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.
Career and work
Busoni embarked on a new stylistic journey that incorporated Italianate (1904 monumental Piano Concerto with chorus), occult (Sonatina seconda), virtuoso (Toccata), post-Bachian polyphonic (Fantasia contrappuntistica), and Mozartian (opera Arlecchino, 1914-1916) elements. Even his masterpiece, the opera Doktor Faust, (1916-24) rejected Wagnerian music-drama in favour of a profoundly humanist and visionary aesthetic.
His ideas distilled in Sketch of a new Aesthetic of Music (1907) look forward with enthusiasm to the use of microtones and electronic means. They were attacked by conservatives, and led many to associate Busoni with the futurist movement.
The conflicts unresolved in his musical mind between classical recovery and futurism, Mozart calm and Listzian flamboyance, German substance and Italian vocality, all inform his larger compositions, which include his Piano Concerto, works on American Indian themes and operas, and even Doktor Faust, where the protagonist's search after knowledge and innovations is finally soothed.
Busoni was extremely prolific. As a pianist Busoni was considered to have the most powerful individuality and greatest technical mastery since Liszt and Rubinstein. As a composer he was admired by Mahler and Schoenberg alike (one premiered his Berceuse elegiaque in 1909, and the other arranged it). Most of his piano music requires a virtuoso Lisztian technique. He was an editor and transcriber of Bach's work, such as the famous piano arrangement of the D minor Chaconne for violin. His Bach transcriptions were published in a seven-volume edition.
Doktor Faust, his final important work, remained unfinished. After his death, it was completed by Jarnach and produced in Dresden a year later.
Photo Credit:
Ferruccio Busoni. NNDB.com / Public Domain
Video Credit:
Ferruccio Busoni: Piano Concerto Op. 39. John Ogdon, piano. An Englishman's love letter to Italy. Youtube, uploaded by AntPDC. Accessed MMMApril 1, 2024. A remastered reissue of 2007 that collectors had sought for decades, namely John Ogdon's magnificent 1967 EMI Angel recording of Ferruccio Busoni's Piano Concerto, Op. 39 (BV 247, 1904), with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra under Daniell Revenaugh. This was the first commercial recording of Busoni's elephantine piano concerto, which is in five movements, calls for male chorus in the last movement and lasts as long as Beethoven's Ninth Symphony.
Resources:
Ferruccio Busoni. en.wikipedia.org.
Oxford Dictionary of Music. Edited by Michael & Joyce Kennedy & Tim Rutherford-Johnson. 2012. Oxford: OUP: 2012.
The Grove Concise Dictionary of Music, (New Updated Edition), edited by Stanley Sadie. London: Macmillan Publishers. 1994.
(c) April 2008. Updated April 1, 2024. Tel. Inspired Pen Web. All rights reserved.
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