Ferruccio (Benvenuto) Busoni - Biography, Busoni's music, Busoni's editions, Recordings, References and external links
Pianist and composer, born in Empoli, NC Italy. An infant prodigy, in 1889 he became professor of the pianoforte at Helsinki, and later taught and played in Moscow, Boston, and Berlin. The influence of Liszt is apparent in his great piano concerto. Of his four operas Doktor Faust, completed posthumously by a pupil in 1925, is his greatest work.
Ferruccio Busoni (April 1, 1866 – July 27, 1924) was an Italian composer, pianist, music teacher and conductor.
Biography
Dante Michelangelo Benvenuto Ferruccio Busoni was born in Empoli in Italy, the only child of two professional musicians: his Italian/German mother a pianist, his Italian father a clarinetist.
Busoni was a child prodigy.
Busoni had a brief period of study in Graz where he conducted a performance of his own composition 'Stabat Mater' when he was twelve years old, before leaving to Leipzig in 1886.
In 1894 he settled in Berlin, giving a series of concerts there both as pianist and conductor.
In 1907, he penned his Sketch of a New Esthetic of Music, lamenting the traditional music "lawgivers", and predicting a future music that included the division of the octave into more than the traditional 12 degrees.
During World War I, Busoni lived first in Bologna, where he directed the conservatory, and later in Zürich.
Busoni died in Berlin from a kidney disease.
He is commemorated by a plaque at the site of his last residence in Berlin-Schöneberg, Viktoria-Luise-Platz 11, and by the Ferruccio Busoni International Competition.
Busoni's music
The majority of Busoni's works are for the piano. Busoni's music is typically contrapuntally complex, with several melodic lines unwinding at once. Although his music is never entirely atonal in the Schoenbergian sense, his later works are often in indeterminate key. In the program notes for the premiere of his Sonatina seconda of 1912, Busoni calls the work senza tonalità (without tonality).
Some idea of Busoni's mature attitude to composition can be gained from his 1907 manifesto, Sketch of a New Aesthetic of Music, a publication somewhat controversial in its time. As well as discussing then little-explored areas such as electronic music and microtonal music (both techniques he never employed), he asserted that music should distill the essence of music of the past to make something new.
Many of Busoni's works are based on music of the past, especially on the music of Johann Sebastian Bach. He arranged several of Bach's works for the piano, including the famous Toccata and Fugue in D Minor (originally for organ) and the chaconne from the D minor violin partita. To create a viable work for Romantic piano from an original solo violin piece required a person of Busoni's boldness, inexorable feeling for musical geometry (which requires an in-depth knowledge of integrating chord structures together by parts), and distinctive sonority.
The first version of Busoni's largest and best known solo piano work, Fantasia Contrappuntistica, was published in 1910. It uses several melodic figures found in Bach's work, most notably the BACH motif (B flat, A, C, B natural). Busoni revised the work a number of times and arranged it for two pianos.
Busoni used elements of other composers' works.
Busoni was a virtuoso pianist, and his works for piano are difficult to perform.
Busoni's suite for orchestra Turandot (1904), probably his most popular orchestral work, was expanded into his opera Turandot in 1917, and Busoni completed two other operas, Die Brautwahl (1911) and Arlecchino (1917). He began serious work on his best known opera, Doktor Faust, in 1916, leaving it incomplete at his death. It was then finished by his student Philipp Jarnach, who worked with Busoni's sketches as he knew of them, but in the 1980s Anthony Beaumont, the author of an important Busoni biography, created an expanded and improved completion by drawing on material that Jarnach did not have access to.
Busoni's editions
Busoni also edited of music by other composers. The best known of these is his edition of the complete Bach solo keyboard works, which he edited with the assistance of his students Egon Petri and Bruno Mugellini.
On a smaller scale, Busoni edited works by Beethoven, Brahms, Chopin, Mozart. The Busoni version of Liszt's La Campanella was championed by pianists such as Ignaz Friedman and Josef Lhevinne, and more recently by John Ogdon.
Recordings
Busoni made a considerable number of piano rolls, and a small number of these have been re-recorded onto vinyl record or CD. 5 (Chopin) the two works are connected by an improvisatory passage Etude Op.
Busoni also mentions recording the Gounod-Liszt Faust Waltz in a letter to his wife in 1919. Unfortunately for posterity, Busoni never recorded his original works.
The value of these recordings in ascertaining Busoni's performance style is a matter of some dispute. Many of his colleagues and students expressed disappointment with the recordings and felt they did not truly represent Busoni's pianism. His student Egon Petri was horrified by the piano roll recordings when they first appeared on LP and said that it was a travesty of Busoni's playing. Similarly, Petri's student Gunnar Johansen who had heard Busoni play on several occasions, remarked, "Of Busoni's piano rolls and recordings, only Feux follets (Liszt's 5th Transcendental Etude) is really something unique.
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