When Ferruccio Busoni died, in 1924, the composer Kurt Weill wrote that “with him, one of the greatest artistic personalities of all time has passed.”
Weill, then a rising star in Weimar-era Berlin, had been Busoni’s student, a witness to the life of an extraordinary musician: a restless composer, performer, writer and teacher, as well as a mentor to the likes of Schoenberg and Sibelius. All the changes to music history at the start of the 20th century, Weill wrote, “were initiated or at least announced by him.”
You could call Busoni the first truly modern composer. He embodied a new era not only in his field, as a progressive thinker liberated from convention, but also more broadly in the world, as a globe-trotting polyglot who welcomed the transformative powers of technology.
Busoni had enormous respect for the past, too, and in that regard he may be more appropriately described as the first postmodern composer. He viewed music history not as a patchwork chronology but as a cohesive entity constantly informing the present. His sound was undeniably new yet deliberatively familiar, as he crafted an aesthetic of everything.
“His compositions were little understood, even by some of his students,” the Busoni scholar Erinn E. Knyt has written. “Teeming with allusions to the past that were audibly juxtaposed to passages displaying new timbres, textures, harmonies and scales, they seemed to stand outside main musical trends of his era.”
Hence the years he dedicated to transcribing the works of Bach, a project that forms the core of his legacy among performers today. (He is also famous for his enormous Piano Concerto and the opera “Doktor Faust,” though those are more talked about than programmed.) Quieter, but more essential, is his influence as a teacher, with a lineage that can be traced through the 20th century, and perhaps into the 21st: There is still much we can learn from Busoni, an advocate of possibility who gave the world a timeless playbook for thinking about and creating music.
BUSONI WAS BORN in 1866, to professional musicians in Italy. Mostly taught at home, he was a piano prodigy, and by 7 he was already performing and composing. Not long after that, he started at the Vienna Conservatory, where his playing was praised by the eminent critic Eduard Hanslick.
Hanslick wasn’t the only luminary the young Busoni crossed paths with in Vienna. He met Liszt, and later Brahms. But he didn’t really feel at home. As he roamed the German-speaking world, he felt he had “nobody with whom I can communicate as my true self,” he wrote. “The misfortune of having matured young is that one is unable to associate with people of the same age, while older people have no wish to associate with oneself, hence: total isolation.”
Starting in his 20s, Busoni began to travel more widely. He took a teaching post in Helsinki, where he met Sibelius, who was around the same age and would go on to become Finland’s greatest composer. Sibelius was never his student, but the two met almost every day to discuss music, and their exchanges continued into the 1920s.
After Helsinki, Busoni taught in Moscow, and then at the New England Conservatory in Boston. Throughout, his correspondence was prolific. He averaged multiple letters a day, most of them substantial and some of them essayistic. In one, he might think through his preference of Berlioz (“the only composer who always works toward inventiveness”) over Wagner (whose music was “sexual, inactively erotic, thus: lascivious”). He sparred with Schoenberg, whom he ultimately supported so passionately that he hosted an early performance of “Pierrot Lunaire” in his Berlin apartment.
Busoni was especially opinionated about American culture. In addition to teaching in Boston, he traveled as a performer, returning for visits from Europe throughout his life. In 1904, he wrote to a friend, “I am beginning to have my doubts about the ‘future’ of America.” Some of his complaints were petty; he didn’t like “elevators from the kitchen to the dining room, bathrooms adjoining the bedroom, recessed cupboards and similar tomfoolery.”
But he was also perceptive in decrying sensationalism, and the American meaning of success (“a concept which has a purely financial meaning”). Above all, he thought that the country had “founded its ideal on quantity, and not on quality, about which everyone is in perfect agreement.”
Busoni didn’t find happiness in the United States, and settled contentment eluded him in Europe as well. He accepted a teaching job in Bologna, Italy, but spent most of his time there longing to return to Berlin. After World War I broke out, he moved to Switzerland, where he stayed for five years.
REGARDLESS OF HIS BUSY SCHEDULE as a teacher and performer, and regardless of upheavals like the war, Busoni always remained productive, even prolific. He was published by the time he was an adolescent, but he began writing earlier and, starting in the 1880s, transcribed enough of Bach’s keyboard music to fill multiple volumes.
Busoni encouraged his students to transcribe the works of old masters, and his own music reflects how deeply he internalized the Western canon. His “Fantasia Contrappuntistica” (1910), for example, spins a half-hour of musical material to complement Bach’s “The Art of Fugue.” Elsewhere, in Lisztian fashion, he wrote fantasias on famous themes, like those from “Carmen,” and based an “Elegy” on his “Turandot” opera (an earlier version of the story than Puccini’s).
Most of Busoni’s music, though, was not so literal in its inspiration, like his Piano Concerto (1904), a piece that is beloved but rarely performed. (The Berlin Philharmonic, which gave the premiere, programmed it this fall, with Kirill Gerstein, its reigning interpreter, as the soloist. It was the first time the orchestra had presented it since 1921, with Busoni at the keyboard.) In a video for the Philharmonic’s Digital Concert Hall, Gerstein compared Busoni to James Joyce, saying that in a score of allusions at every turn, “each phrase reminds us of something else.”
Gerstein described the concerto as “a summation of everything that had been achieved until then, in terms of piano technique.” It’s as if, he added, someone took you by the hand and guided you through a gallery of the classical tradition, saying: “This here is Bach. Schumann did this. And Tchaikovsky did this.”
The concerto can appear undisciplined and discursive, with a running time of 70 minutes, a medley-like approach to style and a finale that brings in a male choir for a paean to nature. Some dislike what they see as its extravagance, but Busoni, as he wrote in a letter, was “a worshiper of form.”
He believed that “every idea, every motif, every object demands its own form.” And this begins to make sense, on a musical and formal level, with Busoni’s writings and teachings in mind.
His thoughts on composition began to solidify and spread with the 1907 essay “Sketch of a New Aesthetic of Music,” in which he argued, “The art forms that endure the longest are the ones that remain truest to the nature of their particular medium, purest in their means and ends.” To that end, he viewed history as vital to the present and future, a philosophy that would come to be known as Young Classicality.
Young Classicality has more in common with postmodernism than it does with, say, the nearly contemporaneous Neo-Classicism of Stravinsky. Busoni favored synthesis for the sake of possibility, with an emphasis on orchestration, timbre and spatialization. That differed from other disruptive thinkers of the time, like Schoenberg, Stravinsky and Ives.
As Knyt has observed, Schoenberg brought Baroque forms to serialism; Stravinsky adopted Baroque mannerisms and combined them with “pungent dissonances”; and Ives blended quotations of hymns and popular songs with “bitonality and dissonant chord clusters.” Yet overall, Knyt wrote, “these composers utilized a more consistently modern treatment of the musical language.”
Busoni instead, according to Knyt, “audibly juxtaposed musics and scales from different eras as well as folk songs, syncretically drawing upon a wealth of traditions.” And that model, especially as serialism has fallen out of fashion, has proved the most enduring.
His students, though, didn’t copy his style. Most of them wrote with both the “modern treatment” Knyt mentions and Busoni’s worldview. That, if anything is what connected their careers. Many of them would later say that he didn’t teach them how to compose, but how to be composers. He encouraged them to take in culture beyond music. (Busoni was close with the architects of the Bauhaus, who had similar views of artistic synthesis, and of the relationship between form and function.) And he often held informal, talkative coffee hours at his home.
Edgar Varèse described his and Busoni’s opinions as “often poles apart,” yet said, “I am convinced that it was those long talks with Busoni, during which new horizons seemed to be constantly opening, that helped crystallize my ideas and confirmed my belief that new means must be found to liberate sound.” Weill recalled that Busoni “allowed us to breathe his aura, which emanated in every sphere, but eventually always manifested itself in music.”
“It was a mutual exchange of ideas in the very best sense, with no attempt to force an opinion, no autocracy, and not the slightest sign of envy or malice,” Weill added. “Any piece of work that revealed student talent and ability was immediately recognized and enthusiastically received.”
Those students would go on to have students of their own, creating a lineage that, Knyt has argued, includes composers who are still alive, like John Corigliano. The same exacting ideas about timbre and orchestration, and Mozartean precision, that influenced Weill in the 1920s could even be heard in the later, wildly different works of Morton Feldman.
In the end it was a student, Philipp Jarnach, who completed Busoni’s opera “Doktor Faust,” which was left unfinished at his death in Berlin. Not only his magnum opus, it is an encapsulation of his style, with an astonishing rightness in the orchestration and a treatment of the Faust myth, distinct from Goethe’s famous plays and Gounod’s opera adaptation, as free and generous as his views on musical traditions.
“Doktor Faust” premiered in 1925, but like the Piano Concerto has since been more a rare treat than a repertory standard. Its importance, though, transcends performance history. As Stefan Zweig observed while Busoni was still alive, impact, the kind he continues to have on musicians today, is a success in its own right.
“And the influence that Busoni has had on our generation,” Zweig wrote, “not just as a pianist as most people take him to be, but as theoretician, teacher, innovator, creator — in short as a master in the old sense of the word which made the man and his work one — will perhaps be fully appreciated only by the next.”
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