Ferruccio Busoni

Portrait by Umberto Boccioni, 1916, Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Moderna, Rome

Ferruccio Busoni (1 April 1866 – 27 July 1924) (given names: Ferruccio Dante Michelangiolo Benvenuto)[lower-roman 1] was an Italian composer, pianist, conductor, editor, writer, and piano teacher. He was born in Empoli, the son of professional musicians. Initially trained by his father, he later studied at the Vienna Conservatory and then with Wilhelm Mayer and Carl Reinecke. In the ensuing years, he devoted himself to composing, teaching, and touring as a virtuoso pianist. He settled in Berlin in 1894 but spent the years of World War I in Italy and Switzerland. Busoni died in Berlin at the age of 58. In addition to his piano works, he also composed four operas, the best known of which, Doktor Faust, was left unfinished at the time of his death.

Biography

Early career

Ferruccio Busoni, 1877

Busoni was born in the Tuscan town of Empoli, the only child of two professional musicians, Ferdinando, a clarinettist, and Anna (née Weiss), a pianist. The family shortly afterwards moved to Trieste. A child prodigy, largely taught by his father, he began performing and composing at the age of seven. In an autobiographical note he comments "My father knew little about the pianoforte and was erratic in rhythm, so he made up for these shortcomings with an indescribable combination of energy, severity and pedantry."[2] Busoni made his public debut as a pianist in a concert with his parents at the Schiller-Verein in Trieste on 24 November 1873 playing the first movement of Mozart's Sonata in C Major, and pieces by Schumann and Clementi.[3] Commercially promoted by his parents in a series of further concerts, he was later to say "I never had a childhood."[4] In 1875 he made his concerto debut playing Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 24.[5]

From the ages of nine to eleven, with the help of a patron, Busoni studied at the Vienna Conservatory. His first performances in Vienna were glowingly received by the critic Eduard Hanslick.[6] in 1877 he heard the playing of Franz Liszt, and was introduced to the composer who admired his playing.[7] Leaving Vienna he had a brief period of study in Graz with Wilhelm Mayer, and conducted a performance of his own composition Stabat Mater (Op. 55 in the composer's initial numbering sequence)[lower-roman 2] (now lost) in 1879. Others of his early pieces were published at this time, including settings of Ave Maria (Opp. 1 and 2) and some piano pieces.[6]

Busoni was elected in 1881 to the Accademia Filharmonica of Bologna. In the mid 1880s he was based in Vienna where he met with Karl Goldmark and helped to prepare the vocal score for the latter's 1886 opera, Merlin. He also met with Johannes Brahms, to whom he dedicated two sets of piano Etudes, and who recommended him to undertake study in Leipzig with Carl Reinecke.[6] During this period he supported himself by giving recitals, and also by the financial support of a patron, the Baronin von Tedesco. He also continued to compose, and made his first attempt at an opera, Sigune, which he worked on from 1886 to 1889 before abandoning the project.[10] In a letter he describes how, finding himself penniless in Leipzig, he appealed to the publisher Schwalm to take his compositions. Schwalm demurred but said he would commission a fantasy on Peter Cornelius's opera The Barber of Baghdad for fifty marks down, and a hundred on completion. The next morning Busoni turned up at Schwalm's office, and asked for 150 marks, handing over the completed work: "I worked from nine at night to three thirty, without a piano, and not knowing the opera beforehand."[11]

Helsingfors, Moscow, America 1888-1894

Cover of first edition of Busoni's edition of Bach's The Well-Tempered Clavier, 1894

In 1888 the musicologist Hugo Riemann recommended Busoni to Martin Wegelius, director of the Institute of Music at Helsingfors, (now Helsinki, Finland, then part of the Russian Empire) for the vacant position of advanced piano instructor. This was Busoni's first permanent post.[12] Amongst his close colleagues and associates there were the conductor and composer Armas Järnefelt, the writer Adolf Paul, and the composer Jean Sibelius, with whom he struck up a continuing friendship.[13] Paul described Busoni at this time as "a small, slender Italian with chestnut beard, grey eyes, young and gay, with ... a small round cap perched proudly on his thick artist's curls".[14] Between 1888 and 1890 Busoni gave about thirty piano recitals and chamber concerts in Helsingfors;[15] amongst his compositions at this period were a set of Finnish folksongs for piano duet Op. 27.[16] In 1889, visiting Leipzig, he heard a performance on the organ of JS Bach's Toccata and Fugue in D minor (BWV 565), and was persuaded by his pupil Kathi Petri (the mother of his future pupil Egon Petri), to transcribe it for piano. Busoni's biographer Edward Dent writes that "This was not only the beginning of [his] transcriptions, but ... the beginning of that style of pianoforte touch and technique which was entirely [Busoni's] creation."[17] Returning to Helsingfors, in March of the same year Busoni met his future wife, Gerda Sjöstrand, the daughter of Swedish sculptor Carl Eneas Sjöstrand, and proposed to her within a week. For her he composed Kultaselle (Finnish: To the beloved) for cello and piano, (published 1891 without opus number).[18]

In 1890 Busoni published his first edition of works of JS Bach (the two- and three-part Inventions).[19] In the same year he won the prize for composition, with his Konzertstück (Concert Piece) for piano and orchestra Op. 31a, at the first Anton Rubinstein Competition, initiated by Anton Rubinstein himself at the St. Petersburg Conservatory.[20] As a consequence he was invited to visit and teach at the Moscow Conservatoire. Gerda joined him in Moscow where they promptly married.[21] His first concert in Moscow, when he performed Beethoven's Emperor Concerto was warmly received. But living in Moscow did not suit the Busonis for both financial and professional reasons; he felt excluded by his nationalistically-inclined Russian colleagues. So when he received an approach from William Steinway to teach at the Boston New England Conservatory of Music he was happy to take the opportunity, particularly as the conductor at that time of the Boston Symphony Orchestra was Arthur Nikisch, whom he had known since 1876 (when they performed together at a concert in Vienna.[22]

Busoni's first son, Benvenuto (known as Benni) was born in Boston in 1892, but Busoni's experience was at the Conservatory proved unsatisfactory. After a year he resigned from the Conservatory and launched himself into a series of recitals across the Eastern USA. Both in the USA and subsequently for many years in Europe he had to depend for his living on his abilities as a piano virtuoso; at this period he was still remitting substantial amounts to his parents, who continued to depend on his income. In 1896 he wrote "I have great success as a pianist, the composer I conceal for the present."[23]

Berlin 1894-1914

Commemorative plaque at site of Busoni's apartment in Berlin

In 1894 Busoni settled in Berlin, which was henceforth to be his principal base, except during the years of World War I. His earlier feelings about the city had been unsympathetic: in an 1889 letter to Gerda he had described it as "this Jewish city that I hate, irritating, idle, arrogant, parvenu."[24][lower-roman 3] In a series of concerts there both as pianist and conductor, he particularly promoted contemporary music. He also continued to teach in a number of masterclasses at Weimar, Vienna and Basel; among his pupils was Egon Petri.

World War I and after

During World War I, Busoni lived first in Bologna, where he directed the conservatory, and later in Zürich. He refused to perform in any countries that were involved in the war. He returned to Berlin in 1920 where he gave master classes in composition.

Busoni died in Berlin from a kidney disease. He had been planning to play some of Mendelssohn's Songs Without Words in a series of recitals in London in the year of his death.[29] He was interred in the Städtischer Friedhof III, Berlin-Schöneberg. He is commemorated by a plaque at the site of his last residence in Berlin-Schöneberg, Viktoria-Luise-Platz 11. The Ferruccio Busoni International Competition was initiated in his honour in 1949.

Music

Compositions

Ferruccio Busoni

.Most of Busoni's works are for the piano. Busoni's music is typically contrapuntally complex, with several melodic lines unwinding at once. Although his music is never entirely atonal in the Schoenbergian sense, his mature works, beginning with the Elegies, are often in indeterminate key. He was in contact with Schoenberg, and made a 'concert interpretation' of the latter's 'atonal' Piano Piece, Op. 11, No. 2 (BV B 97), in 1909. In the program notes for the premiere of his own Sonatina seconda of 1912, Busoni calls the work senza tonalità (without tonality). Johann Sebastian Bach and Franz Liszt were key influences, though late in his career much of his music has a neo-classical bent and includes melodies resembling Mozart's.

Busoni was extremely interested in the works of Johann Sebastian Bach, both as compositions and in performance. The first version of Busoni's largest solo piano work, Fantasia contrappuntistica, was published in 1910. About half an hour in length, it is essentially an extended fantasy on the final incomplete fugue from Bach's The Art of Fugue. It uses several melodic figures found in Bach's work, most notably the BACH motif. Busoni revised the work a number of times and arranged it for two pianos. Busoni's works sometimes feature incorporated elements of other composers' music. The fourth movement of An die Jugend (1909), for instance, uses two of Paganini's Caprices for solo violin (numbers 11 and 15), while the 1920 piece Piano Sonatina No. 6 (Fantasia da camera super Carmen) is based on themes from Georges Bizet's opera Carmen. Busoni also drew inspiration from non-European sources. His Indian Fantasy for piano and orchestra was composed in 1913 and is based on North American indigenous tribal melodies drawn from the studies of ethnomusicologist, Natalie Curtis Burlin.

Busoni's Piano Concerto, Op. 39 (1904) is one of the largest such works ever written. Performances generally last over seventy minutes, requiring great stamina from the soloist. The concerto is written for a large orchestra with, in the last movement a male voice choir that is hidden from the audience's view. The Britsih pianist John Ogdon, one of the champions of the work, called it "the longest and grandest piano concerto of all."[30]

Busoni's Turandot Suite (1905) was expanded into his opera Turandot in 1917, and Busoni completed two other operas, Die Brautwahl (1911) and Arlecchino (1917). He began serious work on his opera, Doktor Faust, in 1916, leaving it incomplete at his death. It was then finished by his student Philipp Jarnach, who worked with Busoni's sketches as he knew of them, but in the 1980s Antony Beaumont, the author of a Busoni biography, created an expanded and improved completion by drawing on material to which Jarnach did not have access.

In the last seven years of his life Busoni worked sporadically on his Klavierübung, a compilation of exercises, transcriptions, and original compositions of his own, with which he hoped to pass on his accumulated knowledge of keyboard technique. It was issued in five parts between 1918 and 1922, and a second edition was published posthumously in 1925.

Editions and transcriptions

Busoni edited and transcribed works by other composers, in particular those of Bach, Liszt, and Mozart.

His edition of the solo keyboard works of JS Bach, which he edited with the assistance of his students Egon Petri and Bruno Mugellini, was to have significant influence on the history of Bach performance.[31] Busoni adds tempo markings, articulation and phrase markings, dynamics and metronome markings to the originals, as well as extensive performance suggestions. In his edition of Bach's Goldberg Variations (BV B 35), for example, he suggests cutting eight of the variations for a "concert performance", as well as substantially rewriting many sections. Kenneth Hamilton comments that "the last four variations are rewritten as a free fantasy in a pianistic style which owes far more to buysaoni that to Bach."[32] Busoni created many piano transcriptions of Bach works, including the Toccata and Fugue in D Minor (BV B 29, no. 2) (originally for organ), and the Chaconne (BV B 24) from the Partita No. 2 in D minor for solo violin, BWV 1004. Busoni became so well known as a transcriber of Bach's pieces that stories grew of his surname being mistakenly thought of as 'Bach-Busoni'.

He edited three volumes of the 34-volume Franz Liszt Stiftung edition of Liszt's works, including most of the etudes. The Liszt edition was a scholarly endeavor and was faithful to the originals, but Busoni also prepared more freely adapted versions intended for concert performance, including transcriptions of the Liszt etudes based on works by Niccolò Paganini. Amongst these is La Campanella (BV B 68), which has featured in the recitals of pianists such as Ignaz Friedman, Josef Lhévinne, and John Ogdon. Another transcription is his piano arrangement of Liszt's organ work Fantasy and Fugue on the chorale "Ad nos, ad salutarem undam" (BV B 59).

Busoni also made editions of works by Beethoven, Brahms, Chopin, Schoenberg and Schumann.

Pianist

Busoni at the piano, c.1895

Alfred Brendel opines that "Busoni's piano-paying signifies the victory of reflection over bravura" after the more flamboyant era of Liszt. He cites Busoni himself: "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 unrprepared. The spirit of music arises from the depths of our humanity and is returned to the high regions whence it has descended on mankind."[33]

Busoni's first concerts in London met with mixed comments. The Musical Times in 1897 reported that he "commenced in a manner to irritate the genuine amateurs [i.e. music lovers] by playing a ridiculous travesty of one of Bach's masterly Organ Preludes and Fugues, but he made amends by an interpretation of Chopin's Studies (Op. 25) which was of course unequal but, on the whole, interesting". Sir Henry Wood was surprised to hear Busoni playing passages in a Mozart concerto, written as single notes, with two hands in double octaves; at which Donald Tovey proclaimed Busoni "to be an absolute purist in not confining himself strictly to Mozart's written text", that is, that Mozart himself could have taken similar liberties. The musicologist Percy Scholes wrote that "Busoni, from his perfect command over every means of expression and his complete consideration of every phrase in a composition to every other phrase and to the whole, was the truest artist of all the pianists [I] had ever heard."[34]

Writings

Busoni's tomb by Georg Kolbe on the Städtischer Friedhof III in Berlin-Friedenau

Busoni wrote a number of essays on music. His most extended work in this field is the "Entwurf einer neue Ästhetike der Tonkunst (Sketch of a New Esthetic of Music)", first published in 1907, a collection of reflections which are "the outcome of convictions long held and slowly matured." The "Sketch" asserts that "The spirit of an artwork ... remains[s] unchanged in value through changing years" but its form, manner of expression and the conventions of the era when it was created "are transient and age rapidly"; and contains the maxim that "Music was born free; and to win freedom is its destiny".[35] It therefore takes issue with conventional wisdom on music, caricatured by Busoni as the constricting rules of the "lawgivers".[36] It praises the music of Beethoven and JS Bach as the essence of the spirit of music ("Ur-Musik") and says that their art should "be conceived as a beginning, and not as an unsurpassable finality."[37] Busoni asserts the right of the interpreter vis-a-vis the purism of the "lawgivers". "The performance of music, its emotional interpretation, derives from those free heights whence descended Art itself ... What the composer's inspiration necessarily loses through notation, his interpreter should restore by his own."[38] He envisages a future music that will include the division of the octave into more than the traditional 12 semitones.[39]

Busoni's collected articles were published in 1922; an expanded edition appeared in 1956.[40]

Recordings

Audio recordings

Busoni's recorded output on gramophone record, which was greatly admired by the composer and writer Kaikhosru Sorabji, was very limited, and many of the original recordings were destroyed when the Columbia factory burnt down. Busoni mentions recording the Gounod-Liszt Faust Waltz in a letter to his wife in 1919. However, this recording was never released. He never recorded any of his own works.

Piano rolls

Busoni made a considerable number of piano rolls, and a small number of these have been re-recorded onto vinyl record or CD. These include a 1950 recording by Columbia Records sourced from piano rolls made by Welte-Mignon including music of Chopin and transcriptions by Liszt. The value of these recordings in ascertaining Busoni's performance style is a matter of some dispute. Many of his colleagues and students expressed disappointment with the recordings and felt they did not truly represent Busoni's pianism. His student Egon Petri was horrified by the piano roll recordings when they first appeared on LP and said that it was a travesty of Busoni's playing.[41] Similarly, Petri's student Gunnar Johansen who had heard Busoni play on several occasions, remarked, "Of Busoni's piano rolls and recordings, only Feux follets (Liszt's 5th Transcendental Etude) is really something unique. The rest is curiously unconvincing. The recordings, especially of Chopin, are a plain misalliance".[42]

Notes and References

Notes
  1. ↑ The names were chosen by his father to reflect Dante Aligheri, Michelangelo Buonarrotti and Benvenuto Cellini; but "in later life, Ferruccio, feeling that all these names involved too formidable a responsibility", quietly dropped them.[1] The spelling version 'Michelangelo' is sometimes found for the third given name; the spelling 'Michelangiolo' is given by (amongst others) Dent, who consulted with Busoni's wife and family in writing his life of the composer.
  2. ↑ Busoni gave many (but not all) of his works opus numbers; some have two such numbers (after the composer dropped some of his earlier works from his acknowledged corpus). Nor are the composers's numbers all in temporal order.[8] The musicologist Jürgen Kindermann has prepared a thematic catalogue of his works and transcriptions[9] which is also used (in the form of the letters BV followed by an identifier) to identify his compositions and transcriptions.
  3. ↑ In the context of the time, this need not be read as agressive antisemitism. Factors in Busoni's life indicate placing this in context include: Busoni's great-great-grandfather on his mother's side was in fact half-Jewish (although he may not have been aware of this);[25] Busoni used Jewish melodies to characterize a Jewish character in his opera Die Brautwahl;[26] when during World War I Busoni took a stand against German aggression, Hans Pfitzner took the occasion to call his views "a manifestation of the international Jewish movement" against Germany;[27] in 1920 Busoni referred to his pupil Kurt Weill as "a very fine Jew, who will certainly make his way".[28]
References
  1. ↑ Dent (1933), pp. 7—8.
  2. ↑ Dent (1933), p.16.
  3. ↑ Dent (1933), p.17.
  4. ↑ Couling (2005) pp. 14–16
  5. ↑ Beaumont (2001) §1
  6. 1 2 3 Wirth (1980), p. 508
  7. ↑ Walker (1996), p. 367.
  8. ↑ Dent (1933), p. 37.
  9. ↑ Kindermann (1980)
  10. ↑ Couling (2005), pp. 70—1.
  11. ↑ Kogan (2010), p. 10.
  12. ↑ Wis (1977), p. 251.
  13. ↑ Wis (1977), p. 256.
  14. ↑ Wis (1977), p. 255.
  15. ↑ Wis (1977), pp. 267-269.
  16. ↑ Wis (1977), p. 258.
  17. ↑ Dent (1933), p. 86.
  18. ↑ Wis (1977), pp. 259—261.
  19. ↑ Dent (1933), p. 103
  20. ↑ Taylor (2007), p. 218.
  21. ↑ Wis (1977), p. 264.
  22. ↑ Couling (2005), p. 128.
  23. ↑ Dent (1933), pp. 97—100, p. 105, p. 113.
  24. ↑ Couling (2005), p. 143.
  25. ↑ Couling (2005), p. 352.
  26. ↑ Knyt (2010) p. 233
  27. ↑ Kogan (2010), p. 101.
  28. ↑ Couling (2005), p. 330.
  29. ↑ Porter, Andrew (1956). Liner notes to the Walter Gieseking recording of Mendelssohn's Songs without Words, Angel 35428. OCLC 3537574
  30. ↑ Ates Orga, Volume 72 of Philips' Great Pianists of the Twentieth Century series (set I on John Ogdon)
  31. ↑ Chiara (2012)
  32. ↑ Hamilton (1998), pp. 66—67.
  33. ↑ Brendel (1976), p. 211.
  34. ↑ Citations and comment from Scholes (1947), p. 318.
  35. ↑ Busoni (1907), p. 3.
  36. ↑ Busoni (1907), p. 1.
  37. ↑ Busoni (1907), p. 4.
  38. ↑ Busoni (1907), p. 7.
  39. ↑ Busoni (1907), p. 10—12.
  40. ↑ Wirth (1980), p. 511.
  41. ↑ Sitsky (1986) p. 329.
  42. ↑ Johansen, Gunnar (1979). "Busoni the pianist – in Perspective". The Piano Quarterly, Vol. 28. pp. 46–47.

Sources

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  • Bertoglio, Chiara (2012). Instructive Editions and Piano Performance Practice: A Case Study. Saarbrücken: Lambert Academic Publishing. ISBN 978-3-8473-2151-4
  • Brendel, Alfred (1976). Musical Thoughs and After-Thoughts. London: Robson Books. ISBN 0-903895-43-9. 
  • Busoni, Ferruccio (1911). Sketch of a New Esthetic of music. Translated by Th. Baker. New York: G. Schirmer. 
  • Couling, Della (2005). Ferruccio Busoni: "a Musical Ishmael". Scarecrow Press. ISBN 0810851423
  • Dent, Edward J. (1933). Ferruccio Busoni: A Biography, London: Oxford University Press. (Reprint: London: Ernst Eulenberg, 1974) ISBN 0-903873-02-8
  • Hamilton, Kenneth (1998), "The virtuoso tradition", in Rowland, David, The Cambridge Companion to the Piano, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 57–74, ISBN 9780521479868 
  • Hamilton, Kenneth (2008). After the Golden Age. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-517826-5. 
  • Kindermann, Jürgen (1980). Thematisch-chronologisches Verzeichnis der Werke von Ferruccio B. Busoni. Studien zur Musikgeschichte des 19. Jahrhunderts, vol. 19. Regensburg: Gustav Bosse Verlag. ISBN 3-7649-2033-5
  • Knyt, Erinn E. (2010). ""How I Compose": Ferruccio Busoni's Views about Invention, Quotation, and the Compositional Process". The Journal of Musicology 27 (2): 224–264. JSTOR 10.1525/jm.2010.27.2.224.  (subscription required)
  • Kogan, Grigory (2010). Busoni as Pianist. Translated by Svetlana Belsky. Rochester: University of Rochester Press. ISBN 978-1-58046-335-5. 
  • Roberge, Marc-André (1996). "Ferruccio Busoni et la France". Revue de Musicologie 82 (2): 269–305. JSTOR 947129.  (subscription required)
  • Scholes, Percy A. (1947). The Mirror of Music 1844-1944. London: Novello and Company. OCLC 634410668. 
  • Sitsky, Larry (1986). Busoni and the Piano: The Works, the Writings, and the Recordings. Greenwood Press. ISBN 0313236712
  • Stevenson, Ronald (1987). "Book review: Ferruccio Busoni -Selected Letters translated and edited by Antony Beaumont.". Tempo (New Series, 163): 27–29. JSTOR 945689.  (subscription required)
  • Taylor, Philip S. (2007). Anton Rubinstein: A Life in Music. Bloomingdale and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. ISBN 9780253348715. 
  • Vogel, Wladimir (1968). "Impressions of Ferruccio Busoni". Perspectives of New Music 6 (2): 167–173. JSTOR 832359.  (subscription required)
  • Walker, Alan (1996). Franz Liszt. Volume 3: The Final Years 1861-1880. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. ISBN 9780394525426. 
  • Wirth, Helmut (1980). "Busoni, Ferruccio (Dante Michelangelo Benvenuto)". The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians 3. London: Macmillan. pp. 508–512. ISBN 0-333-23111-2. 
  • Wis, Roberto (1968). "Busoni and Finland". Acta Musicologica, 49 (2): 250–269. JSTOR 932592.  (subscription required)

Further reading

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