A Master of Musical Synthesis

Ferruccio Busoni was a master of musical synthesis who spent a lifetime seeking to penetrate the ultimate mystery of all music. He was born in Empoli, Italy and died in Berlin, Germany. Busoni is one of the more complicated, compelling, fascinating life stories that I've run across in recent years because of the richness of his many musical activities.

He toured as one of the truly preeminent concert pianists through Europe and US for decades. He taught in short stints at music conservatories in Helsinki, Finland, and in Boston, at the still nascent Conservatory of Music. He also taught in Moscow for a year.

He wrote extensively on music, both as a music critic, but also with his treatise, which is more a musical philosophical treatise that was published in the early twentieth century.

*Ferruccio Busoni,1890 at the age of 24*

He was always interested in, as he described, “looking ahead to music of the future,” to musical currents of the day. As an example, he was very interested in microtonal music. Busoni even went as far as creating his own keyboard instrument, his own harmonium, with steps and whole steps in thirds, instead of the traditional half-step note patterns that we're so accustomed to.

He was very interested in twelve-tone music, in serialism. Schoenberg and Anton Weber and Alban Berg in Austria and Germany after the turn of the centurym, and did some of his own experimentation with that.

By the time Busoni was a teenager, he had already created numerous compositions of his own. He saw himself throughout his lifetime primarily as a composer, although the rest of the world really viewed him primarily as a virtuoso and incredibly compelling and powerful pianist.

Busoni's father, Ferdinando, was a traveling virtuoso clarinetist whose musical training was really spotty but had developed a repertoire based mostly on variations and other works on a popular operatic songs, arias of the day and was a rather imposing figure in young Busoni's life, reminding me somewhat of the relationship between Amadeus Mozart and his father Leopold and Ludwig Beethoven and his father as well, sort of trying to leverage the precocious talents of their children for their own purposes.

*Ferruccio Busoni, Vienna, 1877, age 11*

Busoni's mother, Anna Weiss, was a well-trained pianist, and most likely, musically and emotionally, was Busoni's rock when he grew up, and really set the stage in terms of Busoni's own love of the piano, and love of the literature for it as well. Busoni was a very well-read pianist. and apparently was utterly taken with the novel written in the early seventeenth century by Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote. And for whatever reason, Busoni really identified with the Don Quixote character, more or less the solitary figure out in the world on continuous quests and in a way from what I have learned that really Busoni's life in so many ways.

I want to focus on Busoni's publication of a multi-part series of piano tutorials written towards the end of Busoni's life. in these volumes Busoni is not only creating a wonderful and fascinating system for creating a solid technical and musical foundation pianistically but it's a glimpse into Busoni's interest in synthesizing the pianistic styles and approaches, specifically Franz Liszt, Anton Rubinstein in Russia, and then also Johannes Brahms. So pianistically, and to a great extent, late Beethoven too. That's more compositional. These are the pianist and composers that really formed Busoni's approach toward piano playing and building a technical foundation.

The first two volumes are a series of preludes and etudes and exercises. The third volume is dedicated specifically to staccato studies. Those three volumes Busoni dedicated to the Basel, Switzerland Conservatory, where he spent a little time teaching.
The fourth volume is Busoni's own reworking of several Etudes by pianist Johann Baptiste Kremer. And he dedicated those etudes to Professor Karl Lutschig in St. Petersburg, Russia. And then the fifth and final volume, Variations in Perpetual Motion, Pieces in various keys.

A really interesting collection of pieces that Busoni wrote himself and dedicated to his own student and protege, Taglia Pietra, who was Busoni's protege and an incredible pianist but also a teacher in Italy for a number of decades and carried on a lot of Busoni's own thoughts in terms of piano teaching specifically.

Busoni did his first formal training in Graz, Austria with Dr. Wilhelm Mayer. This was a course of study that the young Busoni finished in record time. And in this course of study, there was harmony and counterpoint using the music of Cherubini as a model fugue. The fugues of Johann Sebastian Bach as the main model orchestration, relying on the works of Berlioz, Brahms, and Charles Gounod,

Lots of different musical forms, musical history, especially studying medieval and Renaissance music as source material. And so this was a very wide-ranging course of study that Busoni undertook. He was a teenager when he presented this program in March. Robert Schumann's Complete Piano Concerto, Beethoven's Sonata, and this sonata was to gain special significance for Busoni, and Busoni programmed it throughout the coming decades of his performing lifetime.

Busoni's own string quartet in C minor, his Prelude and Fugue, and also a setting of Psalm for chorus and orchestra.

Let's go forward a little bit to Vienna, Austria, and Busoni's debut recital in Vienna featured Bach's Italian Concerto, Beethoven again, the Symphonic Etudes of Robert Schumann, the Andante Spignato and Grand Polonaise of Frederic Chopin, Liszt's Mendelssohn Midsummer Night's Dream for the piano, and Busoni's own variations and scherzo for piano trio and two of his own etudes.

Busoni was known for putting together mammoth-sized programs that really just are astounding to me. After his debut recital in Vienna, he was hired by the independent newspaper from Trieste, Italy to write a series of articles, continuing articles and musical criticism about musical life in Vienna during the day.

Here is an excerpt from when Busoni was fairly new to Vienna:

“There is music everywhere and too much of it. The wars of the Wagnerians and anti-Wagnerians are not over yet. Brahms too has his party and the Slavs and Germans are continually fighting. So the world goes on like cats and dogs, eternal unrest without which the world would not exist.”

Then quite a few years later when Busoni really had a clearer sense of musical life, not only in Vienna but throughout Europe, by that time he had settled for the most part in Berlin but was constantly on tour.

“I begin to realize that the ruin of the Viennese as regards their attitude to art comes from newspaper criticism. This systematic daily reading for decades of causeries on art, witty and superficial, short and all turning on an obvious catch word, has destroyed for the Viennese their own power of seeing and hearing, comparing and thinking with any seriousness.
These little Viennese have something Parisian in their thirst for enjoyment and their own superiority, And in their chase after sensations, they are often badly taken in, like the Parisians.”

So obviously not very shy with his opinions, but over the years, as he was becoming a more mature musical artist, composer, he was also a very deep philosophical musical thinker. And apparently the treatise from the late nineteenth century written by Austrian music critic Edward Hanslick had a significant impact on Busoni's own thinkings about music and art.

There was a quote by Hanslick that Busoni kept with him on his person for many years:

“Beautiful music is the art of the prophets that can calm the agitations of the soul. It is one of the most magnificent and delightful presents God has given us. Music is the shorthand of emotion. When words leave off, music begins. Music can change the world because it can change people.”

Apparently, Busoni really resonated with that quote and took it very seriously,
taking it to heart and incorporated that it as a worldview about the purpose of music into everything that he did in terms of his writing his compositions his teaching his interactions with others his place in the world in general.

His deep study of Franz Liszt compositional style as well as riches in a currency which the local money market does not acknowledge. And there we have that solitary Don Quixote figure going out and tilting at artistic windmills throughout his life. Fascinating person.

Please share your thoughts about Busoni and any other thing musically, artistically, that you find to be of interest.

Rick Ferguson