Ferruccio Busoni (1866–1924)
Piano Music • 5
Dante Michelangeli Benvenuto Ferruccio Busoni was
born at Empoli, near Florence, on 1 April 1866, the
only child of a clarinettist father and a pianist mother.
He made his début as a pianist in Trieste in 1874, going
to Vienna for study the following year. On the advice of
Brahms he moved to Leipzig in 1885, where he studied
with Carl Reinecke, before teaching spells at the
conservatories in Helsinki and Moscow. Performance
occupied much of his attention until the turn of the
twentieth century, when composing began to assume a
new importance, though never (to his regret)
dominance, in his career. Aside from living in Zurich
for most of the First World War, he resided in Berlin
from 1894 until his death on 27 July 1924.
The essence of Busoni’s music lies in its synthesis
of his Italian and German ancestry: emotion and
intellect, the imaginative and the rigorous. Despite
acclaim from composer and performer colleagues, his
music largely remained the preserve of an informed few.
Neither inherently conservative nor demonstratively
radical, his harmonic and tonal innovations were wholly
bound up with an essentially re-creative approach to the
musical past that has only gained wider currency over
recent decades. Busoni left a substantial body of
orchestral music, a fair number of chamber works and
songs [a selection is on 8.557245] and four operas (the
last, Doktor Faust, being his magnum opus though left
unfinished at his death), but piano music constitutes the
largest part of his output. Bach was a pervasive presence
from the beginning, whether in the contrapuntal aspect
of his music or in Busoni’s repertoire as a performer; a
process of assimilation culminating with the Bach-Busoni Edition that was published in 1918. Busoni’s
later Bach work is arguably more creative interpretation
than arrangement, though strength of personality is
evident from his very earliest transcriptions.
Published in July 1918 as part of Volume Three of
‘Bach-Busoni’, the transcription of the Prelude and
Fugue in E flat dates from around 1890 and represents
Busoni’s approach to Bach at its most grand. Such is
apparent in the Prelude, with its powerful rhythmic
unisons and muscular part-writing which convey the
harmonic solidity and contrapuntal intricacy that gives
this music its inherent strength; as equally in the Fugue,
building methodically and with a cumulative
momentum from its initial understatement to an
apotheosis that confirms it among the most monumental
of all Bach’s organ works.
1883 was a decisive year for Busoni. Having arrived
in Vienna at the beginning of a two-year stay, he made
the acquaintance of Brahms, whose influence soon
turned his composing away from the emulation of
Baroque, Classical and early Romantic models towards
an idiom more wholly of the present. The immediate
result of this stylistic reorientation was the Six Études,
published just a year later as his Op. 16. The existence,
however, of four further substantial études (including
the Étude en forme de variations, as featured in Volume
Two of this series [8.555699]) suggests that Busoni
might have intended to extend the sequence, perhaps as
far as a cycle of 24.
As to the present set of Études, the preludial first
acknowledges an audible debt to Brahms in its flowing
passage-work and mellifluous harmony, while the second
is redolent perhaps of Mendelssohn in its nimble
figuration as well as in the more rhapsodic nature of its
central section. The third is a definite highpoint of
Busoni’s early maturity, recalling Schumann in its
ceaseless underlying figuration though with a decidedly
Italianate suavity, contrasted in the fourth with a charged
pianism which emulates Chopin at his most
demonstrative. The fifth has been designated a Fugue and
can be seen as a complement to the forthright Bach
transcriptions that Busoni was starting to include in his
recitals, then the sixth is a resourceful Scherzo which
finds a persuasive accord between the hitherto
incompatible virtuosity of Liszt and Brahms in what is a
bravura end to the overall sequence.
If the Études mark the onset of Busoni’s most
intensive phase as a virtuoso in the true Romantic sense,
the Sechs Stücke (Six Pieces) composed in 1895–96 can
be seen as its effective endpoint. Other than the Vierte
Balletszene (included on Volume Three of this series
[8.570249]) from two years earlier, he had written
surprisingly little piano music during this period and
was not to return to the medium for over a decade.
These six diverse and yet complementary pieces are
thus a drawing-together of stylistic influences, as well as
a setting-out of compositional and pianistic intentions
that were not to be pursued.
The first piece, Schwermut, starts with powerfully
undulating figuration across the keyboard such as
Busoni was to refine in his Piano Concerto but here
employs more for its rhetorical grandeur. The second
piece, Frohsinn, has a nonchalance and deftly propelled
vigour that make for highly superior salon music;
something which the third piece, Scherzino, emulates in
its capering demeanour and the teasing interplay
between melody and accompaniment. The next two are
much the longest of the set: the fourth piece, Fantasia in
modo antico, unfolds in a nobly Bachian manner before
switching to fugal writing that draws the previous ideas
into an altogether more intensive discourse; whereas the
fifth piece, Finnische Ballade, is a through-composed
study in folk-inflected themes that are by turns
atmospheric and eloquent. The brief sixth piece, Exeunt
omnes, dismisses such introspection in a characterful
display of virtuosity.
Virtuosity is the defining element of the Variations
and Fugue in Free Form on Chopin’s Prelude in C
minor (included on Volume Two of this series
[8.555699]) that Busoni had composed in Vienna during
1884–85 and which fairly sums up the many possibilities
of Romantic pianism. The older composer had come to
see the work as excessive and, in April 1922, produced
the Zehn Variationen über ein Präludium von Chopin—substantially compressed and rewritten in line with his
mature aesthetic; a version curtailed further for the
posthumous second edition of his summative
Klavierübung, published in 1925.
The Chopin Prelude itself is the visionary twentieth
from the set of 24 Preludes, originally with its striking
diminuendo from forte to piano but now given a
dynamic overhaul typical of the late Busoni. The first
variation unfolds with a methodical lilt which the
second transforms into dancing figuration, while the
third opens up new harmonic perspectives that the
fourth accordingly intensifies. The fifth variation strikes
an angular tone that the sixth evolves into something
decidedly Mephistophelian, then the seventh adopts an
improvisatory manner such as the eighth blithely
counters with its capricious demeanour. Opening with a
peremptory call to attention, the ninth variation adopts
the manner of a culminating fugue that, in the tenth,
becomes transformed into a waltz that is a ‘hommage’
as affectionate as it is ironic. The brief coda then evinces
an urgent momentum that closes the work in a brusque
and decisive fashion.
Richard Whitehouse
