Ferruccio Busoni

Classical Music / Composers Datebook: April 1

 

Brief biography of Ferruccio Busoni, a visionary composer with conflicting musical mind, dubbed a 'complex genius'. Busoni's compositions epitomized the struggle between two music attitudes, tradition and innovation. He was a remarkable piano virtuoso.

 

 

Ferruccio Busoni was a German-Italian pianist and composer who settled in Berlin. He was born on April 1, 1866, in Empoli, Italy (near Pisa), and died on July 27, 1924, in Berlin, Germany. His visionary composition and playing made him revered by many in his lifetime. Born with musician parents (father was Italian and mother, a German pianist), he was an infant prodigy, and appeared as a pianist in public at the age of seven. Busoni was passionately interested in the music of Bach. 

Life

In 1876, the family settled in Graz, where he produced his first published works. He composed intensively during his youth and in wrote an oratorio Il sabato de villaggio, that received acclaim. He then moved to Vienna, to Leipzig and eventually Berlin in 1894. H also traveled and taught in Helsinki, Moscow and the USA.  It was during these travels that he met prominent composers like Brahms, Liszt, Tchaikovsky, Grieg and Mahler. He gave up teaching and worked as a virtuoso pianist based in Berlin until 1914. During the war, he retired to Switzerland to compose. After the war, his health failed him and he returned to Berlin. He died of heart failure, athough inflamed kidneys and overwork also contributed to his death.

Musical influence

At the turn of the 18th century, as well as maintaining his keen appreciation of Bach and Mozart, his interests broadened to a wider range of influence that included modern music.  He championed the works of Bartok and Schoenberg.  He also began conducting modern music concerts including works by Debussy, Bartok, Sibelius and himself.   

He adopted an aesthetic by which he intended a return to the clarity and musical motivation of Bach and Mozart, at the same time his works such as  virtuoso Fantasia contrappuntistica (1910) and the Second Sonatina (1912), all for piano, showed his awareness of the latest modern developments including Schoenberg's most recent music.   

Feature: 

Ferruccio Busoni: Piano Concerto Op. 39. John Ogdon, piano. An Englishman's love letter to Italy 

Mozart Photo Identified Painting

In my Mozart groups, we have been excited over this news about the recently identified painting of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart from 1783. He would have been 27 years old. The painting is alleged to have been painted after his marriage to Constanze Weber.

My Mozart friends and I have had discussions about it. So far, my handful and I think it's non-authentic, but then we might be subjective. It would be very interesting to hear from other Mozarteans, and most especially, I'd like to know what the Mozarteum will have to say.

Some links about the painting:

• Australian Broadcasting (ABC)
• Big News Network
• Times Online Co. UK
• CBC

Bedrich Smetana

Classical Music / Composer's Datebook  (1824-1884)

© Agnes Selby, Guest Writer-Friend 

Bedřich Smetana (1824-1884), was born at a time when the Czech language was regarded as the language of  peasants.  No educated person would be seen dead speaking Czech or Slovak,  although many musicians in Vienna were of Czech and Slovak  origin. The music of these peasants was regarded as barbaric and no compositions were written in that genre. In 1824 Beethoven and Schubert reigned in Vienna and their music was performed in all centres of the  Austrian Empire. In Prague, only Germanic music could be heard with a sprinkling of Italian operas.  Bedrich Smetana himself learned to read and write Czech only at a mature age and was never proficient in the Czech language.  Yet, he was the first  composer to bring forth the music of the Czechs  with great grandeur and is today honoured  as the “Father of Czech Music”.  

Although the disdain for Czech music and language reigned supreme during  the above mentioned period, the Czechs benefited from the reforms of Emperor Joseph II (1780-1790). These reforms introduced the era of Enlightenment into the backward  provinces of the Austrian Empire.  Native Czechs gained easier access to higher education and started their Czech National Revival at the  beginning of the 19^th century.  

While the early impulse of the Czech National Revival was Rationalist, it soon gained a Romanticist orientation.  They enthused over what they saw as a glorious Czech past, were vocal in their desire to resurrect the dormant Czech civilisation and proclaimed a brotherhood with all suppressed Slavonic peoples.  This earned them nothing but stricter police oppression and the leaders of the nationalistic trend were imprisoned or exiled.