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 and 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 throughout Europe and the 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, “Sketch of a New Aesthetics in Musical Art”, 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 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 (serialism) and the work of Arnold Schoenberg, Anton Weber and Alban Berg in Austria and Germany after the turn of the century. Busoni did some of his own experimentation with 12-tone composition.

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 an 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 and arias of the day. Ferdinando 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, with the father 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. She was, musically and emotionally, 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 youngster and apparently was utterly taken with the novel “Don Quixote”, written in the early seventeenth century by Miguel de Cervantes, . And apparently Busoni really identified with the Don Quixote character: The solitary figure out in the world on continuous quests that ultimately mirrored 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 his 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 also a glimpse into Busoni's interest in synthesizing the pianistic styles and approaches of Franz Liszt, Anton Rubinstein in Russia, Johannes Brahms and, to a great extent, late Beethoven (especially from a composition perspective). 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, 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 Kramer. He dedicated those etudes to Professor Karl Lutschig in St. Petersburg, Russia. The fifth and final volume, Variations in Perpetual Motion, consists of pieces in various keys designed to create a fluid playing style.

This fifth volume collection of pieces that Busoni wrote himself is dedicated to his own student, Gino Tagliapietra, who was Busoni's protege and an incredible pianist. Tagliapietra was also a teacher in Italy for a number of decades and carried forwards many of Busoni's own thoughts in terms of piano teaching.

Busoni had 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. In this course of study, there was harmony and counterpoint using the music of Cherubini as a model, the fugues of Johann Sebastian Bach as the main model and orchestration, relying on the works of Berlioz, Brahms, and Charles Gounod,

A variety of musical forms were studied, as well as musical history. Medieval and Renaissance music was often used as source material. This was a very wide-ranging course of study that Busoni undertook, to put it lightly. Busoni was a teenager when he presented his graduation recital program in March of 1879. His program consisted of Robert Schumann's Complete Piano Concerto, Beethoven's Sonata Op. 111, Busoni's own string quartet in C minor, his Prelude and Fugue and also a setting of Psalm for chorus and orchestra. Beethoven’s Op. 111 was to gain special significance for Busoni and he programmed it throughout the coming decades of his performing lifetime

Another example of precocious was Busoni's debut recital in Vienna, Austria in 1877. This recital featured Bach's Italian Concerto, Beethoven Op. 111 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, 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 of Trieste, Italy to write a series of article and criticism about musical life in Vienna during the day.

Here is an excerpt of one such article 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 had a clearer sense of musical life in Vienna but throughout Europe, he wrote the following:

“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.”

Busoni was obviously not very shy about sharing his opinions. Over the years, as he was becoming a more mature musical artist and composer, he was also becoming a deep philosophical musical thinker. Apparently, the treatise from the late Nineteenth Century Austrian music critic Eduard Hanslick (“On The Musically Beautiful”) had a significant impact on Busoni's own thinking 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 deeply resonated with that quote,
taking it to heart and incorporating it as a part of his worldview about the purpose of music. He incorporated it into everything that he did in terms of his prose, his compositions, his teaching, his interactions with others…and his place in the world in general.

His deep study of Franz Liszt’s compositional style and editions of Listz’s and JS Bach’s keyboard works were a significant part of Busoni’s legacy. 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