Ferruccio Busoni (1866-1924), who died 100 years ago last July, was a musical renaissance man. The Italian composer, pianist, conductor, teacher, writer, and editor has been called “the first truly modern composer.” He is also remembered for numerous enduring transcriptions of the music of J.S. Bach. Busoni associated with such a disparate group of contemporaries as Schoenberg, Sibelius, and Edgard Varèse. His small circle of students included Kurt Weill.
The pianist Alfred Brendel observed that Busoni’s playing “signifies the victory of reflection over bravura.” This artistry is preserved unsatisfactorily through a series of Welte-Mignon piano rolls. His students and contemporaries insisted that they did not represent his true performance style. Busoni’s gramophone recordings, none of which included his own works, were limited. Many of his original recordings were destroyed in a 1912 fire at the Columbia Graphophone Company. After one session, Busoni complained that he had to adjust his playing and use of the pedal to “this devilish machine.”
In a 1922 recording of Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsody No. 13, Russian-American pianist Kirill Gerstein marvels at the way Busoni “manages to melt the piano so that it doesn’t sound like an object of wood and metal, but smoke and illusions.” (Rebecca Schmid)
J.S. Bach: Prelude and Fugue in C Major, BWV 846
Chopin: Prelude in A Major, Op. 28 No. 7/Etude in G-flat Major, Op. 10 No. 5/Nocturne in F-sharp Major, Op. 15 No. 2/Etude in E minor, Op. 25 No. 5
Liszt: Hungarian Rhapsody No. 13 in A minor
Music is so constituted that every context is a new context and should be treated as an ‘exception’. The solution of a problem, once found, cannot be reapplied to a different context. Our art is a theatre of surprise and invention, and of the seemingly unprepared. The spirit of music arises from the depths of our humanity and is returned to the high regions whence it has descended on mankind.
-Ferruccio Busoni
Recordings
- Busoni’s 1922 English Columbia sessions Naxos