robs the composer of concentrated time. His two careers are in constant opposition. Even as Busoni surmounts the heights of pianism, he feels the loss of time and fears the waste of his best years. In 1904, Busoni describes Manchester, England as, “a refinely contrived department of Dante’s Inferno, where traveling Virtuosi, who threw away the best part of life because they were covetous for fame and money, grind their teeth.” And he writes to his wife Gerda, from Boston, in 1911, “I am like one who is obliged to lie with a broken leg: but who has nothing else wrong with him, and waits until he can walk and move about again. I say once more, I must not throw away my good years. The position in my development as a composer would already be quite different if it had not been for the long interruptions.”

‘The attainment of mastery’, and ‘the quest for fulfillment’, ruin and redemption, are recurring themes, played out in his opera Doktor Faust, and pointedly so, considering he will not live to finish this work, born of the need to represent his innermost artistic philosophy. Busoni writes to Egon Petri in 1912: “If I could only rid myself of this feeling of shame at playing in public! I think my playing has become different again. I observed myself and collected (my own) criticism. Something is still wanting...Life becomes shorter and shorter - the goal even farther off; what an inhuman task!” Ten years afterwards, in 1922, Busoni laments, “The higher my reputation rises as a pianist (and it seems still to be on the increase), the more unjust is the opinion of me as a composer. By trying to help myself, I am working against my own interests.”

Liszt’s pupils compare Busoni to their venerable master. Anton Rubinstein was more the model for Busoni the pianist, however, Liszt serves as model for Busoni’s piano writing. As artist and man, Liszt’s psyche encompasses the religiously divine and profane. Busoni’s duality also embodies the divine, as in a magnificent transcendence. But his profane is not the romantic Satan of Liszt’s era. His evil is a condensing of the sinister forces that live in the soul of humankind, an uneasiness that causes nightmares, the turbulence beneath a deceptively smooth surface. Musically, these subtle forces will shadow many lighter compositions.

With the monumental Piano Concerto of 1904, signaling both the height and end of his Romantic period, Busoni moves from the vanishing world of Yesteryear, where he performs for Brahms and Tchaikovsky. His mounting attraction to revolutionaries, including Schoenberg and Bartók, sparks a growing need for a radical transformation, a surprising metamorphosis when considering the careers of some of his contemporaries. Tremendous capacities for regeneration and growth define Busoni’s art and can be traced to his childhood. He remains forward looking, a survivalist and an affirmer of life. As he grows, the futuristic aspects of his personality nourish his mystical affinity and direct this 20th century visionary. In 1912, from his essay Self-Criticism, he writes, “There is no new and old. Only the known and not yet known. Of these, it seems to me that the known still forms by far the smaller part.”

Busoni’s brilliant and insightful essays illuminate his far-reaching legacy as theorist and philosopher. From his miraculous beginnings, to the very end of life, he labors, defining and affirming his aesthetics for the future of music, hoping to direct younger generations of composers. Busoni’s groundbreaking publication, Outline of a New Aesthetic of Music, 1907, proclaims his vision. Calling for freedom from ‘shackles of law-givers’, he challenges traditional notation, harmony and key structures, so that the young history of music will continue to grow. He is always quick to counter, “An intentional avoidance of the laws cannot masquerade as creativity.” In his teachings, he strenuously advocates experimentation, shuns the commercial exploitation of compositional devices, and insists all innovations synthesize with integrity. He abhors the constraints of organized schools and movements, believing they replace one iron rule with another. He would never waiver from this position. In 1919, Busoni writes from Zurich, “Each person should try his best on his own behalf, without relying on groups or communities; then everything would be more genuine and honest.”

Arnold Schoenberg hopes for some commendation when he sends Busoni his Op.11 Piano Pieces in 1909. Busoni responds: “The ‘asceticism’…of the piano writing seems to me a pointless avoidance of foregone achievements. You are proposing a new value in place of an earlier one, instead of adding the new one to the old. You will become different and not richer.” The tonality does not shock Busoni, this he prophesied. The compressed form and density of information, in his view, does not provide a listener adequate space and time to digest the music. He disagrees with the un-pianistic writing because it limits a full projection of melodic and harmonic elements. In 1921, he writes, “The so-called ‘new ways’ are today no longer new. The epoch of experiments and of the overrating of means of expression at the expense of content and artistic durability is rapidly drawing to a close.” History is never a barrier for Busoni; his philosophy of art does not allow for the destruction of masterful accomplishments. He is convinced that creation does not demand a complete break with the past. In his late essay, published posthumously, What is Happening at the Present Time, he writes, “The newcomers deceive themselves, too, in thinking they can break, or have broken with their predecessors. This is not the case, in spite of their unshakable conviction, for every child has a mother to whom it is still attached...even after birth.” Busoni understands masterpieces as creatively potent, and maintains that future generations should “rise on the shoulders of the past.”

Busoni believes music is an art still in infancy, and explains, in his Outline of a New Aesthetic of Music, that the binding rules of lawmakers are not appropriate for a child. Perhaps they work for an adult. He dares artists to create their own rules, and never follow established precepts. He encourages young progressionists to command all laws and experience them first hand, before any renunciation. Busoni further clarifies this philosophy in his concept, ‘Young Classicism’. He writes from Zurich, January 1920: “By ‘Young Classicism’ I mean the mastery, the sifting and the turning to account of all the gains of previous experiments and their inclusion in strong and beautiful forms. This art will be old and new at the same time at first. We are steering in that direction.”

Busoni envisions an end to categories: Past and Future, God and the Devil, Church and Chamber music. His ‘Oneness’ is an attempt to unify art by forging a balance with nature. In Busoni’s important compositions, past and future co-exist and tie to his concept, the ‘omnipresence of Time’. He understands time as a part of nature, not linear but spherical: “I have not found out why we humans think of time as a line going from backwards, forwards, whilst it must be in all directions like everything else in the system of the world.” He identifies with Hoffmann’s Serapionsbrüder; the hermit Serapion eclipses time and place. Busoni channels this supernatural time traveler and blurs the lines between reality and dream, most notably in Die Brautwahl and Doktor Faust. Busoni sees all categories as impediments, they constrict composers’ abilities to notate authentic inspiration, and at the conclusion of Outline of a New Aesthetic of Music, he features a quote from Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil: “I could imagine a music whose rarest magic should consist in its complete divorce from Good and Evil - only that its surface might be ruffled, as it were, by a longing as of a sailor for home.” Busoni embraces ancient melodies as he searches for this pure music. “Their intensity of feeling,” and “absolute” beauty, better exemplify his philosophy of ‘Universal Music’. He struggles to clarify this celestial music, a music which will convey the feeling state of the ‘essence of music’.

For Busoni, masterworks are fragments of divine music, gleaned from an infinite sounding universe, his mythic ‘Realm of Music’. A composer might reap a part of this ageless ‘sounding organ’ through brief enlightenment, at times of heightened perception. However, strict laws regarding key structures, notations, and harmony obscure the path: “My final conclusion…is this: Every notation is, in itself, the transcription of an abstract idea.” In his view, music is alive in a composer’s mind, and prior to the act of notation, a composition “exists whole and intact before it has sounded and after the sound is finished. It is, at the same time, in and outside of Time.” Busoni understands the imperfect mechanics of notation as a further transcription: “Notation, the writing out of compositions…an ingenious expedient for catching an inspiration, with the purpose of exploiting it later. But notation is to improvisation as the portrait is to the living model. It is for the interpreter to resolve the rigidity of the signs into the primitive emotion.” Busoni argues that notation is not, nor could ever be, the music itself, and therefore one correct interpretation is impossible. He cites many instances where composer-performers contradict their own scores. Busoni regards the attitude of performers as yet another transcription. Within his theory, he considers a collaborative partnership of composer, transcriber, and instrumentalist. Countering disfavor with the art of transcription, Busoni mentions the respected variation-form, and points out that a ‘borrowed theme’ produces whole series of arrangements.

A youthful Busoni adores analyzing thematic origins. As this precocious pastime develops it becomes an intrinsic thread in the composer’s theories and publications. He conceptualizes an ‘Eternal Calendar’ of music, and in essays, lists numerous examples of melodies transcending time, form, occasion, country, and ethnicity. He references composers incorporating historically extant music for glaringly divergent purposes. While investigating thematic material found in Liszt’s Spanish Rhapsody, Busoni reveals compositions by Mozart, Gluck, Corelli, Glinka, and Mahler, as well as his own.

Busoni’s artistic imperative is methodical and deliberate: ‘The creation of sublime music’. The unification of a spiritual and cognitive intensity lies at the core of each mature composition. Although he believes the essence of a masterwork is intuitively divine, he refutes endeavors that do not include conscious and rigorous scrutiny. At the same time, he takes for granted that art must be beautiful. Despite a phenomenal intellect, a massive accumulation of knowledge, and a lifelong mastery of technique, Busoni’s approach remains intuitive. His close friend, the Dutch composer Bernard Van Dieren, explains that although much is written of Busoni’s intellect, austerity and serenity, the composer is never so forbidding as his commentators make out. In recorded conversations with Van Dieren, Busoni dismisses his many “intellectual flatterers” as proof of achievement: “All we do with those brains we are so proud of means little compared to the feeling which at once recognizes the note of truth in a work...But this mysterious, sudden surrender of a listener who is guided by emotion alone is our greatest reward. We have touched the heart and senses of those whose judgement we most cherish. It means that I have succeeded...only this finally matters.” Busoni adds, “Not as if intellectual grasp comprises all the mysteries of sentiment. I believe on the contrary that ‘the fullest understanding’ born from the heart reveals all the mystery of technical structure, all the intricacies of organic build...the emotion of a moment does not suffice.”

Busoni has his own ‘timetable of systematic progress’. His compositions and writings display an ever-widening and cohesive search for his ‘Ideal’. His intentions are neither reactionary nor contradictory, and yet there are times when firmer styles arise out of his need to steer a worthier course for future generations.

His search merges with an impassioned need to shape the future of music, an ‘Ideal’, which he hopes will guide other artists. He undertakes his tasks tirelessly. Bernard Van Dieren writes, “He had a horror of dissipation in any form. Every waking hour was devoted to work.” Busoni writes from Chicago, January 1911, “I have some few hours of Sunday repose. The traveling bag, which contains my work, lies at the station; there is no pianoforte in the room, so I am thrown on my own thoughts.” With these few hours, he pens a timely and concise essay, The New Harmony, for the periodical Signale, Berlin. The discussion concerns the current “searchings and gropings.” Busoni delineates five paths, and determines that, as of this time, no composer succeeds toward a viable end. He comments on the first, chord formation according to customary scales: “Debussy, out of 113 scales which I have compiled, only employs the whole tone scale, and that only in the melody.” Bernhard Ziehn shows Busoni the second, the symmetrical inversion of harmonic order. The third has voices independent of each other, in polyphonic compositions. Busoni relates, “I have, as an experiment, constructed a five-part fugue in which every voice is in a different key so that the harmony flows in quite new chord successions.” He describes the fourth road as anarchy: “An arbitrary placing of intervals, next and over one another, according to mood and taste. Arnold Schoenberg is trying it; but already he is beginning to turn round in a circle.” Busoni writes, “The fifth will be the birth of a new key system, which will include all the four afore-mentioned ways.”

In 1919, Busoni writes, “Many experiments have been made in this young century; now, from all our achievements - older and newer - it is time to form something durable again. This is my goal. Accomplished creation and the joy of making music must come into their own once more.” That he could not, and will not, be classified, is a consequence of his philosophy of art: anti-categorical and unconstrained. This holds true today. Busoni consumes teachings of all artistic disciplines. His biographer and disciple, Hugo Leichtentritt, chronicles the composer’s process in Music History and Ideas, 1938: “He tried out all the new tendencies, reducing them to an extract which gave a strange flavor to the fundamental substance of his natural and individual manner of expression without seriously affecting it. By this long process of distillation he finally arrived at a highly concentrated essence of the really valuable constituents. This constant refining, this spirituality and concentration, this absence of anything inessential and commonplace, this simple presentation of extremely difficult and complicated problems gives his style a certain severity and exclusiveness. Popular traits are almost entirely absent, save in the occasional allusion to some gay Italian tune.”

From his essay, Simplicity of Music in the Future, 1922, Busoni describes the numerous portraits of Edgar Allen Poe in his treasured editions. They are detailed and carefully executed. “But a picture of Poe by Manet, etched with a few strokes, sums up all the other pictures and is exhaustive. Should not music also try to express only what is most important with a few notes, set down in a masterly fashion?” Pointedly, he asks, “Does my Brautwahl, with its full score of seven hundred pages achieve more than Figaro with its six accompanying wind instruments? It seems to me that the refinement of economy is the next aim after the refinement of prodigality has been learnt.”

Although Busoni’s mature style period clearly portrays his psychology, it is the manifestation of an artist’s journey, rather than the emotional investigations of expressionism. He disdains sensuality, sentimentality, and rejects “brooding and melancholy and subjectivity.” His art will not, however, be unaffected by life. The war changes him. At its conclusion, Busoni writes to Isidor Philipp, “For four years, I have lived in a state of inward hostility towards this remote world, from which I have shut myself off. While judging it to have become uncivilized, I have perhaps become uncivilized myself. On the other hand I think my art has become more subtle, and that it expresses all that remains ‘good’ within me.”

While aiming for artistic perfection, Busoni acknowledges the limitations of any singular life span, and a human’s finite capacity for discovery. He becomes severely critical and often rewrites or destroys compositions. He has long understood his philosophical searchings will culminate in the realization of a great masterwork, “for which all previous achievements are intended.” The consummation of this quest is Doktor Faust, a quasi autobiographical-allegorical theater piece, with his own libretto. Throughout the opera’s slow and meticulous development, many Faust ‘studies’ appear, and are published. These fully independent compositions contain potent Faust material, and in some cases, their conception and integration into the opera’s score is simultaneous. The composer, able to determine their quintessential value over time, explains, “The studies were absorbed motivically and stylistically into the score, where they fulfilled their preparatory nature in terms of stimulation, scale and atmosphere.”

Suffering from chronic inflammation of the heart and kidneys, Busoni insists to look forward. His biographer, Edward J. Dent, affirms, despair was alien to this composer’s personality, and any habitual melancholy irritated him. Faust’s words, “Only he is happy who looks to the future,” becomes one of Busoni’s favorite refrains in later years. Although bedridden in his final months, he anticipates recovery and dreams of new beginnings. He fights bitterness and resignation. Busoni, the boundless explorer, lives his creative philosophy through to his final days, even though his body can no longer serve as vessel for the search.

On his birthday, 1 April, 1924, Busoni sketches a plan for the missing scene of Doktor Faust. He is too ill to implement the ideas. In early May, Busoni writes to his friend Jella Oppenheimer, “Temporarily the remainder of the work is ‘within the soul of its creator’ — assuming that he still possesses a soul.” Unfinished, Doktor Faust personifies Busoni’s ‘unattainable Ideal of Beauty’. On July 8th, a few weeks before his death, Busoni dictates his revelatory essay, The Essence of Music: A Paving of the Way to an Understanding of the Everlasting Calendar. In this poetic and lucid discussion, Busoni defines the ‘Ideal’ of his Helena as ‘the essence of music’. With his ever-optimistic personality, the influential mentor advises artists, and elaborates on the privilege of a reverential, expansive quest. He begins, “I have gradually been forced to the opinion that our conception of the essence of music is still fragmentary and dim; that only very few are able to perceive it and fewer still to grasp it, and that they are quite unable to define it.” In the final paragraphs of this beautiful essay, Busoni writes, “At times, and in rare cases, a mortal is by listening made aware of something immortal in the essence of music that melts in the hands as one tries to grasp it, is frozen as soon as one wishes to transplant it to the earth, is extinguished as soon as it is drawn through the darkness of our mentality. Yet enough still remains recognizable of its heavenly origin, and of all that is high, noble and translucent in what surrounds us and we are able to discern; it appears to us as the highest, noblest, and most translucent.”

Man Ray’s late photographic portrait of Busoni, Paris 1923, shows the composer peering into his eternal and infinite dream world. He has already entered his Sounding Universe, free of worldly burdens, a soaring galaxy of resonate harmony and perpetual exploration. The ‘Realm of Music’ he created for all, is home-like. At last, Busoni is one with his spiritual journey.

When Faust is confronted with Helena’s image, he shrinks away, exclaiming, “Man is not able to attain perfection. Then let him strive according to his measure and strew good around him, as he has received it.” Faust renounces all hope of the ‘Ideal’, and at death, he bequeaths his soul to serve the future of humanity, thereby defeating the devil, and vanquishing the pretext of ‘Good and Evil’. Faust contemplates: “I, wise fool, hesitator and waster, have accomplished nothing; all must be begun afresh; I feel as if I were drawing near to childhood again. I look far out into the distance; there lie young fields, uncultivated hills that swell and call to new ascent. Life smiles with promise.”

Busoni writes to Philipp Jarnach, July 1923: “The greatest continue to develop until their death, and leave behind unfulfilled expectations.”

The poet speaks to the onlooker:

Still exhausted all the symbols wait
That in this work are hidden and conceal’d;
Their germs a later school shall procreate
Whose fruits to those unborn shall be reveal’d.
Let each take what he finds appropriate;
The seed is sown others may reap the field.
So, rising on the shoulder of the past,
The soul of man shall reach his heaven at last.

Doktor Faust, Ferruccio Busoni

“On the shoulders of the past, the future will rise.” - Ferruccio Busoni
[1 April, 1866 - 27 July, 1924]

The Six Sonatinas:

An Artist’s Journey 1909-1920 – his language and his world

The Six Sonatinas, written between 1910 and 1921, are Busoni’s finest and most compelling collection of compositions. Although they are not programmatic in any aspect, the set tells a cohesive story of an artist’s journey. These are deeply personal, quasi-autobiographical compositions: Each Sonatina serves as chronicle, and marks a gathering and culmination of Busoni’s spiritual searchings and growth. Fluid and timeless, the Sonatinas also encompass Busoni’s temporal world. Beginnings and departures are marked. They are a diary of contentment, of aggressive experimentation, of the war and chaos, and peace and reconciliation. The Sonatinas are contemplative works, and although all end softly, they are unreservedly expressive, with abundant contrasts and highly developed instrumental writing. The Sonatinas are also premonitory; they foretell Busoni’s orchestral and operatic language as it expands, evolves, and crystalizes.

Busoni writes to his wife, Gerda, from Colorado Springs: “No year in my life has been so full up as this one which is just over: the richest in work, experiences and achievements - and I feel that I am still going upwards. Everything good, my Gerda, is with us.” The date is 1 April, 1910, and the composer marks his 44th birthday surveying a year of fertile and extravagant artistic discovery.

In December 1908, Busoni composes the sparkling miniature for piano, Nuit de Noël, as a musical offering to the New Year. He often acknowledges Christmases, New Years, and other important dates with musical works. Nuit de Noël is a masterpiece of color and style, an auspicious beginning for the New Year. After completing his concert tours in 1909, Busoni begins one of his most prolific and intense periods of artistic achievement. From June until October 1909, his efforts appear impossible:

Berceuse, for piano. June 1909

Fantasia nach Johann Sebastian Bach, for piano. June 1909

Preludietto, Fughetta ed Esercizio Book 1 An die Jugend, for piano. June 1909

Preludio, Fuga e Fuga figurata Book 2 An die Jugend, for piano. July 1909

Giga, Bolero e Variazione Book 3 An die Jugend, for piano. July 1909

Concertante transcription of Schoenberg’s Klavierstück, op. 11 no. 2. July 1909

Introduzione e Capriccio (Paganinesco) & Epilogo Book 4 An die Jugend, for piano. August 1909

Berceuse élégiaque, for orchestra. October 1909

The summer’s accomplishments also include several transcriptions of Bach’s Chorale Preludes and a musical comedy libretto titled Frau Potiphar. In addition, Busoni writes his explorative treatise, Attempt at an Organic Notation for the Pianoforte, and prepares new material for an anticipated second edition of his Outline of a New Aesthetic of Music. He begins orchestration on his important opera, Die Brautwahl and in July, completes Act 1 part 1.

The Berceuse élégiaque is inscribed in memory of Anna Busoni, and Fantasia nach Johann Sebastian Bach is composed for Ferdinando Busoni. Both parents died a few months apart in 1909, and these pieces are personal eulogies, musical gestures of bereavement and mourning. The remaining compositions are dedicated to the young generation of composers.

Sonatina, 1910, is born from An die Jungen. The composer, Bernard van Dieren, offers to clarify the misleading title, An die Jugend. He writes, “Busoni intended them as visionary sketches of aspects which, in his belief, music was to assume and dedicated them to Youth which would see the full growth. On Youth all his hopes centered.” Van Dieren adroitly concludes: “He did not resist the temptation to leave possibilities of confusion. It points to a didactic strain in his mind which avoided the danger of pedantry by an impish sense of humour, and by a romantic delight in erudite, poetic complexities.” Busoni explains the title to Schoenberg in 1909, “An die Jugend is intended to signify that the publications are conceived for the new generation,” and as with his Elegies, Busoni dedicates the pieces to promising young musicians: Josef Turczinski, Louis Theodor Gruenberg, Leo Sirota, Louis Closson, and Emile R. Blanchet. Busoni writes, in his forward to An die Jugend: “My love belongs to the young and shall always belong to them. Their impossible plans, their open-minded questions, disarming criticisms, defiant contradictions and fast-beating hearts...Very fine, but unfortunately optimistic. Youth is mostly conservative and its promise is often deceptive…the ‘best’ stand alone in every generation.” Busoni speaks as both the eternal optimist and the worldly cynic. The opposing forces of Faust, the seeker of knowledge, and Mephistopheles, the incessant doubter, become more pronounced as the composer matures. This duality forged opportunistic energy and balance, giving shape to his operas and mature works.

Busoni writes, “Composing only deserves the name when it busies itself ever with new problems.” He hopes a new generation will further explore and develop the musical aspects he foresees as significant in the development of 20th century music. Busoni is forever Janus-faced, and the gift for future generations is also homage and memorial to generations past. Early on, Ferdinando Busoni introduces his wonder child to Bach, and during adolescence, Busoni completes a 15-month course of study with his only formal composition teacher, Wilhelm Mayer-Rémy. This teacher fortifies an already marvelous gift of counterpoint, and instills the 14-year-old with a lifelong dedication to Mozart. As Busoni grows, he initiates himself into the world of Liszt, gaining complete mastery over his technique. Ultimately, this discovery of Liszt serves as a primary model for his piano writing. Although the title An die Jugend has lighthearted connotations, the mature composer is on consecrated ground, with Bach, Mozart, and Liszt standing guard.

The four books are a devotional collage of the composer’s love of form, and polyphonic explorations, or ‘free polyphony’. The volumes contain his original music, as well as transcribed material. Musical puzzle-games of dazzling complexity are interspersed with creative gestures, acknowledging the great masters. References to various compositions suggest musical and philosophical subtexts. ‘Free polyphony’ reigns as unrelated and related themes combine contrapuntally with breathtaking facility. Uncanny harmonies are an important side effect of these explorations.

The pieces in An die Jugend have a complex and cohesive relationship. For instance, Book 2 is an exercise based on the D major Prelude and Fugue from Bach’s Well-Tempered Klavier, Book 1. Busoni writes, in his edition of the 48 Preludes and Fugues: “The thematic relations between the Prelude and Fugue are closer than may generally be assumed; their common harmonic basis would render it possible to superimpose the one piece on the other.” The Fuga figurata, a contrapuntal combination of both the Prelude and Fugue, is proof of his concept. Although slight modifications occur, the work is not a technical prank, it is Busoni’s concrete demonstration in the underlying unity of Bach’s music. Another example is in Book 3, the ‘Mozart’ volume of An die Jugend. Busoni freely transcribes Mozart’s Kleine Gigue, K574. The historian Alfred Einstein relates that Mozart was in Leipzig in 1789 and inscribed this brilliant 3-voice gigue in the Court Organist Engel’s notebook as a creative homage to Bach. In the same volume, Busoni follows Gigue with Bolero, drawn from Act lll of Mozart’s Le Nozze di Figaro. Busoni transposes, transcribes, and re-visions Mozart’s fandango as a piano composition. The Variazione pushes Mozart’s peculiar rhythms and harmonies further afield in a celebration of ‘free tonality’.

In his essay, Value of the Transcription, 1910, Busoni discusses the borrowing, quoting and passing on of musical themes. He asks, “But where does the transcription begin?” Busoni examines two of Liszt’s compositions, Spanish Rhapsody, and Great Fantasy on Spanish Airs. They share the same themes, and Busoni poses the question, “Which of them is the transcription? The one which was written later? But is not the first one already an arrangement of a Spanish folk-song? That Spanish Fantasy commences with a theme which tallies with the dance motive in Mozart’s Figaro and Mozart took this from someone else too. It is not his, it is transcribed. Moreover the same theme appears again in Gluck’s ballet Don Juan.” After more investigations, he reveals, “We have been able to bring the motive material of both Spanish Fantasies by Liszt in conjunction with the names of Mozart, Gluck, Corelli, Glinka, Mahler. My humble name too, is now added.” An die Jugend is the realization of Busoni’s ‘Eternal Calendar of Music’, and by extending the musical language of Bach and Mozart, he furthers ‘free polyphony’ and ‘free tonality’.

Antony Beaumont notes an entry in Busoni’s diary, 5 October, 1909, “An die Jugend! The source of the palimpsest.” Busoni often references Thomas De Quincey’s Suspira de Profundis. An essay from this collection, The Palimpsest of the Human Brain, is a meditation on consciousness and memory. De Quincey explains the term Palimpsest: “Hence it arose in the middle ages, as a considerable object for chemistry, to discharge the writing from the roll, and thus to make it available for a new succession of thoughts. The Greek tragedy, the monkish legend, the knightly romance, each has ruled its own period.” Readings of obscured texts were made possible by chemists in the early 1800’s. De Quincey comments, “They are not dead, but sleeping...the Grecian tragedy had seemed to be displaced, but was not displaced, by the monkish legend; and the monkish legend had seemed to be displaced, but was not displaced, by the knightly romance.” He examines the phenomenon whereby unrelated texts intermingle, invade and compete. He poses the paradox: “What would you think, fair reader, of a problem such as this, — to write a book which should be sense for your own generation, nonsense for the next, should revive into sense for the next after that, but again become nonsense for the fourth; and so on by alternate successions, sinking into night or blazing into day...But really it is a problem not harder apparently than to bid a generation kill, but so that a subsequent generation may call back into life; bury, but so that posterity may command to rise again.”

De Quincey links the palimpsest to human memory and consciousness: “What else than a natural and mighty palimpsest is the human brain...Everlasting layers of ideas, images, feelings, have fallen upon your brain softly as light. Each succession has seemed to bury all that went before. And yet, in reality, not one has been extinguished.” These texts align with Busoni’s aesthetics, and in 1916, Carl Jung will define his theory of the ‘Collective Unconscious’, evoking De Quincey’s writings, as well as Busoni’s ‘Eternal Calendar of Music’. Musical references in the An die Jugend volumes existed throughout the ages, simultaneously credited or linked to composers from many different generations. Busoni is the time traveler, unearthing past treasures, revealing hidden mysteries, and teaching their value. By extending the language, he becomes a beginner, adding another dimension to the parchment, and passing the torch forward.

In 1910, at the time Busoni posts the letter to Gerda, he is touring America. Seeds for the Indian Fantasy and Red Indian Diary are planted, the Grosse Fuga is complete and the Fantasia Contrapuntistica will be finished within a few months. He lists tours of England, Switzerland and Austria along with his American tour, where he performs 35 times. In August of that year, he reworks sections of An die Jugend to form his first Sonatina.

The Six Sonatinas are Busoni’s greatest series of compositions and contain his very personnel and uniquely identifiable voice. This title, however, creates confusion and a predilection for misunderstanding. The general assumption connotes works of diminutive form; ‘Sonatina’ usually describes ‘studies’ for young musicians, or small scale Sonatas. With these youthful implications, it is easy to comprehend the humorous, yet meaningful segue, from An die Jugend to Sonatina.

Busoni does not intend to confuse or alienate amateurs and students with a misleading title; selling music is already challenging. Allegorically, a beginner would be a journeyman, an explorer and artist. In his unrelenting push for growth and discovery, he questions as a way of life. Busoni has a personal horror of looking back and thrills to imagine himself a novice. A critic, writing for Musical America in 1910, understands Busoni’s meaning: “Certainly this description has not been selected without real justification, but probably also not without a slightly ironical undercurrent of thought. A ‘Sonatina’ means a piece for beginners, and in this Sonatina, the composer may have regarded himself as the beginner or founder of a new system of harmonies.”

Busoni writes, “The Sonatina is merely a re-working of the Preludietto, Fughetta, Esercizio and Epilogo from ‘An die Jugend’, organically condensed. Perhaps the maturest of my piano pieces.” Throughout the composer’s life, he is compelled to revisit and search particular material until finally, its creative potential is depleted. Sonatina is from Books 1 and 4 of An die Jugend and is all thematically related. Although Busoni never programs all four Books, he performs Sonatina. His refined chiseling of the larger work produces a sensational concert piece. Busoni gives the first performance at the Musikhochschule, Basle, on 30 September, 1910. Dedicated to Rudolf Ganz, Sonatina has striking economy of form and succinct use of thematic material. Every note is vital. As with many Busoni compositions, a listener experiences a journey; questions and solutions are worked out from the end backward. With the final move in mind, the grand master solves a chess game. Busoni masterfully secretes his methods of thematic transformation. Gestures lead in deceptively effortless fashion towards a transfiguration. A stunning improvisatory language rises out of a carefully articulated journey. Busoni never subjugates form and lyrical beauty; yet, he is not pouring ‘old wine into new bottles’. The Sonatina integrates a complex harmonic language, derived from Busoni’s ‘free polyphony’. This is his style being spun. It is not Abstract Expressionism, Impressionism, Serialism, Futurism or post-Wagnerianism.

Sonatina is in one-movement form, with five sections. The opening is marked Semplice, commovente. A fughetta follows, Più tranquillo, and the third section is Allegretto elegante. The fourth section, marked Teneramente, come da principio, has a brief return and disintegration of the opening theme. This leads to a mystical and unearthly section, the complete Epilogo from An die Jugend.

Although the initial melodic material is marked semplice, the punctilious phrase markings and ensuing harmonic improvisations are not easy. The theme, in the treble, evokes a pulse: two repeating tones follow in diminuendo, while the left hand keeps a gentle, flowing pace with a two-note slur — the pulse of an artist walking serenely through his world, quietly observing, commenting and taking stock. A harmonic journey is undertaken. Many of Busoni’s interesting scale patterns are planted beneath the theme and shimmer below the surface. The simple melodic material and supple accompaniment are perfect foils for a calm but deliberate stroll off the well-worn path. Secure ground begins to shift. There is a restlessness beneath the heartbeat. After a climax incorporates and pre-states the fughetta subject, the pulse sounds alone with pedal, suspending and extending the contemplative atmosphere.

In the fughetta Più tranquillo, the subject is plainly stated, intimate and unsentimental. As Busoni explores familiar territory, traditional harmony recedes when small chromatic scales in 4-note groupings enter. Patterns of shifting whole-tone and half-tone combinations, extending to broken major and minor thirds, crawl under and above the subject. The music leaves sure-footed earth bound harmony with dizzying embroidery and certain flight. The fughetta theme remains a cantus firmus, the voice of reason. Foundation combines with flight, and the two elements of earth and air are magically blended. The section ends with a sumptuous small cadenza recalling the improvisatory finale of an ornamental Baroque cadenza, passages Busoni cherished. In an autobiographical moment, the fughetta subject returns chorale-like, sonorously chiming an unambiguous, traditional cadence.

This transitional cadence into the third section is Busoni’s prayerful acknowledgment following intense explorations. He respectfully nods to past Masters, tips his hat, and salutes the key of C major. The beginners’ key accentuates how far he has traveled and serves to remind younger generations that much discovery remains. His first Elegy, Nach der Wendung, symbolically begins in C and spins a mystical and spiritual harmonic journey outward. Similarly, the Sonatina returns to C major, his mantra for other explorers: build upon your ancestral foundations.

The Allegretto elegante rises from the final, resonating C major chord of the cadence. The right hand is in 4, the left hand is quasi-Valse 3 meter. The right hand explores the whole-tone scale, the left hand stays rooted to defined key centers, all the while transforming the color and direction of the right hand. The fughetta subject remains in the middle voice, rhythmically and harmonically freed from the outer voices. The Lisztian figurations are marvelously designed. The Allegretto elegante is marked leggiero throughout, even when forte, and presents an exhilarating invention of the waltz. This style of scherzo-waltz is one of Busoni’s trademarks. The printed music appears sparse, yet these spectral waltzes are never straightforward. Some examples of his fantastical original waltzes are the fleeting Die Nächtlichen (the ghost waltz from the Elegies) and the early op.20, op.30a and op.33a. Other undiscovered miniature jewels can be found among the short pieces of Busoni’s Klavierübung. The Allegretto elegante is homage to Chopin, but the debt to Liszt is unquestionable. Busoni’s waltzes are the children of Liszt’s Forgotten Waltzes as well as Mephisto. They are certainly the predecessors of Ravel’s La Valse.

In the final section, the theme returns briefly, followed by the Epilogo from An die Jugend. Here the composer speaks entirely in his own language. The fughetta subject is present, lyrical and intact, even as Busoni opens the gate to his secret subterranean world. Colors, pedaling effects, and harmonies entice the listener into a realm of magic. The alchemist spins the whole-tone scale, spilling a trace of liquid silver, trills float disembodied, and glistening modulations stretch and pull. With each statement of the theme, he shows a different path - wonders await. Throughout, bell-tones echo C major. Born within this framework, Busoni defines his creativity and imagination. In the closing moments of Sonatina, the noble simplicity of a cadence acts as reminder that past and future are one.

Busoni posts a letter to his wife from Dayton, Ohio, on 3 March, 1910. He encloses his essay, The Realm of Music, intended as an epilogue to Outline of a New Aesthetic of Music. The essay is undoubtedly a companion piece for Sonatina. “Come, follow me into the realm of music. Here is the iron fence which separates the earthly from the eternal…Here there is no end to the astonishment, and yet from the beginning we feel it is homelike … Unthought-of scales extend like bands from one world to another…Now you realize how planets and hearts are one, that nowhere can there be an end or an obstacle; that infinity lives completely and indivisibly in the spirit of all beings.”

Busoni writes to Gerda, March 1911, “I think with serious joy of the journey home and I have the feeling that my most important period is beginning and that it is, I suppose, the definitive one. The joy is not less because it is serious; on the contrary, it is deeper. It is deep and beautiful, but it has lost all its youthfulness, like Rembrandt’s later self-portraits.”

Sonatina seconda, dedicated to the pianist Mark Hambourg, is composed in the summer of 1912, and heralds a period of energetic experimentation. For the 46-year-old composer, this signals the end of a nearly two year compositional silence. A period of rigorous concert tours allows him time to complete his opera Die Brautwahl. He debates a form for the Indian melodies, reads voraciously, and anticipates his future path after the dynamic explorations of 1909 and 1910.

The first Sonatina is lyrical and transparent, sensual in its flowing lines. By comparison, Sonatina seconda is a powerful, kinetic work. The contrast of light to dark is also useful here. Sonatina seconda is a tour de force, decidedly experimental for its time. This composition contains much of what is new and rarely tried, in a compelling form. Generations remain captivated by its spell, and the piece is a treasured masterwork for instrumentalists and composers. Known commonly as ‘the occult’, the word appears for the first time in a Busoni score, the composer later admits the piano piece is a Dr. Faust study. Sonatina seconda enters the senses as tableau in contemplation of worlds beyond our own.

The printed page forcefully announces daring changes within the composer. There is no key signature or time signature. A postscript at the bottom of the first page instructs the interpreter that accidentals apply only once, natural signs (cancellations of sharps and flats) never occur. Bar lines are used rarely and serve to mark the ends of phrases or sections. The music is written in a virtuosic style: demanding, volatile and liquid rich. The visual score is splendid, the aural is revelatory, and the markings, Lento occulto, flebile and lamentoso, beckon from another dimension.

Busoni gives the first performance at the Verdi Conservatoire, Milan, on 12 May, 1913. His program notes describe the piece as ‘senza tonalità’. The opening is a single line stretching two octaves, a free-tone row. Schoenberg, the Futurist movement, and Busoni’s personal conjuring of his ultimate autobiographical hero, are varying influences. Busoni’s relationship with Schoenberg, who returns to Berlin in the autumn of 1911, is recorded in hundreds of letters. For a time, they share rule of the Berlin avant-garde and cautiously admire each other. Their letters tell a captivating story of two artistic giants. While attempting to understand each other, the relationship is riddled with apprehension, mutual respect and a general philosophical agreement notwithstanding. The Futurist movement is also reaching a broad audience at this time. Busoni shows mild interest, but remains wary of any movement proselytizing an absolute manifesto. He writes, “Unfortunately I can see that these people are already becoming old-fashioned.”

Sonatina seconda is published at a time when séances are in fashion and occultism is a popular topic. Busoni is an extremely charismatic, larger-than-life virtuoso, surrounded by an aura of mystery. As with Paganini and Liszt, he attracts fantastical tales. He is, in most ways, a practical man, although his artistic and spiritual temperament leaves him sensitive to nightmares and emotionally suggestive. The walking dead and gypsy-robed conjurers are not the characters Busoni gravitates towards. His letters, diaries and essays are a truer measure of the man than the myths built around him. A list of his favorite authors will include, Edgar Allen Poe, H. G. Wells, E.T.A. Hoffmann, Cervantes, and De Quincey. He believes, under special circumstances, telepathy and clairvoyance might occur, and has already begun to write about his metaphysical concept of the ‘omnipresence of Time’. In Sonatina seconda, Busoni’s supernatural obsessions find their truest expressions as an extension of his artistic quest for perfection and fulfillment. The forces of good and evil, Mozart’s Magic Flute and the ‘Trial by Fire and Water’, better exemplify his marking occulto. He is searching for the ideal mythical-mystical protagonist that will be his voice. This quest begins many years before Sonatina seconda.

Busoni endlessly deliberates the choice of his protagonist before settling on Dr. Faust. He is fascinated with puppet plays and loves the ambiguity of beings that possess both human and superhuman characteristics. Early on, Aladdin is explored, and he also considers the mythical magician Merlin as subject for a musical work. When Busoni is a young man, Carl Goldmark’s opera Merlin is premiered. Busoni writes a piano fantasy on themes from the opera and is hired to produce the vocal score. Busoni often incorporates a variant on melodic material from Goldmark’s opera as a motif. This motto becomes a personal musical signature in many of his compositions. The Magicians-Alchemists Leonhard and Manasse duel as opposing forces of good and evil in Busoni’s musical comedy opera, Die Brautwahl. Leonardo and Dante are debated in a search for a truly Italian opera. Mephistopheles, the Wandering Jew, Don Juan, and Don Giovanni appear, as he tries to grasp the essence of these beings. His library holds beautiful rare books and prints depicting the superhuman mythological beings. Who best embodies the opposing forces of good and evil, and is consumed with the struggle for their soul? Who personifies the crusade for truth, creativity, and wisdom, while in danger of dissolution, falsification and failure? These are the supernatural forces that enter the arena with Sonatina seconda. Ten years after publication, Busoni acknowledges that this is his first published study for Dr. Faust. In 1912, with years of searching behind him, Sonatina seconda is conjuring the soul of his hero, and serves as an incantation for the process to begin.

Busoni’s music is not programmatic, however, his writing is atmospherically suggestive and produces unforgettable feeling states. Sonatina seconda must be considered separate from Dr. Faust. Only hindsight reveals that musical material for the opera is developed here. That being said, the autobiographical references, attached to certain musical passages that make their way into the opera, are haunting. It is a vision of both past and future. Some material explored in the Sonatina seconda is later used in the opera as the ‘Students’ Theme’. In the opera, the students from Krakow enter Faust’s study, accompanied by the ‘Students’ Theme’. Faust speaks, “Ah Krakow, memories of my youth!” Edward J. Dent, Busoni's biographer (published 1933), relates an incident in 1912 that mirrors these words. Busoni is at Hamburg for rehearsals of his opera Die Brautwahl. According to Dent, Busoni and some friends are dining in a restaurant following a rehearsal. Busoni is sitting with his head in his hands, lost in meditation. One guest begins speaking about Klagenfurt and Busoni looks up as if stricken. Trance-like, he shocks his companions, exclaiming, “Klagenfurt! Klagenfurt! Who spoke of Klagenfurt?” Everyone falls silent and later they report that Busoni painfully enunciated the word several times and said — “The ford of wailing.” When asked if he ever played there, he replies, “Did I ever play there? Klagenfurt! It brings back all my childhood!” Busoni explains, “I was there with my parents; I was twelve years old; I was a wonder-child, and everything turned on me. We were in a hotel there and had to stay for three months, because we had no money and could not pay the bill.”

Busoni is haunted by memories of an unhappy childhood. The sensitive and gifted prodigy long understood his fiduciary responsibility to his parents. Busoni’s father is an abusive pedant with a furious temper and cruel demands. The child is exploited as a Tom Thumb of the piano, and exhaustive concert tours negated any serious course of education. Ferdinando Busoni incurs egregious debt and makes enemies wherever he goes, precipitating many disappointments in the young artist’s life.

As a child, he longs for a future, free of his parents. From his first professional concerts, at the age of seven-and-a-half, until the death of both parents 35 years later, he is their sole means of support. His mother, Anna Wiess, is an exceptional pianist, and his father, Ferdinando, is a traveling clarinet virtuoso of natural, but unrefined gifts. Anna Busoni is in charge of her son’s education until Ferdinando Busoni, after lengthy absences, gives up work when he sees that the boy has enough talent to support them all. He knows little about the piano, and Busoni describes him as being erratic in rhythm. His father sits beside him and scrutinizes every finger and note for hours; the only break is an explosive temper, which Busoni describes as, “violent in the extreme. A box on the ears would be followed by copious tears, accompanied by reproaches, threats and terrifying prophesies.” Anton Rubenstein’s testimonial for Ferruccio is a blunt letter of advice to Ferdinando, written in 1878 while the family was in Vienna: “The young Ferruccio Busoni has a very remarkable talent both for performance and for composition. In my opinion he ought to work seriously at music and not be forced to play in public to earn a living.” Busoni’s unfinished autobiography of 1909 relates how debt follows them everywhere: “The state of the exchequer was then, and always was, the weak point of my father’s administration…All through my childhood and all through my youth I had to suffer…and as far as my father was concerned it never ended.” As to Ferdinando’s insistence that the boy study Bach in great detail, Busoni recalls that at the time of his youth in Italy, Bach is rated little higher than Carl Czerny: “How did such a man in his ambition for his son’s career come to hit on the very thing that was right?”

In Vorspiel I of Dr. Faust, the students from Krakow enter Faust’s study, welcomed with warmth and generosity. This is a common posture for the recognizable figure of Busoni. Ernst Krenek recalls, “Musicians were in a minority and painters, writers, poets, architects, scientists, and a large number of miscellaneous intellectuals were all attracted by the fireworks of his fascinating soliloquy which would go on for an hour or more, before he retired ceremoniously...to attend to his creative work proper.” From his book, Music History and Ideas, 1932, Hugo Leichtentritt writes, “In Berlin, Ferruccio Busoni was for twenty years the advocate of all ideas that aimed seriously at creating something vitally new. As an incomparable master of the piano, as a composer, conductor, teacher, essayist, and philosopher of art, Busoni was an outstanding personality of the highest artistic and intellectual type...Almost every night there was a gathering of young artists from many countries at his hospitable residence...there were heated controversies on the artistic problems of the day in which everyone spoke freely and which were given great distinction by Busoni’s own esprit and wit, superior understanding, mature judgement, and illuminating criticism.”

By 1912, this powerful artist dominates the Berlin avant-garde and his circle of students surrounds him. He is a towering virtuoso, welcomed onto stages as a living legend. Guests and students fill his home. In this Dr. Faust scene, Busoni is both grand seigneur and young student. He is the present and the past, the disillusioned and optimistic youth, the dissolute and fulfilled adult.

Sonatina seconda’s popularity rests on free-fantasy bravura, overtly emotional writing, and Busoni’s intoxicating lyricism. There are confounding harmonic explorations, contrapuntal writing, and economy of material. Small cells are hidden within Busoni’s long Italianate cantilena style. The canons are complex, in reverence to Bach, and the sparse perfect form confides a devotion to Mozart, all characteristics of Busoni’s mature style. From Lisztian bravado, to the disquieting beginnings of Dr. Faust, the dreamscape stream-of-conscious style of the Elegies implodes in full concentrated perfection. No other Busoni piano work will sound so adventurous.

Robert Freund, the composer and pianist, writes to Busoni: “The Sonatina took me captive at once. The very unusual harmony just suits the fantastic, mystic character of the piece, and gives the impression of a natural, spontaneous intuitiveness. I ask myself why it is I cannot get in touch with Schoenberg whilst even the most daring things you do seem quite natural to me.”

The incantation begins: Il tutto vivace, fantastico, con energia, capriccio e sentimento. Sostenuto, a mezza voce parlando. Under this sign post and low in the bass, glowing coals and a smoldering of elements rise in a single melodic strand, leaving a trail of molten gold across two octaves: The alchemist speaks. The pianist’s hands weave underneath and on top of each other, crossing from treble and bass on three staves, mixing ethers, tossing and blending elements of fire, air and water. A two-note motif is drawn from the opening incantation. The mysterious undulating broken-chord accompaniment is now more pronounced, and serves as a primary source for melodic material. Nervously, the flames begin to erupt. A fragment of the ‘Students’ Theme’ appears in a scornful unison octave passage. The texture becomes ruthless. Falling sevenths recall a motif from Goldmark’s opera Merlin, announcing the arrival of the magician. A fire spout funnels upward to a full statement of the ‘Students’ Theme’.

The spell is cast. Marked Opaco, thick ominous chords enter as severe contrast to texture and color. The Merlin motif echoes in the falling sevenths of the ‘Students’ Theme’. The theme repeats, marked triste, accompanied by lamenting murmurs. The two-note ‘incantation’ motif is always present. Conjuring a ghost from another past, a Neapolitan-like song enters, marked pallido, a chilling, subconscious quote from Busoni’s Elegy, ‘All’ Italia!’ In modo napolitano. The harmonic underpinning is slightly broken and stuttering, assisting the vocal line. This undulating harmony, drawn from the opening of the piece, is an uneasy terra firma. The texture transforms as aural deja vu, a faded background of a half-remembered song, from a world long past.

A cadenza pours into the Con fuoco, energicissimo, where the ‘Students’ Theme’ and the Merlin fragment entwine in Mephistophelean fury. The texture recalls Liszt’s Dante Sonata, with metric opposition of duple and triple rhythms. The music is driven with frenzied, erratic pacing, to a crashing silence. Lento occulto heads a chord passage cloaked in low bass tones, derived from the opening two-note motif of the ‘incantation’ tone row. These chords pivot to and from E flat major. Busoni’s sketches for this passage are marked ‘3-mal. Akkord’. This is the description Mozart uses for his Masonic music in Die Zauberflöte, and Mozart’s opera begins and ends in the key of E flat major, the Masonic key. There follows a three-voice canon of remarkable harmonic effect, formed from the top three notes of the undulating broken-chord accompaniment. Mirror image inversions twist through strettos and severely stress the contrast between lyricism and dissonance. The music is calm, yet the overall effect is unnerving. A canon follows with a regular dotted-rhythm pattern, and this quasi-ostinato is momentarily grounding, even though the complex inclusion of theme, mirror image, and melodic extensions are never harmonically at rest. The outer voices cross through the middle dotted-rhythm voice with exquisite serpentine style.

In striking contrast, the next section enters the water world of a long descending chromatic line. Marked flebile, this haunted wail is texturally and rhythmically reminiscent of a Neapolitan song. It is actually an extension of the original melodic material. The canonic texture liquefies, returning seamlessly into a recapitulation of the opening harmony. Here, the parlando theme is marked Sostenuto quasi Violoncello and calando. The accompaniment figure bleeds into waves of A flat minor and F major. These keys recall the composer’s Berceuse. The A flat minor and F major chords are repeated again and again, an insistent echo, until the material begins to break off. Long lines shift to short fragments. The spell weakens.

The contrasting Calmissimo follows, and has the Mozart Masonic chords laced bell-like in canon, in Mozart’s original E flat key center. The theme is in the middle; chords float throughout the 3-stave passage. The atmosphere is transcendental. Dent relates that Die Zauberflöte was one of Busoni’s most treasured scores. Writing about the Overture of the opera, the historian Alfred Einstein states: “[Mozart] compressed the struggle and victory of mankind, using the symbolic means of polyphony: working out, laborious working out in the development section; struggle and triumph.” Busoni’s inclusions of the Masonic elements symbolize his appeal to the higher ideals of humanity, and subtly foretell the eventual triumph of Faust over the devil.

The canon returns truncated and inverted, falling into the descending chromatic line. Reverberations of the lowest strings prompt the descent. The treble climbs slightly upward, exhausted, to a full solemn restatement of the ‘Students’ Theme’, un poco marziale. As the tableau disintegrates, the theme marches into shadow, fading behind the curtain. The revenants return to their world. The Past or the Future. The last instruction of the piano piece is estinto, extinguished. The falling sevenths, reminiscent of the Merlin fragment, are now a personal motif for Busoni, a musical nom de plume. The sevenths fall to C and the C repeats twice, hushed and extinguished. The candlewick sizzles, and all is black. Busoni ends on C, a muffled heartbeat, a profound pulse.

At summer’s end, 1914, Busoni asks for a year’s leave of absence from his position as director of the Liceo Musicale in Bologna. He signs a contract for his American tour and remains in Berlin over Christmas, playing a Bach concert to benefit charities. This is the first all-Bach piano recital for the Berlin public, and Dent writes that it is received with “discourteous ingratitude.” Busoni outlines his plan for Dr. Faust, recording in his diary, “Everything came together like a vision.” By Christmastime, the text is complete. With the outbreak of war in 1914 and an uncertain future, Busoni sails to New York with his family on 5 January, 1915. He writes to Egon Petri: “When shall we ever meet again? This state of uncertainty (Planlosigkeit), after ten years of deliberate constructive work, at the climax of my vital strength, is the hardest of all blows to bear!” He is battling disillusionment, yet hopes to proceed with his opera Arlecchino. Modeled on 16th century puppet plays, the composition is an organic link to Dr. Faust. Busoni takes the two librettos with him. His letters describe a growing isolation: “When one is no longer master of one’s own freedom of movement, life has no further value.” He abhors the provincial limitations of American audiences, and expresses fear that the war in Europe will cause cultural destruction. He is consumed by a paralyzing anxiety about the future, and this precipitates a desperate emotional state. Busoni writes, “I shall never overcome this criminal amputation on my life.” At a time when the composer’s attention is tightly focused on the realization of a masterwork, Busoni is obliged to proceed with the scheduled tour, and in so doing; he nervously anticipates a creative drought. Compounding these difficulties, New York is deluged with celebrated artists in exile from Europe. Audiences are in thin supply. He writes to Edith Andreae, June 1915, “I didn’t dare set to work on the opera…for fear that a false start would destroy my last moral foothold.”

Busoni begins an orchestral composition as a warm-up for Arlecchino, the Rondò Arlecchinesco. He sets down ideas, hoping they might be a useful study, if all else fails, and writes, “If the humour in the Rondò manifests itself at all, it will have a heartrending effect.” With bold harmonic language, Busoni clearly defines this composition as his last experimental work. The years give way to compassionate reflection. The war will change him.

In America, Busoni completes Sonatina ad usum infantis Madeline M.* Americanae, pro Clavicimbalo composita, Red Indian Diary, the Rondò Arlecchinesco, his editions of Bach’s Well-Tempered Klavier Book 2, and Goldberg Variations.

Each Sonatina has a Latin title and bears a dedication. With Sonatina ad usum infantis Madeline M.* Americanae, pro Clavicimbalo composita, Busoni obscures the dedicatee, omitting her full name. A photograph of Madeline Manheim, dated 1918, was found among his papers in Berlin. She was a friend of Busoni’s eldest son, Benvenuto. He had American citizenship, born during one of his father’s extended teaching and concert tours. Busoni composes Sonatina ad usum infantis in America and perhaps meets her then. The portrait of Madeline Manheim shows a beautiful young woman with a thoughtful expression. The title hints at the Sonatina’s encapsulated innocence, and offers an insider’s view of the composer’s ability to regenerate his youthful enthusiasm. Now, he sees the world as a wide-eyed child, without the Mephistophelean cynic looking over his shoulder. Mature Busoni compositions mirror the composer’s ontological state, as well as his temporal environment. There are no dated sketches or surviving manuscripts. The piece is published in 1916, and performed by Busoni on 6 November, 1917, at Tonhalle, Zurich. Sonatina ad usum infantis is probably completed shortly before the composer’s Red Indian Diary, dated 20 June, 1915.

Busoni references Sonatina ad usum infantis as, “A sonatina for a child which itself has the air of a child.” Considering the catastrophic times, it is a rite of purification, a cleansing of self-doubt and uncertainty. He introduces a composition with clear and simple melodies, gentle harmony and transparent beauty. This Sonatina is not for a child, but graciously warm, and disarmingly uninhibited. Busoni writes to Edith Andreae in 1916: “My heart…is in a state of adolescence again; shy and full of longing and lacking practical impact.”

The subtitle is pro Clavicimbalo composita (harpsichord). Busoni plays the piece on piano and the long silky legatos, with sustained pedal harmonies, contradict a harpsichord touch. The writing style points towards the rich warm tone of the piano, yet the elegant ornamentation is reminiscent of a remote past. By using the term ‘harpsichord’ the composer designates a youthful piano, constructing a symbolic recapitulation to an earlier period of time, recalling Gregorian chant, and the pure lines of Palestrina. This is Busoni’s Gothic harmony, and the language of Arlecchino as well as Sonatina in diem nativitatis Christi MCMXVII.

The third Sonatina’s visionary aspects are significant. After 1900, Busoni begins to use a pure form of polyphony (‘free polyphony’). He often combines this technique with the development of melodic and constructive materials, forming motifs of usually two or three notes. In his definitive study of Busoni’s piano music, the composer-scholar Larry Sitsky traces all musical material used in Sonatina ad usum infantis to the opening few bars of the composition. An exceptionally integrated work, motifs are treated to rhythmic variation, augmentation, inversion and other techniques used by great masters. Busoni is cognizant and hopeful for the path of new music, when he writes his treatise on ‘Absolute Melody’, 1913. Prophetically, this very style becomes widely popular after the Second World War. Busoni describes ‘Absolute Melody’: “A row of repeated ascending and descending intervals, which are organized and move rhythmically. It contains in itself a latent harmony, reflects a mood of feeling.” He further explains that expression does not depend on a text or accompanying voices and declares, “It must be maintained here that melody has expanded continuously, that it has grown in line and capacity for expression and that in the end it must succeed in becoming the most powerful thing in composition.” Busoni’s discourse on ‘Young Classicism’, contained in a letter to Paul Bekker, 1920, gives further insights into his crusade for the future of music. Busoni calls for “The definite departure from what is thematic and the return to melody again as the ruler of all voices and all emotions …and as the bearer of the idea and the begetter of harmony, in short, the most highly developed (not the most complicated) polyphony.”

There are five numbered and connected movements: 1. Molto tranquillo 2. Andantino melancolico 3. Vivace (alla Marcia) 4. Molto tranquillo 5. Polonaise (un poco cerimonioso).

The Molto tranquillo and the Andantino melancolico pair as prelude and fughetta. The Vivace (alla Marcia) has two variations with a brief coda. The fourth movement restates the Molto tranquillo theme, ascending towards the luminescent transfiguration of a chorale motif, drawn from the first movement. This brief passage serves as unifying bridge to the elegant and enchanting Polonaise.

The third Sonatina is born at a time when Busoni attempts to toss off his brooding spirits and reenter his creative journey with Dr. Faust. Despite his opera’s quasi-autobiographical elements, the composer believes personal hardships could poison an objective perspective. After nine torturous months in America, Busoni returns to Europe and settles in Zurich, where he completes Arlecchino, classifying the composition as a “Marionetten Tragödie.” Dent writes that the composer feels it is his “most individual and personal work,” and describes it as a satire on war and human failings. Reality and illusion fuse. Grim humor combines with fantasy and philosophical paradox, resulting in a labyrinth of meanings and finely interwoven themes.

This is the era of Stravinsky’s Petrushka, Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire, and the toy boxes of Debussy and Fauré. ‘Commedia dell’ Arte’ returns to the stage in the 20th century. Despite the popular tide, Busoni has a long attraction to 16th century puppet plays; he is enthralled with the marionettes’ contra-human characteristics.

Contrasting the outward gentle beauty of Sonatina ad usum infantis, the fourth Sonatina retreats inward. Busoni dedicates Sonatina in diem nativitatis Christi MCMXVII (1917) to his son Benvenuto. The composer gives the premier in Zurich on 24 January, 1920. A critical review reads: “Ringing of bells and Christmas atmosphere seen with the eyes and felt with the heart of an artist shaken by the griefs of the world.” Busoni is isolated, broken hearted from his exile and wearied by the mounting ravages of war. He is also concerned for Benvenuto, who is called to military service in America. The fourth Sonatina, titled and dated ‘Christmas 1917’, is not a Holiday tribute, it is the composer’s plea for peace. Busoni turns away from the world and embarks on an intense period of creativity. This is the first of four compositions written in Zurich, with Dr. Faust material.

The Sonatina in diem nativitatis Christi MCMXVII is a profound work. The manuscript, a modest eight pages, has enormously condensed emotional material. The entire composition maintains a serene beauty. Fortes are rare, emerging from Busoni’s characteristic long lyrical lines, blended arpeggiated strands, and sonorous chorale reverberations. The melody is marked dolce. In a gently rocking three meter, the bass is slightly off center, entering with the melody on the third beat of each measure. Although lyrically dolce, the music is not reassuring. An oscillating broken-chord strand rises from the quasi-berceuse accompaniment and begins to sound quietly subversive, implying an underlying menace. A structurally inverted motif from the Pezzo serioso of the Piano Concerto smoothly punctuates the end of this oscillating figure. First impressions of calm stability give way. Characteristic of a medieval folk song, a contrasting theme enters in intervals of fourths, articulated above un poco vivace triplets. This melody reaches a crescendo with four chiming F major chords, adamant and painful. This stagnant chord passage, mirroring Busoni’s death motif, fades to a restatement of the opening thematic material. The next passage remembers the veiled world of the Elegies. The right hand weaves a Lisztian figured accompaniment, falling and rising above lyrical, sotto voce bass octaves. These low melodic lines are prayerful and questioning, while shifting harmonies glaze the transparent atmosphere. The music seems to be moving towards a resolution. The singing octaves crescendo to the opening theme, augmented and passionately restrained. The theme eventually subsides, dissolving into the opening lullaby.

A single line rises out of the lowest tones of the broken-chord accompaniment, floating plaintively, a memorial to the Sonatina seconda. This melodic strand is transformed, as if Busoni views it from a great distance, while always carrying it with him. The apparition imparts a feeling of rest and security. A chorale unfolds as an ancient investigation, still and meditative. Low bells toll, accompany the chorale, and contain a latent rhythm, while sounding timeless. A rustic medieval dance, harmonically monotonous, enters. The dance dissipates into rhythmically augmented basses, marked ritenendo and suspended by continuous pedals. The chorale returns in a questioning dialogue with muffled bell tones. The closing section combines the theme in 4-part fugue, and disintegrates within a triplet accompaniment. In the final section, marked quasi transfigurato, the theme is resplendent, augmented and stated three times in rapturous bell-like clarity. Treble - tenor - treble, ending on A with ancient open fifths. Bleakness and apprehension give way to hope and firm foundation.

The Sonatina in diem nativitatis Christi, reminiscent of late Liszt, illustrates Busoni’s ability to convey vastly profound feeling states, with very few gestures. The composer is at his peak, with a magnificently refined technique and crystallized thought process. He creates music of weightlessness, and communicates emotions of unfathomable density.

Sonatina brevis in Signo Joannis Sebastiani Magni (in freier Nachdichtung von Bach’s Kleiner Fantasie und Fuge d-moll) is found at the end of the seven-volume Bach-Busoni edition, a testament to the singular importance the composition holds for the composer. The Bach editions occupy all of Busoni’s adult life and range from visionary recastings of the great original works, to the immeasurable wisdom recorded in his edition of the Well-Tempered Klavier Book 2. There are two separate collections of Busoni’s Bach editions. In 25 Volumes, the Klavierwerke, 1894-1923, presents Bach’s complete keyboard works. The other collection is a six-volume publication from 1916, and holds Busoni’s transcriptions and arrangements. A seventh volume is added to the six-volume set and these are published in 1920. A posthumous eighth, 1925, is the second edition of Busoni’s Klavierübung.

The 1916 and 1920 editions differ only in the addition of the seventh volume, which has all new material. The compositions in Volume 1 and 2, Bearbeitungen, are arrangements. Volume I, Lehrstücke, are study pieces, and Volume 2, Meisterstücke, contains compositions for concert use. Volume 1 opens with a dedication, Widmung. This miniature combines the tones B.A.C.H. with the C majorFugue from Book I of the Well-Tempered Klavier. There are, eighteen short Preludes and a Fughetta BWV 924-42, a revised version of the Two-part and Three-part Inventions from the 1892 publication, Four Duets BWV 802-5, and Prelude, Fugue and Allegro in E flat major BWV 998. Volume 2 has, the Chromatic Fantasia and Fugue, Concerto for piano and strings in D minor, and the Goldberg Variations. Volume 3 holds the virtuoso transcriptions of organ works. These are, the Prelude and Fugue in D major BWV 532, the ‘St. Anne’ Prelude and Triple Fugue in E flat major BWV 552, the Toccatas and Fugues in D minor BWV 565, and C major BWV 564, and ten Choral Preludes. The Chaconne for solo violin is also found in this edition. The transcriptions in Volume 3 date from the 1880’s through 1909.

The works in Volume 4 are Nachdichtungen, original compositions based on motifs or themes from Bach. These are, Fantasia nach Johann Sebastian Bach (Alla Memoria di mio Padre Ferdinando Busoni † il 12 Maggio 1909 †), and Preludio, Fuga e Fuga figurata, from An die Jugend. A realization of the Capriccio on the Departure of a beloved Brother BWV 992 bears a dedication to Arthur Schnabel. Fantasia, Adagio and Fuga in C minor, and Fantasia Contrapuntistica (Versio minore and Versio definitivo) round off this heroic collection. Volume 5, originally published in 1894, is the Well-Tempered Klavier Book 1, while Volume 6 is devoted to the Well-Tempered Klavier Book 2. Busoni notes: “Bach’s ‘well-tempered’, Part 1 for pianists, Part 2 for composers: my testament.”

Volume 7 is compiled in 1920 and has, three Toccatas BWV 914-916, and a critical edition of the Fantasie and Fugue in A minor BWV 904, dedicated to Hugo Leichtentritt in appreciation for his 1916 Busoni biography. Here is Busoni’s creative grouping of three separate Bach pieces; Fantasia and Fugue BWV 905, Andante BWV 969, and Scherzo BWV 844. There follows, a transcription for cello and piano of the Chromatic Fantasia and Fugue, 1917, Improvisation for two Pianos on ‘Wie wohl ist mir’, and new versions of the puzzle canons from Musical Offering. The final work is Sonatina in Signo Joannis Sebastiani Magni, a Nachdichtung of the little Fantasy and Fugue BWV 905, found earlier in this same volume in its original form. Just as Widmung dedicates the seven volumes, the fifth Sonatina is Busoni’s signature on his completed effort.

Throughout his life, Busoni returns to Bach’s works for inspiration and rediscovery, believing the music is both essential and potential. As a child, Bach is his favorite composer, and this is where he learns the art of structure and counterpoint. From earliest youth, Busoni is a natural, intuitive contrapuntist; he joyfully combines unrelated themes to victorious solutions. By age ten, he has already developed prodigious skill improvising polyphonically.

The prophetic original compositions based on Bach themes and fragments, known as Nachdichtungen, stand as monument to a lifetime of study. Nachdichtungen expose the thinking process and colossal imagination behind many of Busoni’s compositions, and confirm his creative perspective as intuitive, rather than intellectual. These structural masterpieces embody a free, visionary aesthetic, grounded in the composer’s artistic ideals and his philosophical concept of the ‘omnipresence of Time’. For Busoni, the past and future are one, and in the Nachdichtungen, they are inseparable. Busoni looks back for structure and counterpoint. He looks to the future, and frees polyphony from strict control, elevating it, both melodically and constructively, above harmony. The freed polyphony and the constructive adventures produce a new, fluid harmony.

Nachdichtungen are not transcriptions or paraphrases. The Bach themes, fragments, or motifs, found in these compositions, are often far removed from their original contexts. Here, Bach’s musical ideas are re-conceptualized, restructured, and stylistically transformed. The Nachdichtungen illustrate Busoni’s belief that Bach’s music is both ‘essential’ and ‘potential’. It is possible to view a Nachdichtung as a deeply personal commentary on existing material, combined with Busoni’s original music.

The Fantasia, Fugue, Andante and Scherzo, in Busoni’s seventh volume of the 1920 Bach editions, constitutes a synthetic grouping of Bach’s compositions. Busoni feels they are related by thematic material and key structures, and encourages their unity as an effective concert piece. In this presentation, Busoni comments on the Fugue: “The countersubject appears as a fragment of an obvious canonical leading which has not been developed.” He suggests an appropriate realization, and in the Sonatina brevis, the Fantasia and Fugue are eloquently combined with unrestricted use of his proposed solution.

Sonatina brevis in Signo Joannis Sebastiani Magni, composed in August 1918, is dedicated to Philipp Jarnach. A series of musical signatures are combined in a short, ‘brevis’, composition. The score consists of five printed pages. The music is rich in material, color, texture and design, and there is a transparency in the natural improvisatory character of the piece. One thought flows, and binds into another, a continuous organic improvisation. The Sonatina brevis is a meditation on the future of 20th century polyphony.

Marked Andante, espressivo e Sostenuto, a canonic chain of sustained falling sevenths opens the Sonatina brevis. A common Bach figure (melody extracted from a series of diminished seventh chords), these sevenths are also one of Busoni’s signatures, his Merlin motif. The sevenths serve as structural material for the ‘Students’ Theme’, and announce the arrival of Megaeros, the fifth spirit of hell, in Dr. Faust. In Sonatina brevis, the sevenths are wrapped around a three-note motif. This three-note motif is found in many Busoni compositions, and it is one of Bach’s signatures as well. These notes are a transposition of the first three notes of the second Kyrie from Bach’s B Minor Mass, a work recognized for its dualistic nature. Another provocative characteristic of the Mass, as it relates to Sonatina brevis, is the transcription-transformation aspect. Albert Schweitzer lists six sections of the B minor Mass as ‘rearrangements’, and describes them as, “Not mere transfers…it is more correct to speak of their being suggested by the original than borrowed from it.” Schweitzer’s observation applies to Busoni’s Nachdichtungen as well. The sevenths and the three-note motif serve as structurally unifying elements in various sections of Sonatina brevis. They symbolically join the musical souls of Bach and Busoni.

The Fugue subject enters in the second section of the composition, Poco più mosso, ma tranquillo. Natural extensions of the subject’s melodic material produce adventurous harmony, the result of the vertical realization of polyphonic development. The falling sevenths return and bridge the third section, Tema dell’ Andante. Highly developed counterpoint blends all elements: the Fugue subject, the three-note motif of the Andante, the falling sevenths. The Fugue subject becomes a cantus firmus, disguised among 16^th-note accompanying figures.

In the closing section, the falling seventh motif inverts, rising purposefully. In this form, the motto releases its darkness, and speculates the reversal of fortune. As with Sonatina in diem Nativitatis, a coda announces a benevolent transfiguration. These final bars are closely tied to Vorspiel II, Dr. Faust (Adagio Theme). Expectations of a tranquil ending fail, when a cadence breaks off without resolution. The sevenths fall, and Sonatina brevis endsambiguously, in an unstable A major.

The final conclusions of peace are made in the spring of 1919, and Busoni is able to travel once more. The Zurich years allow the composer an intense period of productivity, and although comfortably settled, he cannot plan for the future. Dent speaks of Busoni’s growing isolation and oppressive loneliness. He is cut off from his great cosmopolitan world. He misses his friends and students, he is lost without his beloved library, and he longs for provocative artistic stimulation. Concerned that the majority of life is already behind him, Busoni experiences a mounting anxiety, his depression deepens. He writes to Isidor Phillip, “For four years I have lived in a state of inward hostility towards this remote world, from which I have shut myself off. While judging it to have become uncivilized, I have perhaps become uncivilized myself. On the other hand I think that my art has become more subtle, and that it expresses all that remains ‘good’ within me.” He begins to think of his future, “Zurich is exhausted, and now that peace is concluded...I see that it is time for me to make an end of its limitations.” He gives a series of five concerts in Zurich and makes plans for appearances in Paris and London.

Busoni writes to Phillip Jarnach from Paris, 10 March, 1920, “After the sanatorium existence of Zurich, Paris has a liberating effect. It is like a homecoming for me to find life on the grand scale again.” He is renewed in this vibrant city, where he has always enjoyed a certain freedom. He observes that Parisians do not judge a person according to their dress, personal wealth, or private companionship. Nine solo and orchestral concerts are sold out: “I shall never forget it. Not as a virtuoso but as a human being, I sensed this tremendous devotion from a public that scarcely knew me, in a spoilt and hardened capital city, as something quite phenomenal...the applause continued all evening.” On 25 March, He describes the audience for his compositions’ concert as, “very concentrated then increasingly enthusiastic...with the finest understanding and greatest warmth...one of the most wonderful evenings of my life...the end of the concert was indescribable, people stood up and shouted…the orchestra performed miracles.”

While in Paris, Busoni finds many ways to occupy himself, including composition. He writes to Phillip Jarnach, 10 March, “As a gesture of thanks to my host I am trying to construct a brief Carmen fantasy, an interesting pastime.” The overwhelming response of the Parisians leaves him “very inspired and full of ideas.” With the city at his feet, Busoni completes his sixth Sonatina on 22 March, 1920. He writes, “The little Carmen fantasy is finished. - It is 12 pages long, with five themes and four short sections.”

The dedication to Kammer-Fantasie über Bizet’s Carmen (Sonatina super Carmen) reads En souvenir d’estime et de reconnaissance, à Monsieur Tauber, Paris, Mars 1920. Busoni met Leonhard Tauber in Klagenfurt. Tauber was owner of an inn and frequently heard the young Busoni play. He becomes a successful hotelier, has many musician friends, and owns the luxurious Hotel Foyôt in Paris where the Busonis often stay. Their letters are evidence of their close friendship, and on the composer’s final visit to Paris, in 1923, he dedicates his ‘study for the Steinway piano with the third pedal’ to Tauber. Sonatina super Carmen is written while Busoni is staying at Tauber’s home, during his series of orchestral and solo recitals. Busoni gives the first performance at Wigmore Hall, London, on 22 June, 1920.

Busoni plans Carmen as early as 1917. He loves Bizet’s French opera more than any contemporaneous Italian opera. In his essay titled, ‘Mozart’s Don Giovanni and Liszt’s Don Juan Fantasy’, he proposes: “If it were a question of the paraphrase of Carmen, the transcriber, following Liszt’s example, would begin with the suggestive scene in the marketplace in Act IV, and in the introduction as contrast to this, would join the pathetic ‘Carmen’ theme built on the gypsy scale. The middle section would be composed of the Habañera (followed by variations), the finale, the bull-ring music.” The final version is larger than the one imagined in his essay. Busoni understands that the Opera Paraphrase in Liszt’s hands is more than a presentation of selected melodies for virtuoso display. The visionary aspects of Liszt’s skills transform the Opera Paraphrase. Liszt’s paraphrases are dramas in condensed settings, they project the emotions of the actual staged event, and bring a story to life.

Busoni often composes lighter ‘antidotes’ to serious works in an effort to achieve a creative equilibrium. In 1920, he wrote the orchestral Tanzwalzer (inspired by Johann Strauss) ‘for fun’, as an antidote to the powerful Toccata for piano. Music from both the Toccata and the Tanzwalzer contain potent Dr. Faust material and appear in theopera. Although inspired by other composers’ ideas, Carmen and Tanzwalzer are completely original in Busoni’s formats: These ‘light’ compositions are shadowed, sometimes obliquely, other times intrinsically. The music’s sinister whispers escape the casual listener.

Kammer-Fantasie über Bizet’s Carmen (Sonatina super Carmen) opens in A major, inextricably linking itself to Sonatina brevis. For Busoni, the keys of A and C are significant. The final sustained tones of Sonatina brevis melt into silence, easily embracing the opening pizzicato thirds of Sonatina super Carmen. Fate motifs play a major role in both compositions, and the two Sonatinas also pair for their interchangeable duality, both internal to themselves, and in relation to each other. The Sonatina brevis is Bach, encapsulating many of Busoni’s strong Germanic traits, yet it is lyrically flowing, light, and flexible. The Sonatina super Carmen, with Liszt as creative source, celebrates Busoni’s Mediterranean lyricism. At the same time, the sixth Sonatina is dark, with clearly ordered sections. Busoni said, “Truly Bach is the Alpha of pianoforte composition and Liszt the Omega.”

Busoni did not intend Carmen for virtuoso exhibitionism, although the writing is extravagantly demanding. Edward J. Dent emphasizes that, Busoni would never draw attention to difficult, extraneous passages in order to display his colossal technique. He was a master of melody, subjugating surrounding voices to an endless spectrum of imaginative colors.

The bright opening material, Allegro deciso, comes from the chorus of Act IV. Staccato octaves and double-thirds flutter in canonic variations. The second section, Andantino con amore, is a free arrangement of José’s Flower Song from Act II scene 2. The melody is in the tenor voice, while the right and left hands spin darkly glittering ornamental arpeggios. The Carmen theme enters at the end of this section with a subtle, gloomy presence, a fateful premonition. This leads to the third section, where the Habanera from Act I is treated to a series of variations. Any expectation of a light operatic fantasy ends here. The variations, one marked fantastico, flicker with malice, and what appears in the opera as a lusty celebration of life, here, has the essence of a gleeful dance of death. The material of the fourth section is taken from the Prelude to Act 1. The familiar tune becomes mocking and increasingly malignant. The fifth section is marked Andante visionario. The fate theme, from the end of the second section, now levitates above the descending chromatic scale of the Habanera, while somber deep bells toll the spectral fragments of a dissipated dance rhythm.

Carmen and Busoni exemplify Jung’s ‘shadow’ to the object of society. Both are liberated outsiders. Carmen’s uninhibited nature and unrestrained sensuality have portentous implications, making the character a symbolic companion to artists and philosophers in their pursuit of an anti-pragmatic ideal.

In 1947 Kaikhosru Sorabji comments on Busoni’s Sonatina super Carmen: “I feel the metapsychic element to be present to a degree and intensity unparalleled in music…The gay and occasionally rather trivial Bizet tunes become indescribably ‘charged’ and even sinister, undergoing a sort of dissolution and transformation that is… fascinating and haunting to the mind of the suitably ‘attuned listener,’ so that at the end of the process one almost says to oneself - such is the impression of the ineluctable and immense power behind the whole business - this is a psychical invasion in musical terms.”

With Sonatina super Carmen, Busoni demonstrates his characteristic ability to rejuvenate his spirits. He shakes off the horror of war years and the desolation of exile, he momentarily releases himself from the intense journey with his master work, Dr. Faust, and he sets aside his most pressing concern: For over a year, Busoni is unable to decide where the next chapter of life will take him. He ends his letter to Phillip Jarnach, “ ‘Home’? - the word invokes all the problems awaiting me; and this time I shall ignore them.” Busoni is inundated with offers, and there are many cities he loves. His torturous indecision ends when he accepts an appointment from the Prussian Ministry of Education. He will return to Berlin and direct a class for advanced composition at the State Academy of Arts and Sciences. He writes to Isidor Phillip from Zurich, 7 September, 1920, “My heart is bursting, I leave my sons behind, I am going - at 54 - into the unknown.”

Toccata in C Major for Organ BWV 564

Preludio Adagio Fuga

Johann Sebastian Bach

Transcribed for piano by Ferruccio Busoni

For the introduction to Bach’s Toccatas, in his Bach-Busoni editions, Busoni discusses the form and style of toccatas. He writes from Zurich, in 1916, “It was allowable to give the title ‘Toccata’ to pieces of varying content and with forms diverging widely one from another... Many Toccatas have one thing in common - that they are compiled from a number of different smaller forms, and another...they aim at velocity and bravura.” He describes the organ Toccata in C major as, “Majestic, rich in feeling, and bold.” Of the form in general he writes, “The Toccata stands nearest to improvisation. Improvisation would stand nearest the true essence of art if it lay within human capacity to master its promptings. The Toccata certainly consists in improvisation and reflection, momentary ideas and elaboration, easily inclining towards fluency, feeling, or form; tarrying here, quickly breaking off there, playing transiently from one to the other and mostly without the pretension of representing anything permanent...Apart from the inevitable fact that the fugue is never missing we recognize a decided independence in the forms of the Bach pianoforte and organ Toccatas which rejoices the artist just as much as it confuses the theorist.”

Busoni’s alterations to Bach’s C Major Toccata are minor. In addition to the physical transcription from organ to piano, the score is marked and edited with his interpretive ideas on phrasings, tempi and dynamics. A wave of three-bars extended cadence appears at the end of the Fugue. In most other aspects, the composer remains faithful to the original score. Busoni performed the Toccata in C major in Manchester, England, in 1899.

© 2004, 2015 by Jeni Slotchiver

“My style takes everyone aback: too young for the old, insufficiently mindless for the young, it constitutes a clear-cut chapter in the disorder of our times. −Inasmuch, it will hold its own better with subsequently fluctuating later generations.”
Ferruccio Busoni 1922

Ferruccio Busoni is born on 1 April, 1866, in Empoli, Italy, and only a few years later, his prodigious talent earns him the reputation of a wonder child. He shows equal natural gifts as instrumentalist and composer. He grows to adulthood and becomes the most acclaimed virtuoso pianist of his time. When George Bernard Shaw suggests Busoni compose under an assumed name, the advice is ironic prophecy. As with Franz Liszt, Busoni’s interpretive and performing genius overshadows his life as a composer. In contradiction to his popular legacy, from the time he is a child, Busoni never doubts that composition is his truest artistic mission.

Sprawling pages of testimonials describe a Busoni piano recital as a spiritual catharsis. He mesmerizes his audiences. The lush Italian cantabile interpretations of German Baroque and Classic repertory defy accepted practices. His color palette hypnotizes, yet his overwhelming sense of architecture is inarguable. Often dissatisfied with his ability, he works to refine the very nature of his communicative skills, changing constantly. Busoni frequently says that artists must be occupied with new problems and ideas in order to grow. He discards the wisdom of countless experiences as his intellect roots out the weaknesses of every composer. The staggering breadth of his repertory testifies to an irrepressible appetite.

Busoni’s innovative technical studies provide many idiosyncratic style characteristics within his compositions. Striking harmonic passages are often the result of pianistic experiments utilizing specific keyboard hand positions. As an instrumentalist, the piano aids his need for a deeply individual musical voice, and fortifies his search for artistic perfection. The cosmopolitanism forced on a world-renowned artist influences his theoretical writings; he encounters shocking provincialism and comes to see borders of countries as detrimental. Discouraged by the limitations of nationalism, Busoni seeks to encourage and create a ‘Universal’ language of music.

The life of a virtuoso robs the composer of concentrated time. His two careers are in constant opposition. Even as Busoni surmounts the heights of pianism, he feels the loss of time and fears the waste of his best years. In 1904, Busoni describes Manchester, England as, “a refinely contrived department of Dante’s Inferno, where traveling Virtuosi, who threw away the best part of life because they were covetous for fame and money, grind their teeth.” And he writes to his wife Gerda, from Boston, in 1911, “I am like one who is obliged to lie with a broken leg: but who has nothing else wrong with him, and waits until he can walk and move about again. I say once more, I must not throw away my good years. The position in my development as a composer would already be quite different if it had not been for the long interruptions.”

‘The attainment of mastery’, and ‘the quest for fulfillment’, ruin and redemption, are recurring themes, played out in his opera Doktor Faust, and pointedly so, considering he will not live to finish this work, born of the need to represent his innermost artistic philosophy. Busoni writes to Egon Petri in 1912: “If I could only rid myself of this feeling of shame at playing in public! I think my playing has become different again. I observed myself and collected (my own) criticism. Something is still wanting...Life becomes shorter and shorter - the goal even farther off; what an inhuman task!” Ten years afterwards, in 1922, Busoni laments, “The higher my reputation rises as a pianist (and it seems still to be on the increase), the more unjust is the opinion of me as a composer. By trying to help myself, I am working against my own interests.”

Liszt’s pupils compare Busoni to their venerable master. Anton Rubinstein was more the model for Busoni the pianist, however, Liszt serves as model for Busoni’s piano writing. As artist and man, Liszt’s psyche encompasses the religiously divine and profane. Busoni’s duality also embodies the divine, as in a magnificent transcendence. But his profane is not the romantic Satan of Liszt’s era. His evil is a condensing of the sinister forces that live in the soul of humankind, an uneasiness that causes nightmares, the turbulence beneath a deceptively smooth surface. Musically, these subtle forces will shadow many lighter compositions.

With the monumental Piano Concerto of 1904, signaling both the height and end of his Romantic period, Busoni moves from the vanishing world of Yesteryear, where he performs for Brahms and Tchaikovsky. His mounting attraction to revolutionaries, including Schoenberg and Bartók, sparks a growing need for a radical transformation, a surprising metamorphosis when considering the careers of some of his contemporaries. Tremendous capacities for regeneration and growth define Busoni’s art and can be traced to his childhood. He remains forward looking, a survivalist and an affirmer of life. As he grows, the futuristic aspects of his personality nourish his mystical affinity and direct this 20th century visionary. In 1912, from his essay Self-Criticism, he writes, “There is no new and old. Only the known and not yet known. Of these, it seems to me that the known still forms by far the smaller part.”

Busoni’s brilliant and insightful essays illuminate his far-reaching legacy as theorist and philosopher. From his miraculous beginnings, to the very end of life, he labors, defining and affirming his aesthetics for the future of music, hoping to direct younger generations of composers. Busoni’s groundbreaking publication, Outline of a New Aesthetic of Music, 1907, proclaims his vision. Calling for freedom from ‘shackles of law-givers’, he challenges traditional notation, harmony and key structures, so that the young history of music will continue to grow. He is always quick to counter, “An intentional avoidance of the laws cannot masquerade as creativity.” In his teachings, he strenuously advocates experimentation, shuns the commercial exploitation of compositional devices, and insists all innovations synthesize with integrity. He abhors the constraints of organized schools and movements, believing they replace one iron rule with another. He would never waiver from this position. In 1919, Busoni writes from Zurich, “Each person should try his best on his own behalf, without relying on groups or communities; then everything would be more genuine and honest.”

Arnold Schoenberg hopes for some commendation when he sends Busoni his Op.11 Piano Pieces in 1909. Busoni responds: “The ‘asceticism’…of the piano writing seems to me a pointless avoidance of foregone achievements. You are proposing a new value in place of an earlier one, instead of adding the new one to the old. You will become different and not richer.” The tonality does not shock Busoni, this he prophesied. The compressed form and density of information, in his view, does not provide a listener adequate space and time to digest the music. He disagrees with the un-pianistic writing because it limits a full projection of melodic and harmonic elements. In 1921, he writes, “The so-called ‘new ways’ are today no longer new. The epoch of experiments and of the overrating of means of expression at the expense of content and artistic durability is rapidly drawing to a close.” History is never a barrier for Busoni; his philosophy of art does not allow for the destruction of masterful accomplishments. He is convinced that creation does not demand a complete break with the past. In his late essay, published posthumously, What is Happening at the Present Time, he writes, “The newcomers deceive themselves, too, in thinking they can break, or have broken with their predecessors. This is not the case, in spite of their unshakable conviction, for every child has a mother to whom it is still attached...even after birth.” Busoni understands masterpieces as creatively potent, and maintains that future generations should “rise on the shoulders of the past.”

Busoni believes music is an art still in infancy, and explains, in his Outline of a New Aesthetic of Music, that the binding rules of lawmakers are not appropriate for a child. Perhaps they work for an adult. He dares artists to create their own rules, and never follow established precepts. He encourages young progressionists to command all laws and experience them first hand, before any renunciation. Busoni further clarifies this philosophy in his concept, ‘Young Classicism’. He writes from Zurich, January 1920: “By ‘Young Classicism’ I mean the mastery, the sifting and the turning to account of all the gains of previous experiments and their inclusion in strong and beautiful forms. This art will be old and new at the same time at first. We are steering in that direction.”

Busoni envisions an end to categories: Past and Future, God and the Devil, Church and Chamber music. His ‘Oneness’ is an attempt to unify art by forging a balance with nature. In Busoni’s important compositions, past and future co-exist and tie to his concept, the ‘omnipresence of Time’. He understands time as a part of nature, not linear but spherical: “I have not found out why we humans think of time as a line going from backwards, forwards, whilst it must be in all directions like everything else in the system of the world.” He identifies with Hoffmann’s Serapionsbrüder; the hermit Serapion eclipses time and place. Busoni channels this supernatural time traveler and blurs the lines between reality and dream, most notably in Die Brautwahl and Doktor Faust. Busoni sees all categories as impediments, they constrict composers’ abilities to notate authentic inspiration, and at the conclusion of Outline of a New Aesthetic of Music, he features a quote from Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil: “I could imagine a music whose rarest magic should consist in its complete divorce from Good and Evil - only that its surface might be ruffled, as it were, by a longing as of a sailor for home.” Busoni embraces ancient melodies as he searches for this pure music. “Their intensity of feeling,” and “absolute” beauty, better exemplify his philosophy of ‘Universal Music’. He struggles to clarify this celestial music, a music which will convey the feeling state of the ‘essence of music’.

For Busoni, masterworks are fragments of divine music, gleaned from an infinite sounding universe, his mythic ‘Realm of Music’. A composer might reap a part of this ageless ‘sounding organ’ through brief enlightenment, at times of heightened perception. However, strict laws regarding key structures, notations, and harmony obscure the path: “My final conclusion…is this: Every notation is, in itself, the transcription of an abstract idea.” In his view, music is alive in a composer’s mind, and prior to the act of notation, a composition “exists whole and intact before it has sounded and after the sound is finished. It is, at the same time, in and outside of Time.” Busoni understands the imperfect mechanics of notation as a further transcription: “Notation, the writing out of compositions…an ingenious expedient for catching an inspiration, with the purpose of exploiting it later. But notation is to improvisation as the portrait is to the living model. It is for the interpreter to resolve the rigidity of the signs into the primitive emotion.” Busoni argues that notation is not, nor could ever be, the music itself, and therefore one correct interpretation is impossible. He cites many instances where composer-performers contradict their own scores. Busoni regards the attitude of performers as yet another transcription. Within his theory, he considers a collaborative partnership of composer, transcriber, and instrumentalist. Countering disfavor with the art of transcription, Busoni mentions the respected variation-form, and points out that a ‘borrowed theme’ produces whole series of arrangements.

A youthful Busoni adores analyzing thematic origins. As this precocious pastime develops it becomes an intrinsic thread in the composer’s theories and publications. He conceptualizes an ‘Eternal Calendar’ of music, and in essays, lists numerous examples of melodies transcending time, form, occasion, country, and ethnicity. He references composers incorporating historically extant music for glaringly divergent purposes. While investigating thematic material found in Liszt’s Spanish Rhapsody, Busoni reveals compositions by Mozart, Gluck, Corelli, Glinka, and Mahler, as well as his own.

Busoni’s artistic imperative is methodical and deliberate: ‘The creation of sublime music’. The unification of a spiritual and cognitive intensity lies at the core of each mature composition. Although he believes the essence of a masterwork is intuitively divine, he refutes endeavors that do not include conscious and rigorous scrutiny. At the same time, he takes for granted that art must be beautiful. Despite a phenomenal intellect, a massive accumulation of knowledge, and a lifelong mastery of technique, Busoni’s approach remains intuitive. His close friend, the Dutch composer Bernard Van Dieren, explains that although much is written of Busoni’s intellect, austerity and serenity, the composer is never so forbidding as his commentators make out. In recorded conversations with Van Dieren, Busoni dismisses his many “intellectual flatterers” as proof of achievement: “All we do with those brains we are so proud of means little compared to the feeling which at once recognizes the note of truth in a work...But this mysterious, sudden surrender of a listener who is guided by emotion alone is our greatest reward. We have touched the heart and senses of those whose judgement we most cherish. It means that I have succeeded...only this finally matters.” Busoni adds, “Not as if intellectual grasp comprises all the mysteries of sentiment. I believe on the contrary that ‘the fullest understanding’ born from the heart reveals all the mystery of technical structure, all the intricacies of organic build...the emotion of a moment does not suffice.”

Busoni has his own ‘timetable of systematic progress’. His compositions and writings display an ever-widening and cohesive search for his ‘Ideal’. His intentions are neither reactionary nor contradictory, and yet there are times when firmer styles arise out of his need to steer a worthier course for future generations.

His search merges with an impassioned need to shape the future of music, an ‘Ideal’, which he hopes will guide other artists. He undertakes his tasks tirelessly. Bernard Van Dieren writes, “He had a horror of dissipation in any form. Every waking hour was devoted to work.” Busoni writes from Chicago, January 1911, “I have some few hours of Sunday repose. The traveling bag, which contains my work, lies at the station; there is no pianoforte in the room, so I am thrown on my own thoughts.” With these few hours, he pens a timely and concise essay, The New Harmony, for the periodical Signale, Berlin. The discussion concerns the current “searchings and gropings.” Busoni delineates five paths, and determines that, as of this time, no composer succeeds toward a viable end. He comments on the first, chord formation according to customary scales: “Debussy, out of 113 scales which I have compiled, only employs the whole tone scale, and that only in the melody.” Bernhard Ziehn shows Busoni the second, the symmetrical inversion of harmonic order. The third has voices independent of each other, in polyphonic compositions. Busoni relates, “I have, as an experiment, constructed a five-part fugue in which every voice is in a different key so that the harmony flows in quite new chord successions.” He describes the fourth road as anarchy: “An arbitrary placing of intervals, next and over one another, according to mood and taste. Arnold Schoenberg is trying it; but already he is beginning to turn round in a circle.” Busoni writes, “The fifth will be the birth of a new key system, which will include all the four afore-mentioned ways.”

In 1919, Busoni writes, “Many experiments have been made in this young century; now, from all our achievements - older and newer - it is time to form something durable again. This is my goal. Accomplished creation and the joy of making music must come into their own once more.” That he could not, and will not, be classified, is a consequence of his philosophy of art: anti-categorical and unconstrained. This holds true today. Busoni consumes teachings of all artistic disciplines. His biographer and disciple, Hugo Leichtentritt, chronicles the composer’s process in Music History and Ideas, 1938: “He tried out all the new tendencies, reducing them to an extract which gave a strange flavor to the fundamental substance of his natural and individual manner of expression without seriously affecting it. By this long process of distillation he finally arrived at a highly concentrated essence of the really valuable constituents. This constant refining, this spirituality and concentration, this absence of anything inessential and commonplace, this simple presentation of extremely difficult and complicated problems gives his style a certain severity and exclusiveness. Popular traits are almost entirely absent, save in the occasional allusion to some gay Italian tune.”

From his essay, Simplicity of Music in the Future, 1922, Busoni describes the numerous portraits of Edgar Allen Poe in his treasured editions. They are detailed and carefully executed. “But a picture of Poe by Manet, etched with a few strokes, sums up all the other pictures and is exhaustive. Should not music also try to express only what is most important with a few notes, set down in a masterly fashion?” Pointedly, he asks, “Does my Brautwahl, with its full score of seven hundred pages achieve more than Figaro with its six accompanying wind instruments? It seems to me that the refinement of economy is the next aim after the refinement of prodigality has been learnt.”

Although Busoni’s mature style period clearly portrays his psychology, it is the manifestation of an artist’s journey, rather than the emotional investigations of expressionism. He disdains sensuality, sentimentality, and rejects “brooding and melancholy and subjectivity.” His art will not, however, be unaffected by life. The war changes him. At its conclusion, Busoni writes to Isidor Philipp, “For four years, I have lived in a state of inward hostility towards this remote world, from which I have shut myself off. While judging it to have become uncivilized, I have perhaps become uncivilized myself. On the other hand I think my art has become more subtle, and that it expresses all that remains ‘good’ within me.”

While aiming for artistic perfection, Busoni acknowledges the limitations of any singular life span, and a human’s finite capacity for discovery. He becomes severely critical and often rewrites or destroys compositions. He has long understood his philosophical searchings will culminate in the realization of a great masterwork, “for which all previous achievements are intended.” The consummation of this quest is Doktor Faust, a quasi autobiographical-allegorical theater piece, with his own libretto. Throughout the opera’s slow and meticulous development, many Faust ‘studies’ appear, and are published. These fully independent compositions contain potent Faust material, and in some cases, their conception and integration into the opera’s score is simultaneous. The composer, able to determine their quintessential value over time, explains, “The studies were absorbed motivically and stylistically into the score, where they fulfilled their preparatory nature in terms of stimulation, scale and atmosphere.”

Suffering from chronic inflammation of the heart and kidneys, Busoni insists to look forward. His biographer, Edward J. Dent, affirms, despair was alien to this composer’s personality, and any habitual melancholy irritated him. Faust’s words, “Only he is happy who looks to the future,” becomes one of Busoni’s favorite refrains in later years. Although bedridden in his final months, he anticipates recovery and dreams of new beginnings. He fights bitterness and resignation. Busoni, the boundless explorer, lives his creative philosophy through to his final days, even though his body can no longer serve as vessel for the search.

On his birthday, 1 April, 1924, Busoni sketches a plan for the missing scene of Doktor Faust. He is too ill to implement the ideas. In early May, Busoni writes to his friend Jella Oppenheimer, “Temporarily the remainder of the work is ‘within the soul of its creator’ — assuming that he still possesses a soul.” Unfinished, Doktor Faust personifies Busoni’s ‘unattainable Ideal of Beauty’. On July 8th, a few weeks before his death, Busoni dictates his revelatory essay, The Essence of Music: A Paving of the Way to an Understanding of the Everlasting Calendar. In this poetic and lucid discussion, Busoni defines the ‘Ideal’ of his Helena as ‘the essence of music’. With his ever-optimistic personality, the influential mentor advises artists, and elaborates on the privilege of a reverential, expansive quest. He begins, “I have gradually been forced to the opinion that our conception of the essence of music is still fragmentary and dim; that only very few are able to perceive it and fewer still to grasp it, and that they are quite unable to define it.” In the final paragraphs of this beautiful essay, Busoni writes, “At times, and in rare cases, a mortal is by listening made aware of something immortal in the essence of music that melts in the hands as one tries to grasp it, is frozen as soon as one wishes to transplant it to the earth, is extinguished as soon as it is drawn through the darkness of our mentality. Yet enough still remains recognizable of its heavenly origin, and of all that is high, noble and translucent in what surrounds us and we are able to discern; it appears to us as the highest, noblest, and most translucent.”

Man Ray’s late photographic portrait of Busoni, Paris 1923, shows the composer peering into his eternal and infinite dream world. He has already entered his Sounding Universe, free of worldly burdens, a soaring galaxy of resonate harmony and perpetual exploration. The ‘Realm of Music’ he created for all, is home-like. At last, Busoni is one with his spiritual journey.

When Faust is confronted with Helena’s image, he shrinks away, exclaiming, “Man is not able to attain perfection. Then let him strive according to his measure and strew good around him, as he has received it.” Faust renounces all hope of the ‘Ideal’, and at death, he bequeaths his soul to serve the future of humanity, thereby defeating the devil, and vanquishing the pretext of ‘Good and Evil’. Faust contemplates: “I, wise fool, hesitator and waster, have accomplished nothing; all must be begun afresh; I feel as if I were drawing near to childhood again. I look far out into the distance; there lie young fields, uncultivated hills that swell and call to new ascent. Life smiles with promise.”

Busoni writes to Philipp Jarnach, July 1923: “The greatest continue to develop until their death, and leave behind unfulfilled expectations.”

The poet speaks to the onlooker:

Still exhausted all the symbols wait
That in this work are hidden and conceal’d;
Their germs a later school shall procreate
Whose fruits to those unborn shall be reveal’d.
Let each take what he finds appropriate;
The seed is sown others may reap the field.
So, rising on the shoulder of the past,
The soul of man shall reach his heaven at last.

Doktor Faust, Ferruccio Busoni

“On the shoulders of the past, the future will rise.” - Ferruccio Busoni
[1 April, 1866 - 27 July, 1924]

Toccata 1920

Preludio - Fantasia - Ciaccona

‘Die Macht des Bösen’

Hauptspiel, First Tableau — Dr. Faust

The Toccata, Busoni’s last major piano composition, reflects the turmoil and conflict surrounding his return to Berlin at war’s end. Despite exile, the composer’s years in Zurich are settled and productive. Toccata is mostly finished when Busoni arrives in Berlin on 11 September, 1920. He begins the work in July, and breaks off his effort in August, as he prepares to embark on the next chapter of his life. He confides to Isidor Philipp, “My heart is bursting. I leave my sons behind. I am going - at 54 - into the unknown.”

Once home in his study, Busoni works with renewed vigor, and quickly signs and dates the manuscript on September 16th, with a dedication to Isidor Philipp. Despite this conclusion, he makes several changes in the days to follow, including an additional variation to the Ciaccona. Busoni gives the first performance at the Philharmonie, Berlin, on 18 November, 1920. He describes Toccata as “arising out of anguish and unstable emotions.” Although this was a defiant and troublesome work, it is one of the composer’s most powerful, and best known.

Busoni’s Toccata stands with the illustrious piano compositions of the 20th century. Demanding technical virtuosity, the score traverses an awe inspiring, expressive spectrum. Within this musical battle of good and evil, the obsessive rhythmic drive of the outer movements frame the central Fantasia’s brooding recitatives and soulful lyricism. The three movements create a work of astounding dramatic proportions. Busoni confesses, “Il est très sévère et pas trop agréable.” The composer captures the isolation and anxiety of an artist uprooted by a horrifying war: “I am something between Don Quixote and the wandering Jew.” More then half a century later, Alfred Brendel writes, “The erosion of the years has not smoothed over [the] unyielding surface. No patina of familiarity softens its sharpness.”

Busoni heads the score with Frescobaldi’s quote: “Non è senza difficoltà che si arriva al fine.” The original heads Frescobaldi’s Toccata Nona, 1637. A substitution occurs when ‘Fatiga’ becomes ‘difficoltà’. This replacement has meaning on many levels. The most obvious would be the considerable physical difficulty of playing the piece. Also, the composer faced an uncertain future on his return to Berlin, after a full year of torturous indecision. More precisely, Busoni’s mounting fear, that the majority of life is already behind him, inhibits work on Doktor Faust, of which Toccata forms a constructive part. Finally, by quoting Frescobaldi, Busoni resonates with the artistic ideals of a very distant past. Their “intensity of expression,” and “freedom and beauty of form,” point a direction for future generations of composers, which will be obtained, ‘non è senza difficoltà’.

As with all mature Busoni compositions, Toccata is a highly integrated work. Practically all thematic material can be traced to two musical ideas heard at the beginning of the piece: a dotted rhythmic motif, and a minor third motif. These motifs undergo rhythmic variations, augmentations, inversions, and other treatments. Developments and consequent transformations unfold seamlessly. After 1900, Busoni begins to use a pure form of polyphony, ‘free polyphony’. He steadily moves from his self-described, “too tightly corseted” counterpoint of the Fantasia Contrapuntistica, towards a freer polyphonic language, evolving organically out of melodic invention. Often, Busoni combines the polyphony with the development of melodic and constructive elements, forming motifs of usually two or three notes. Surprisingly, this cellular technique becomes widely popular after the Second World War. Larry Sitsky, in his study of Busoni’s compositional growth, labels Busoni’s “ongoing permutation of cells” as a form of serial ‘row’. This form of serialism predates the early and strict 12-tone movement, a school Busoni rejects. Sitsky explains that Busoni’s method is prophetic of a more current trend, embraced by the avant-garde of today, rather than the “progressive composers between the two World Wars.”

The Preludio, Quasi Presto, arditamente, is a virtuoso piano fantasy on ‘The Ballad of Lippold’, from Busoni’s opera, Die Brautwahl, Act 1 Part 2. The sparking staccatissimo arpeggio figures depict flames engulfing the stake at the execution of a moneylender, accused of alchemy and witchcraft. Busoni’s libretto, based on a tale by E.T.A. Hoffmann, is drawn from actual events recorded in a 1595 chronicle of old Berlin. Several Doktor Faust motifs emerge in this fiery explosion. One is identical to the first arrival of Mephistopheles in Vorspiel II of Doktor Faust, a part of the opera already completed. Busoni’s Toccata joins his cunning revenants, Manasse and Mephistopheles, from these two operas.

Toccata’s central movement, Fantasia, Sostenuto, quasi adagio, is the most intricate and fascinating. Here, Busoni continues to link, both rhythmically and harmonically, the opening Preludio’s ‘Manasse music’ with his archetype of a ‘Mephisto motif’ from Doktor Faust. In seven contrasting sections, with varied tempi and expressive markings, the Fantasia seeks a lyric balance. Extensions, canonic variations, and the remarkable evolutions of thematic material, are predominantly based on a minor third interval. The dotted rhythm ‘Mephisto motif’ announces the opening of the Fantasia, and recurs throughout the movement, interrupting and punctuating the melodic explorations: a foreboding reminder of prevailing malevolent forces.

Fantasia’s lyrical sections, unlike the opening Preludio, penetrate enormous depth, and convey a marvelous array of emotions. Phrases alternately rise and contract, questioning and searching. Others find solace, providing momentary comfort. There are modulations to new key centers, approaching consummate beauty, as well as eerily subdued, plaintive polyphony. All efforts are thwarted by the ominous Mephisto gesture.

A bridge section, Animando assai, unleashes a flurry of rising broken chord figures, extending symmetrically. The left hand joins with leaping octaves, trumpeting the opening of the Chaconne theme. From this point onward, a malignant force marches precipitously forward. There is no turning back. There will be no compromise.

As the Chaconne strikes, hope is banished, and Toccata returns to the tyranny of a triumphant Mephistopheles.

The Ciaccona has the same rhythm as Bach’s Chaconne for violin, with the dance’s pronounced dotted rhythm pattern. Thus, the four bar theme becomes closely associated with the opening Prelude’s ‘Manasse music’. Busoni’s spellbinding variations, marked Allegro risoluto, proceed without harmonic or lyric relief.

The theme begins with a relentless and menacing fugato. Three-part inventions follow, and chordal settings explode with torrential octave accompaniment. A riveting dialogue ensues when the Chaconne theme straddles a two-part invention, itself structured on a tense adaptation of a minor third motif from the Fantasia. The argument breaks off abruptly, introducing one of Busoni’s ingenious musical puzzles: broken chord figurations rise and fall, only to be recognized as a thematic variation in retrospect, when, eight measures later, the Chaconne theme enters the bass, solves the riddle, and uncovers the question. Broken octaves recall Lisztian bravura and rise in fervent climax, then crumble in fractured pieces. The drama simmers sotto voce, for the coda finale.

A gripping two-part invention, Un poco stretto, is based on shredded themes from the Fantasia. This music is now identical with a ‘Mephisto motif’. The diabolic conversion is unmistakable. The Chaconne theme leaps in the bass and stalks the rising treble, becoming virtually indiscernible from another ‘Mephisto motif’.

The final page is a furious and demonic più stretto. In a grotesquely gleeful dance, octave passages whirl above the entrance of a plunging Mephistopheles. Toccata ends with two chordal thematic outbursts, intractably Mephistophelean, and symbiotically joined with Busoni’s ‘Manasse music’. In D major, with its inflexible rhythmic structure, a disturbing fanfare rings to silence. Thick basses restate the grim anthem in Toccata’s predominantly A flat minor key, then vanish in a full measure of silence, with fermata. A musical apparition. A bleak and potent epigraph.

Prélude et Etude (en Arpèges) 1923

“Come, follow me into the realm of music” — Ferruccio Busoni

In October 1922, the composer and pianist Isidor Philipp asks his close friend, Busoni, to contribute an original work for a volume of arpeggio studies. This would be part of a larger project of books devoted to the various demands of piano playing. At this time, several pianist-composers were preparing similar volumes. These publications often include original compositions that serve to exploit a specific issue. Busoni responds positively and humorously, trading asparagus for arpeggio: “L’INSPIRATION pour les asperges, sauce-Pédale.”

Correspondence with Philipp brings back memories of their delicious meals together in Paris, a far cry from Berlin, where food shortages are common due to rampant inflation. Commenting on the crippling recession, Busoni writes, “My dear wife has a daily struggle to find butter at 300,000 Marks a pound!”

Busoni is stricken with his final acute illness, and suffers lengthy interruptions in his creative endeavors. Confined to bed, he sets aside work on his own unique volumes of technical explorations, the Klavierübung. Despite these adverse circumstances, and with customary generosity, he begins in January 1923, and by February, he has a Prélude et Etude (en Arpèges) for his friend’s volume. The composition is one of Busoni’s finest late works. Egon Petri gives the first performance at the Deutsches Nationaltheater, Weimar, on 18 August, 1923.

For a year, Busoni’s illness prevents him from concertizing and without a publication, he has little hope of income. In a letter to Philipp, March 1923, Busoni refers to his inspired submission in typically diminutive terms, “Now I am most interested to hear of the fate of my two little pieces. I know you are so overburdened with work and occupied with countless projects and I have no right to divert your attention from them to my trifling affairs; but this time I shall be so bold as to ask you not to delay the decision. - Consider that I am sick, captive in more than one sense in a country on the verge of disaster, ignored by my publisher.” Although Philipp’s arpeggio volume is never released, Busoni’s Prélude et Etude (en Arpèges) appears on its own, published by Heugel in 1923.

The Prélude, Arioso - volante ma tranquillo, opens assai leggero, avec les 2 Pédales. Finely webbed, bi-tonal arpeggios spin, and begin to orbit melodic fragments. A single line rises, distinctly evocative, melancolico: tempo elastico, and trails off in the disintegrating ether of ascending arpeggios. An operatic section follows, con dolce estasi, sommessamente legato, with a descending melodic line, and an orchestral setting of muted base tremolos, quasi tema. This ardent and noble music will serve as inspiration for Mephistopheles’s invocation of Helena, in the Second Tableau of Doktor Faust. In an abbreviated reprieve of the first section, arpeggios ornament two benign apparitions of Busoni’s ‘death motif’. A coda, Un poco vivace e staccato, constructively resembles Toccata’s bridge section leading into the Ciaccona. The symmetrical passagework expands, then splinters apart, staccatissimo and rhythmic, dashing downward toward the awaiting Etude.

Busoni notes on the manuscript of this astonishing voyage, “De cette pièce je réponds avec meilleure conscience.”

The Etude, Allegro, violinisticamente articolato, a virtuoso tableau, is athletic and more straightforward. In late years, Busoni avoids use of a ‘thumbs under’ style of fingering. Here, as in his Toccata, he stems the tails, over and under the notes, to assign the two hand positions in the rising and falling arpeggios, overtly enhancing the adventures inherent in this new style of fingering. Right and left arms cross for lengthy passages, a predicament further amplified by twisting stretches toward extreme ranges of bass and treble.

A dramatic base octave theme, con carattere, alternates with lyrical, and at times lush, melodic episodes, marked più dolce, un poco appassionata, and con affeto. The final section, sotto voce, occultamente, velato, leads to widely extended broken chord formations in both hands, rotating and rising con fuoco, to a strident eruption. The pedal is held throughout the last seven bars, ending with an immaculate, shocking, C major vortex.

Busoni expresses his mystical world with Prélude et Etude (en Arpèges). He overcomes the mundane and voyages to his distant dream sphere, an idyllic world of shimmering auras and metaphysical bells. This is the ‘Realm of Music’ the composer chooses to inhabit, far more than his corporeal, world-weary reality.

“Come, follow me into the realm of music. Here is the iron fence which separates the earthly from the eternal...Here there is no end to the astonishment, and yet from the beginning we feel it is homelike. You still hear nothing, because everything sounds. Now, already you begin to differentiate. Listen, every star has its rhythm, and every world its measure. And on each of the stars and each of the worlds, the heart of every separate living being is beating in its own individual way. And all the beats agree and are separate and yet are a whole…Unthought-of scales extend like bands from one world to another…All, all melodies, heard before or never heard, resound completely and simultaneously...they are themselves the souls of millions of beings in millions of epochs...Now you realize how planets and hearts are one, that nowhere can there be an end or an obstacle; that infinity lives completely and indivisibly in the spirit of all beings; that each being is both illimitably great and illimitably small: the greatest expansion is like to a point: and, that light, sound, movement and power are identical, and each separate and all united, they are life.”

Ferruccio Busoni, from The Realm of Music. Posted in a letter to his wife, from Dayton, Ohio, 3 March, 1910, and prepared as an epilogue to Outline of a New Aesthetic of Music.

Nuit de Noël Esquisse pour le Piano 1908

An Expression of Joy, Avec Solennité

In December 1908, Busoni composes his sparkling miniature for piano, Nuit de Noël, as a musical offering for the New Year. The dedication reads: to Frida Kindler. Busoni has an ancient, rather than Christian, orientation to the holiday season, making this a time of thanksgiving and rejuvenation. He often commemorates significant dates with artistic gestures of optimism and hope. This tradition begins in childhood, when composing takes the air of a momentous and exquisite occasion. Busoni writes to Hugo Leichtentritt, from Zurich, 1919: “I have something of a harmless superstition which causes me to write a short piece at the turn of every year.”

Busoni’s title references the Noëls of the French clavecinistes, rather than songs sung at Christmas time. The word Noël does not become associated with Christmas songs until the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. In early usage, Noël is a cry for attention, or exclamation of joy, as in newness or good news. For example, in Guillaume de Villeneuve’s late 13th century poem, Crieries de Paris, a vegetable merchant advertises his wares. ‘News! News!’ Thus, Nuit de Noël is Busoni’s ‘expression of joy’. He has just completed the ‘short score’ of his opera Die Brautwahl and begins a seminal period of artistic achievement, 1909.

Noëls borrow folk melodies, and almost all are parodies that add new words to replace original Latin texts. Similarly, Busoni often borrows folk and existing melodies, a compositional technique wedded to his philosophy of the ‘Eternal Calendar of Music’; melodies found in one generation, region or ethnicity, reappear in another time period, in varying cultures, genres, and countries. In Nuit de Noël, Busoni assimilates an old Sicilian Christmas carol, ‘O Sanctissima’, also popular in Germany as ‘O du fröhliche’.

Nuit de Noël is a masterpiece of color and style, an auspicious beginning for the New Year. This glowing miniature is best understood in the context of Busoni’s Elegies for piano, his opera Die Brautwahl, and the Berceuse for piano, composed six months hence. Spectral and disembodied atmospheres, artful pedals, and blended sonorities are all qualities of Busoni’s mature period. The folk elements, the extended dissonant ostinatos, and the floating rhythmic simplicity, have more in common with Liszt’s enigmatic late piano works, than Impressionism. This is a prevalent, but mistaken, classification.

Marked Andantino, très calme, les 2 Pèdales, bells emanate from a gently rocking, far away tarantella. A dissonant ostinato trill appears, followed by the entrance of a rustic folk melody, un peu vivement, sans Pédale. A brief memory of celebration peers through the dream-scape, as passages are marked for timpani and trumpets. A single crescendo splits the cold landscape with a bright echo of bells, très calme, and quickly evaporates into midnight, as the opening theme returns. The trill reoccurs, pianissimo, 2 Pédales toujours, becomes submerged in falling hypnotic bells, and finally dissolves in D minor triads. A perfect C major cadence, avec solennité, serves as a grateful benediction to end the piece.

Fantasia nach Johann Sebastian Bach

Alla Memoria di mio Padre Ferdinando Busoni † il 12 Maggio 1909 †

Busoni writes to his wife Gerda, from Colorado Springs, in 1910: “No year in my life has been so full up as this one which is just over: the richest in work, experiences and achievements - and I feel that I am still going upwards. Everything good, my Gerda, is with us.” The date is April 1st, and the composer marks his 44th birthday surveying a year of extravagant artistic discovery. In December 1908, he composes the enchanting Esquisse pour le Piano, Nuit de Noël. A hectic concert schedule fills the first few months of 1909. Once free, Busoni thrives in an intense and prolific phase, dedicating many compositions to the younger generations of composers. From June through October, his accomplishments include, Berceuse for piano, Fantasia nach Johann Sebastian Bach for piano, the four volumes of An die Jugend for piano, and Busoni’s Konzertmassige Interpretation of Schoenberg’s Op. 11 Nr. 2 Klavierstück. The orchestral masterpiece, Berceuse élégiaque, also dates from these months.

The Berceuse élégiaque is written in memory of Anna Busoni, and Fantasia nach Johann Sebastian Bach is composed for Ferdinando Busoni. Both parents died a few months apart in 1909, and these pieces are obituaries, musical eulogies of bereavement and mourning.

Fantasia nach Johann Sebastian Bach (Alla Memoria di mio Padre Ferdinando Busoni † il 12 Maggio 1909 †) is in Volume Four of the seven-volume Bach-Busoni editions.

The Bach editions occupy all of Busoni’s adult life, and range from visionary recastings of the great original works, to the immeasurable wisdom recorded in Book 2 of his edition of the Well-Tempered Klavier. There are two separate collections of Busoni’s Bach editions. In 25 Volumes, the Klavierwerke, 1894-1923, presents Bach’s complete keyboard works. The other collection is a six-volume publication from 1916 and holds Busoni’s transcriptions and arrangements. A seventh volume is added to the six-volume set and these are published in 1920. A posthumous eighth, 1925, contains the second edition of Busoni’s Klavierübung.

The 1916 and 1920 editions differ only in the addition of the seventh volume, which has all new material. The compositions in Volume 1 and 2, Bearbeitungen, are arrangements. Volume I, Lehrstücke, are study pieces, and Volume 2, Meisterstücke, contains compositions for concert use. Volume 1 opens with a dedication, Widmung. This miniature combines the tones B.A.C.H. with the C major Fugue from Book I of the Well-Tempered Klavier. There are, eighteen short Preludes and a Fughetta BWV 924-42, a revised version of the Two-part and Three-part Inventions from the 1892 publication, Four Duets BWV 802-5, and Prelude, Fugue and Allegro in E flat major BWV 998. Volume 2 has, the Chromatic Fantasia and Fugue, Concerto for piano and strings in D minor, and the Goldberg Variations. Volume 3 holds the virtuoso transcriptions of organ works. These are, the Prelude and Fugue in D major BWV 532, the ‘St. Anne’ Prelude and Triple Fugue in E flat major BWV 552, the Toccatas and Fugues in D minor BWV 565, and C major BWV 564, and ten Choral Preludes. The Chaconne for solo violin is also found in this edition. The transcriptions in Volume 3 date from the 1880’s through 1909.

The works in Volume 4 are Nachdichtungen, original compositions based on motifs or themes from Bach. These are, Fantasia nach Johann Sebastian Bach (Alla Memoria di mio Padre Ferdinando Busoni † il 12 Maggio 1909 †), and Preludio, Fuga e Fuga figurata, from An die Jugend. A realization of the Capriccio on the Departure of a beloved Brother BWV 992 bears a dedication to Arthur Schnabel. Fantasia, Adagio and Fuga in C minor, and Fantasia Contrapuntistica (Versio minore and Versio definitivo) round off this heroic collection. Volume 5, originally published in 1894, is the Well-Tempered Klavier Book 1, while Volume 6 is devoted to the Well-Tempered Klavier Book 2. Busoni notes in his diary: “Bach’s ‘well-tempered’, Part 1 for pianists, Part 2 for composers: my testament.”

Volume 7 is compiled in 1920 and has, three Toccatas BWV 914-916, and a critical edition of the Fantasie and Fugue in A minor BWV 904, dedicated to Hugo Leichtentritt in appreciation for his 1916 Busoni biography. Here is Busoni’s creative grouping of three separate Bach pieces; Fantasia and Fugue BWV 905, Andante BWV 969, and Scherzo BWV 844. There follows, a transcription for cello and piano of the Chromatic Fantasia and Fugue, 1917, Improvisation for two Pianos on ‘Wie wohl ist mir’, and new versions of the puzzle canons from Musical Offering. The final work is Sonatina in Signo Joannis Sebastiani Magni, a Nachdichtung of the little Fantasy and Fugue BWV 905, found earlier in this same volume in its original form. Just as Widmung dedicates the seven volumes, the fifth Sonatina is Busoni’s signature on his completed effort.

Throughout his life, Busoni returns to Bach’s works for inspiration and rediscovery, believing the music is both essential and potential. As a child, Bach is his favorite composer, and this is where he learns the art of structure and counterpoint. From earliest youth, Busoni is a natural, intuitive contrapuntist; he joyfully combines unrelated themes to victorious solutions. By age ten, he has already developed prodigious skill improvising polyphonically.

Busoni’s prophetic original compositions, based on Bach themes and fragments, are known as Nachdichtungen, and stand as monument to a lifetime of study. Nachdichtungen expose the thinking process and colossal imagination behind many of Busoni’s compositions, and confirm his creative perspective as intuitive, rather than intellectual. These structural masterpieces embody a free, visionary aesthetic, grounded in the composer’s artistic ideals, and his philosophical concept of the ‘omnipresence of Time’. For Busoni, the past and future are one, and in the Nachdichtungen, they are inseparable. Busoni looks back for structure and counterpoint. He looks to the future, and frees polyphony from strict control, elevating it, both melodically and constructively, above harmony. The freed polyphony and the constructive adventures produce a new, fluid harmony.

Following the death of his father, Ferdinando, on May 12th, Busoni composes Fantasia nach Johann Sebastian Bach in three days, during June 1909. Ferdinando Busoni introduced his son to Bach. Busoni notes, in the epilogue to the seven volume Bach editions, “I have my father to thank for my good fortune, because during my childhood he insisted on my studying Bach at a time and in a country that did not rank the master much higher than a Carl Czerny. How did such a man, in his ambition for his son, manage to hit upon exactly the right thing? And showed me a path that I have never entirely abandoned, even though I always retained the Latin characteristics inherent in my nature.”

Busoni’s Fantasia introduces a new compositional form. Nachdichtungen are not transcriptions or paraphrases. The Bach themes, fragments, or motifs, found in these compositions, are often far removed from their original contexts. Here, Bach’s musical ideas are re-conceptualized, restructured, and stylistically transformed. The Nachdichtungen illustrate Busoni’s belief that Bach’s music is both ‘essential’ and ‘potential’. It is possible to view a Nachdichtung as a deeply personal commentary on existing material, combined with Busoni’s original music. When Busoni premieres the Fantasia in Bechstein Hall, London, 16 October, 1909, the critic for The Times understands the Nachdichtung: “The piano was used to interpret and translate, not merely to reproduce.”

Fantasia nach Johann Sebastian Bach begins in F minor. There is no time signature. The opening prelude is marked Molto tranquillo e gravemente, serioso, sostenuto e sempre sottovoce. Darkly shadowed, a single note strand rises from low in the bass, improvising sottovoce. Out of this timeless and liquid texture, basses mournfully intone a reference to a Chorale theme, ‘Christ, der du bist der helle Tag’. Meditative and trance-like, repeated bell tones begin to recall Busoni’s ‘death motif’. The first section ends with a phrase from this Chorale, in A flat major, haloed by gentle arpeggios. The tonal structure mirrors the composer’s journey. As F minor moves to A flat major, unbearable grief gives way to acceptance and peace.

The second section continues the improvisatory style. In an inwardly tempered dialogue, Busoni introduces a short descending chromatic phrase, and joins this dolente figure with his repeating-note ‘death motif’. A repressed organ-like cadenza, non brilliante, sinks to a doleful murmur of bells, tolling the ‘death motif’, and breaking off in silence.

This leads to a rich, cathedral-worthy, organ setting of Bach’s Chorale, ‘Christ, der du bist der helle Tag’, already implied within bell tones of the opening prelude. Each phrase of the Chorale setting, Con Sonoritá, is interrupted by a stunning echo of the ‘death motif’. Marked sospiro, a musical sigh is hushed within three repeated chords. Antiphonal, and otherworldly.

The fourth section, parlando, begins with Bach’s Chorale Partita BWV 766, a first variation on the preceding Chorale. Busoni notes that this variation could be scored for bass-clarinet and cor anglaise. The composer describes this poignant duet, “as if stuttering and interrupted by sighs, in the language of a soul begging for consolation.”

The fifth section, in F Major, Allegretto, is a free reworking of Bach’s Fughetta, ‘Gottes Sohn ist Kommen’, also recognized as ‘In dulci jubilo’ BWV 708. The original Fughetta’s 22 bars are deconstructed, then reassembled in an entirely new format, and extended 40 measures. The energetic climax, sempre più fuoco, abruptly ends, modulates back to a pianissimo F minor chord, and leads to the last variation of BWV 766.

A profound and intricately contrapuntal quartet follows, Andante, quasi-Adagio, il tutto sottovoce. Throughout the three-stave manuscript, remote arias flicker and extinguish, while basses, molto sostenuto, support the framework, stretching the lyrical Chorale phrases. Busoni’s ‘death motif’ becomes chant-like. New material enters, leading to the Fantasia’s celestial climax, the Chorale Prelude, ‘Lob sei dem allmächtigen Gott’ BWV 602. This Chorale theme is closely related to the others, and shares similarities with ‘Wie wohl ist mir’. Ringing gloriously in A flat major, the complex counterpoint eases into an ethereal F major transposition.

A muffled Adagio, based on the third phrase of the Chorale, ‘Christ, der du bist der helle Tag’, returns to earth and the composer’s bereavement. The quote serves as a bridge to an altered version of the Fantasia’s second section.

A coda, Riconciliato, (tranquillissimo), with bases marked quasi campana, transposes the arpeggio-laced Chorale setting from the end of the Fantasia’s opening prelude. Here, it appears in F major, sounding full of grace. PAX EJ! is inscribed over the score. Ferdinando Busoni was a restless spirit. He and his son Ferruccio had a complicated and often contentious relationship. This epitaph, a musical prayer for Ferdinando’s soul, is also Busoni's plea for the reconciliation of his conflicted bereavement. The piece ends with two chordal statements of the ‘death motif’. The first, in F major, crowns the calm reverberations of the arpeggio passage. The final chords fall to the base, mancando, where the ‘death motif’ resounds within an unstable, unresolved, F minor.

Busoni writes to his mother, “The piece dedicated to the memory of Babbo is written from the heart and all those who have heard it were moved to tears, without knowing of its intimate destination.”

Prelude and Triple Fugue in E Flat Major for Organ BWV 552

(St. Anne)

Johann Sebastian Bach

Transcribed for piano by Ferruccio Busoni

Bach composed the Prelude and Triple Fugue in E Flat Major for Organ, known as the ‘St. Anne’, in his latest, most mature period. The Prelude serves as an introduction to the great chorales that appear in 1739, in Part III of Bach’s Clavierübung. The five voice Triple Fugue can be found at the end, Bach’s signature on this towering edition. Albert Schweitzer, the renowned Bach scholar, comments, “The Prelude...symbolizes Godlike majesty,” and, “[The Triple Fugue] is a symbol of the Trinity.”

Busoni’s transcription of the E Flat Major Prelude and Fugue is the second of his four large organ transcriptions and dates from 1890. The composer is teaching at the Conservatoire, in Helsingfors, Finland, when it is first presented. In his transcription of this late work of Bach’s, Busoni describes constructing “An harmonic suspension (instead of a full close) at the end of the ...Prelude, followed by a cadence-like transition to the Fugue.” He omits “18 measures previously heard,” from the Prelude. Explaining his subtitle, “Frei Bearbeitet,” Busoni states, “Free arrangements are, in view of some irreconcilable diversities in the two instruments, not inadmissible.” The score includes Busoni’s interpretive ideas on phrasings, tempi and dynamics.

© 2004, 2015 by Jeni Slotchiver