1866–1924
Ferruccio Busoni (1866–1924) was an Italian composer, pianist, conductor and teacher. He began as a child prodigy and later worked in Helsingfors, Boston and Berlin. He is known for his piano transcriptions of Bach and for the Fantasia contrappuntistica. The sheet music on the site includes pieces at the "Intermediate+" level, from sonatinas to etudes and elegies.
Ferruccio Ferruccio Busoni came into the world on 1 April 1866, in Empoli, Tuscany. His father was a clarinettist and his mother a pianist. On 24 November 1873 the boy went on stage with his parents and played a Mozart sonata in C major, along with pieces by Schumann and Clementi.
His parents pushed their son hard and handled the business side of his career themselves. In 1875 he played Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 24 with an orchestra. The boy studied at the Vienna Conservatory, and the critic Hanslick called his first Vienna performances brilliant. In Vienna he was presented to Liszt, Brahms and Anton Rubinstein; Liszt heard him play in 1877 and admired his skill.
After leaving Vienna, Busoni spent a short time in Graz studying with Wilhelm Mayer. In 1879 his own work, a Stabat Mater, was performed there. Other early works, including piano pieces, were published in those years. In 1881 he was elected to the Philharmonic Academy of Bologna, becoming the youngest person to receive that honour since Mozart.
In the mid-1880s Busoni settled in Vienna. There he got to know Karl Goldmark, met Johannes Brahms and dedicated two sets of piano etudes to him. He earned his living with solo concerts and was also supported by a patroness, Baroness von Tedesco. He kept composing and tried his hand at opera, but both of his first operatic projects were left unfinished.
Busoni's teaching career began in 1888. On the recommendation of the musicologist Hugo Riemann he took the post of principal piano teacher at the Institute of Music in Helsingfors, headed by Martin Wegelius. It was his first permanent position. There he became friends with Armas Järnefelt, Adolf Paul and Jean Sibelius. Between 1888 and 1890 he gave about thirty piano and chamber concerts in Helsingfors.
In Helsingfors he got to know the pianist Gerda Sjöstrand, whose father was the Swedish sculptor Carl Eneas Sjöstrand. Busoni proposed to her within a week. In 1892 the publisher Breitkopf & Härtel brought out his first edition of Bach: the two-part and three-part inventions with his explanatory notes.
Busoni took part in the first Rubinstein Competition, winning a prize as a composer, and was also invited to teach at the Moscow Conservatory. Gerda joined him in Moscow and they married. Moscow disappointed him with its lack of funds and prospects. He gladly took up William Steinway's invitation to teach in Boston, at the New England Conservatory. A first son, Benvenuto (nicknamed Benni), was born to him there. The conservatory work did not satisfy the musician, so he left it and began a series of solo concerts across the east of the United States.
From 1894 Busoni lived mainly in Berlin and regarded it as his home, except during the First World War. From there he set out on concert tours around Europe, appearing in Manchester, Birmingham, Marseille, Florence and many towns in Germany and Austria. Between 1904 and 1915 he travelled to America four times. The tours were exhausting but profitable, and he sent part of his earnings to his parents, who depended on his income.
In the series of orchestral concerts that Busoni gave in Berlin in 1902–1909 as pianist and conductor, he promoted contemporary music by composers from outside Germany, including Bartók, Schoenberg and Sibelius. In his own solo recitals, by contrast, he avoided contemporary music apart from his own.
In 1907 Busoni published a short treatise, Sketch of a New Esthetic of Music (Entwurf einer neuen Ästhetik der Tonkunst); a Russian translation appeared in 1912. In it he argued for bringing plentiful improvisation back into music, for abandoning conventional harmony and the system of intervals, and for using electricity to produce sound. The ideas influenced the most radical reformers of the second and third decades of the twentieth century, among them Luigi Russolo and Edgard Varèse; Busoni personally supported Varèse in Berlin. In his own music, however, he was not an ultra-radical, although the late piano sonatas (1910 and 1912) are atonal to some degree.
Busoni gave master classes in Weimar, Vienna and Basel. In 1900, at the invitation of Duke Carl Alexander, he worked with fifteen young virtuosos. The sessions took place twice weekly, and their success meant they were held again a year later. This way of teaching suited him better than the usual conservatory routine. The Vienna course of 1907 went less well, although those who attended included Ignaz Friedman as well as Closson, Turczyński, Gruenberg and Lev Sirota. He dedicated pieces of his 1909 piano album An die Jugend to Sirota, Gruenberg, Turczyński and Closson. Disputes with the directors of the Vienna Conservatory spoiled the relationship. In the autumn of 1910 he gave master classes and a series of solo recitals in Basel.
Busoni kept widening his contacts in the arts. He had corresponded with Arnold Schoenberg since 1903, and Schoenberg settled in Berlin in 1911, partly because Busoni lobbied on his behalf. In Paris in 1912 Busoni met Gabriele D'Annunzio, who proposed collaboration on a ballet or an opera, and also the Futurists Filippo Marinetti and Umberto Boccioni.
In the spring of 1913, after a series of concerts in northern Italy, Busoni was offered the post of director of the Liceo Rossini in Bologna. He accepted, planning to spend the summer in Berlin and leave in the autumn. The venture did not work out: he found his pupils untalented and was constantly arguing with the local authorities. The First World War began in August 1914, and Busoni asked for a year's leave to make an American tour, but he never went back to Bologna. In this period he wrote a major piece for piano with orchestra, the Indian Fantasy. It is built on melodies and rhythms of different Native American tribes, which he took from a book that came from Natalie Curtis Burlin, an ethnomusicologist who had been his pupil. The premiere took place in Berlin in March 1914, with Busoni himself as soloist.
Because of the war Busoni moved to Zurich, refusing to perform in the warring countries. In 1920 he returned to Berlin and taught again; one of his last pupils was Kurt Weill. From 1916 he worked on the large opera Doktor Faust but did not live to finish it: his pupil Philipp Jarnach completed it. Busoni died on 27 July 1924 in Berlin.
Busoni's own output largely sums up the road that academic music had travelled before him. This is clear from the role of transcriptions, above all of Bach. Lasting popularity belongs to his piano transcriptions of two Bach pieces: the D minor Toccata and Fugue for organ and the Chaconne from the D minor Violin Partita. Transcribing a solo violin work for piano is a hard task, and the scale of Bach's Chaconne makes it much harder. For him the line between transcription and original work is blurred: he draws widely on quotation and variation. Of his pieces for one pianist the best known is the Fantasia contrappuntistica (first version 1910), a large fantasia on the subject of the final fugue of Bach's Art of Fugue, which Bach left unfinished. His works also draw on Mozart, Paganini, Bizet and Liszt. This was a matter of principle for Busoni: in his Sketch he wrote that new music needs the essence of the music of the past.
In the spirit of late Romanticism, Busoni gravitated towards large forms and great technical difficulty. His piano concerto (1904) runs for about seventy minutes, its orchestra is of maximum size and a chorus enters in the finale. He wrote three operas: Turandot and Arlecchino (both 1917) and Doktor Faust. Busoni edited a great deal of other composers' music, most of all Bach: the complete edition of the keyboard pieces that he produced with his pupils Egon Petri and Bruno Mugellini adds tempos, phrasing and detailed interpretive advice. He also edited Beethoven, Chopin, Schumann, Brahms and Liszt. The orchestral piece Sarabande and Cortège is closely linked to Doktor Faust, and in the 1980s the scholar Anthony Beaumont proposed a different completion of the opera, taking into account manuscripts Jarnach had not seen. His large piece for piano with orchestra, the Indian Fantasy, is built on melodies and rhythms of various Native American tribes.
The site has 35 editions of Busoni, all marked "Intermediate+". The most representative are the Fantasia contrappuntistica (several editions in the catalogue), the four pieces of An die Jugend, the etudes (Etudes 1-5), the seven Elegies, several sonatinas, Racconti Fantastici, Medieval Figures, Prelude and fugue and Indianisches Tagebuch 1. To get acquainted, open an die jugend 3, Sonatina a-Moll and [1]. Elegy No. 4.