THE CITY OF REFUGE

Ferruccio Busoni
A Biography
by
Edward J. Dent
pp. 226 ss.

Switzerland was a country which hitherto had had a little interest for Busoni. From a musical point of view it was of no particular importance; musicians who took their tone from Berlin or Vienna regarded Switzerland as a region even more provincial than the 'provinces' of Germany and Austria. To the German mind the non-German parts of Switzerland counted for nothing at all; and in so far as German Switzerland ever produced anything of intellectual or artistic interest the German mind naturally claimed it as being 'German'. Busoni's impression of Basle, quoted in a previous chapter, was characteristic of him; it was a place to have seen once, a place to remember but not to revisit. For beauty of landscape Busoni appeared to have curiously little feeling. He would sometimes admit to what one might call a tourist's enjoyment of natural beauty, but he confessed quite frankly that he hated the realities of country life. His attitude was a perfectly logical and reasonable one. 'Nature', he maintained, was everywhere, and to the imaginative mind one single tree in a street might signify more than a forest. If 'nature' was to mean virgin land where no sign whatever of mankind was to be seen, then one could have no relation to it, unless one approached it professionally, as a botanist, a geologist, an agriculturist, or something of that kind. Any other approach was 'amateurish', and that word, in Busoni's vocabulary, always expressed contempt. He would have agreed heartily with Pope's famous dictum -'The proper study of mankind is Man.'
He had acquaintances in Switzerland, but perhaps had hitherto hardly realized their truevalue. Busoni sometimes gave the impression of being inclined to judge people more by what they could accomplish than by what they were as human beings. His own mind was always tensely concentrated upon some definite end; if for a moment he felt in doubt as to his ultimate aim he was miserable. He had a horror of the 'Hamlet' type, as he called it, but at the same time it was often just those very 'Hamlets' who became indispensable to him, when once he came to know them intimately, on account of the affection which they gave him. Kapff was a typical case. Busoni's keen critical and analytical faculty led him to write of them occasionally with an insight that might seem merciless, but such criticisms were generally intended for Gerda's eyes alone. They were an intellectual exercise, one might say, perhaps even a form of vicarious selfexamination, for Busoni was often inwardly unsure of himself and feared nothing more anxiously than this very sense of inward insecurity. It was for this reason that such friends were necessary to him. Professional contacts, on the other hand, did not so often afford the opportunity for analysis of this kind, and in the strictly professional moments of life Busoni was too completely concentrated on purely artistic matters to admit the distraction of personal feeling. It came as something of a surprise to Busoni in Switzerland that men whom he had hardly known except in a professional association, whatever their artistic abilities might be, should reveal themselves - and just at the moment when he needed it the most - as loyal and warm-hearted personal friends.

By the end of October
1915 he had settled in to a small flat in Zurich at Scheuchzerstrasse 36, on the hill to the north of the lake. He had been driven out of America by an overwhelming sense of disgust - dégôut is the word he used, and the French word used in a German sentence might perhaps be better translated 'intellectual and moral nausea'. When he arrived in Europe and found that Italy was impossible for him to live in, he suddenly became conscious that he was utterly homeless, and that he had really never had a home in his life, except in so far as the flat in Berlin was a home. The war had made all the belligerent countries impossible for him, not on any political or legal grounds, but simply because in all those countries the war had produced - as most of us can now clearly see - a mental condition that bordered on insanity. Busoni spoke of Europe and America as a 'monster madhouse'; towards all these countries he felt as embarrassed and disgusted as a sober man in a company of more or less intoxicated people. Switzerland attracted him because it was neutral; it was not the only neutral country, but it was the only one whose neutrality was certain to be proof against all pressure, the only neutral country which did not more or less definitely side with one or other of the belligerent parties, and the one country in the world which prided itself on being constitutionally international.

The war had made Zurich an international metropolis. That was one of its great attractions for Busoni. It was the one place in the world where he had the chance of meeting people of every nationality. At the same time the enormous influx from every country of people who found their own countries unbearable had given Zurich a doubly international aspect: it was the meeting-place of international idealism, and also of the international underworld. It would be grossly unjust to suggest that Busoni frequented what is called 'bad company', but he undoubtedly took a perpetual delight in those aspects of city life which had first fascinated him when as a boy he read the novels of Dickens.
After the homelessness and friendlessness of America the warmth and cordiality of the welcome that he received at Zurich was astonishing to him. It is a significant symptom of Busoni's psychological condition at this moment that he was ready to appreciate it and to be honestly and profoundly grateful for the friendship that was offered him. Inwardly Busoni was always grateful by natural temperament, but a certain inhibition had often made it difficult for him to admit his gratitude, even to himself; it was only towards his wife that he was always conscious of it and always happy in expressing it.

To no one among his Swiss friends had he more cause for gratitude than to Dr. Volkmar Andreae, the conductor of the Zurich municipal orchestra. It was to Andreae, more than to any one else, that he owed that penetrating sense of repose and refreshment which he derived from his residence at Zurich - an intellectual and moral influence on his character which prepared him for the serener years of his later life and gave him the power to create those works in which at last he realized the true fullness of his own personality. As the son of an Italian mother, Andreae was temperamentally attracted towards Busoni's Italian character. As a musician he was very different from any of the prominent conductors whom Busoni had come across in Germany. He was entirely free from the inordinate vanity of the modern virtuoso conductor; he was firmly rooted -in Zurich and devoted all his energies to the development of Zurich's musical life. He had all the qualities which the romantic artist is inclined to despise - efficiency, punctuality, organizing ability; and he applied these qualities - not without a touch of military precision acquired in his function as a colonel of Swiss artillery - towards furthering - the cause of music and to the artistic support of other musicians. He had for a long time cherished a whole-hearted admiration for Busoni as a musician and an affectionate and loyal appreciation of him as a man; he rejoiced in the opportunity which now presented itself of showing his devotion in a practical form and also of securing the inspiring force of Busoni's immense personality for the musical life of Switzerland.

An opportunity presented itself almost at once. Andreae was called up for military service early in
1916 and therefore proposed that Busoni should conduct the second half of the winter's subscription concerts. The programmes were already to some extent settled, but for the most part they were of a type that Busoni could conduct with satisfaction. The remaining few months of 1915 Busoni devoted to the edition of Bach's clavier works, in collaboration with Petri, who was living in Berlin, and to the composition of his opera Arlecchino.
In January 1916 he played Beethoven's Concerto in E flat, the Indian Fantasy and Liszt's «Totentanz» at a concert conducted by Andreae. In February he began his duties as a conductor with a whole programme of Liszt - «Les Preludes», the «Concerto in A», played by Petri, and the «Faust Symphony». The March concert, at which he had to conduct Tchaikovsky's «Violin Concerto» and «Wotans Abschied», provoked a characteristic outburst in a letter to Petri about  «gods and heroes on stilts, the nightmare of my fifty years' life - heroes, as Heine says, who have the courage of a hundred lions and the brains of two donkeys!» He contrasts them with the Teatro dei Piccoli which he had seen just before at Rome, in a performance of a comic opera written by Rossini at twenty. The next Zurich concert brought the «Italian Symphony» of Mendelssohn, one of the few works of the romantic era that Busoni always admired, and his own Rondo Arlecchinesco; at the last, in April, he had to conduct the Eroica Symphony about which he was by this time beginning to grow somewhat sceptical.
«The Latin attitude to art,» he wrote to Petri, «with its cool serenity and its insistence on outward form, is what refreshes me. It was only through Beethoven that music acquired that growling and frowning expression which was natural enough to him, but which perhaps ought to have remained his lonely path alone. Why are you in such a bad temper, one would often like to ask, especially in the second period.» [6 dicembre 1916]

Busoni had again been taken by surprise at the success of his concerts in
Rome.
«I had a wonderful reception,» he wrote to Petri, «and was shown both respect and affection. A delightful circle of intelligent younger musicians surrounded me at once. The people there (i.e. at Rome) are naturally very clever. So was the orchestra, which at once understood everything new and unfamiliar, tackled it at once and carried it out rightly. I feel very grateful. And I am grateful to you for coming and for playing: it is not forgotten in spite of all that has happened since.»

Besides the concerts in Zurich and Rome there were four pianoforte recitals at Zurich, devoted respectively to Bach, Beethoven, Chopin, and Liszt. He played also in other Swiss towns. Swiss people might seem dull to Busoni at times - he quotes a dictum of Carl Spitteler to the effect that if the Swiss had made their own mountains they would have been very much flatter - but in spite of their narrowness they had a certain culture, and he could feel some likelihood of finding his artistic ideals appreciated.

In
June 1916 he was the guest of a new friend, Marchese Silvio Casanova, at San Remigio near Pallanza. Marchese Casanova was a man of considerable culture, with a singular devotion to German literature which induced him to write poetry in German himself. He was also keenly interested in music, and one of the reasons which led Busoni to cultivate his acquaintance was the fact that he possessed unpublished manuscripts of Liszt. Another guest at San Remigio was Boccioni, the painter, in whom Busoni had been interested for several years. During the three weeks that they were together Boccioni painted a striking portrait of Busoni. In July he was called up for military training (he had already served seven months as a volunteer in a cyclist battalion directly after Italy entered the war) and in August was killed by a fall from his horse. Busoni was deeply distressed at his death, and bitterly indignant at the way in which the death of a gifted young artist was treated by patriotic journalism. The Corriere della Sera, as did many newspapers of other countries in similar cases, spoke of the young painter as if his military service was a matter of infinitely greater value than his future career as an artist. Busoni wrote a notice of Boccioni in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung. Along with the Corriere's obituary he quoted a letter written by Boccioni to himself early in August:

I can only thank you for giving me the courage to endure this appalling life... The first days were unbearable... After this existence I shall have an utter contempt for everything but art. There is nothing more terrible than art. Everything that I am now facing is child's play compared to a rightly made stroke of the brush, to a harmonious line of verse or a properly placed chord.

Busoni was enraged at the 'conspiracy of silence' by which such unforgivable wrongs as the sacrifice of young artistic hopes were glossed over with patriotic commonplaces. He ended by quoting the motto inscribed by Goya on Los Desastres de la Guerra - 'La verdad es muerta !'
Busoni had cause enough to exclaim that truth was dead, for he had himself been the victim of perpetual persecution in the newspapers. He was an international 'celebrity', and though no one cared much about his merits as a composer, it was a matter of journalistic interest to know what side he took in the war. He had already been annoyed by the impertinence of American and German comments on his meeting with Saint-Saëns in New York. No sooner had he settled down to life in Switzerland than it was rumoured that he had naturalized himself as a Swiss subject. A few months later Maurice Kufferath, the former director of the Theatre de la Monnaie at Brussels, stated in the Journal de Geneve that Busoni had given a concert at Brussels by desire of the German military authorities. It was absolutely untrue; Busoni had never even been invited to play at Brussels. He was too proud to answer these charges, and felt it to be insulting that he should be expected to 'prove an alibi'. His friend José Vianna da Motta, who was living at Geneva, and in constant correspondence with him about the edition of Liszt's pianoforte works on which they were collaborating, drew his attention to the statement, and himself wrote to contradict it. The Journal de Geneve published a very half-hearted rectification - 'bien que M. Busoni eut refuse son concours etc.'. But the damage was done; the misstatement was copied into Italian papers and procured further annoyance for Busoni in Italy. It was amusingly characteristic of Busoni that he attributed Kufferath's indiscretion to the fact that Kufferath was an enthusiastic devotee of Wagner! Busoni had unearthed a letter of Wagner to Bülow in which he admitted having obtained many of his new harmonic devices from Liszt, 'but must one tell the public that at once ?' It suggested the morality of a fraudulent bank, Busoni said; it also accounted for Wagnerite standards of truth.
As regards his alleged change of nationality, Busoni expressed his views clearly enough in a letter to Emile Blanchet (13.05. 1917) at Lausanne: «Tutto il mondo è paese: one finds defects everywhere, and everywhere one can discover - if one will qualities. All the nations, taken en masse, are antipathetic (yes, all!), and each nation produces personnalites d'elite. For this one and most important reason it would seem to me a pity to change my nationality, since it has never been proved that any one, all told, is better than any other. It is for this reason that I have not become a Swiss, and you can make this dementi in Paris, if people attach so much importance to it. It is quite enough to have been born with one nationality ticketed on one's body!»

It was only a week before Boccioni's death that Busoni completed the music of «Arlecchino». It was accepted for production at the Zurich opera-house, and as it was not long enough to occupy a whole evening, Busoni suddenly determined to convert his incidental music to «Turandot» into a short opera with spoken dialogue. «Turandot», the full score of which amounted to three hundred pages, was finished early in March; the work had taken him a hundred days, and he was not a little pleased at his achievement in rapid workmanship. The two operas together «Arlecchino» were to be considered as examples of a new 'comedy of masks' (la nuova commedia dell'arte). Arlecchino was less of a new comedy of masks than a ferocious satire on the theatre, the conventional opera, the war, and human nature in general. It has had more performances than any other opera of Busoni's, but it has never become popular, for it leaves an audience bewildered and somewhat uncomfortable.
The first performance of «Turandot» and« Arlecchino» took place at Zurich on May 11, 1917. [...]

Yet behind the momentary joy in the creation of his opera there was a grim background of depression. April 1, 1916, had been Busoni's fiftieth birthday, and he reflected that in spite of all the work achieved at Zurich his future was still uncertain. He was never much concerned for his financial future; what troubled him was the thought that the greater part of his life lay behind him, and that he must lose no opportunity of making the best use of what remained. As long as the war kept him an exile and a prisoner in Switzerland, it was impossible to make plans. There were always recitals to be given, but he had reached an age when he loathed practising the pianoforte. Da Motta had suggested his taking a pianoforte class; he replied that he could no longer bear to sit and watch students going through all the labour that he himself had gone through years ago.
He began to feel intensely lonely. Deprived of his library in Berlin, he began to collect books again in Switzerland, but after a year or two he had exhausted all the second-hand booksellers, for they received no fresh supplies from other countries. Switzerland was full of interesting people who had taken refuge there, but as the war went on they became less and less accessible to human society.

At the beginning of
1917 Da Motta left Geneva to become head of the Conservatoire at Lisbon. Busoni congratulated him on having the chance, at fifty, of starting a new life and of taking a position of importance in his own country. «I feel homesick for great cities,» he wrote to Philipp; «life is exhausted in work. I have no talent for "organization" and small hope of gathering (raccogliere) the fruits of my efforts. Still I remain serene.»
By the middle of 1917 he began to feel that he had exhausted the resources of Switzerland. He did his best to keep in touch with the younger musicians, but there were very few of them to talk to and educate.

In the first month of his arrival in Switzerland he had made friends with Philipp Jarnach, the son of a Spanish painter, born and educated in France. Jarnach was an excellent pianist and a clever composer. He soon became Busoni's famulus, as he called him, and was employed by Busoni to make the pianoforte arrangements of «Arlecchino» and «Turandot». He delighted Busoni by his Latin clarity of mind, as well as by what Busoni called a German outlook on music in general; that meant merely that Jarnach took music seriously, not that he was burdened with the bourgeois romantic outlook. During the first two years in Zurich Busoni had made his house - cramped and uncomfortable as it was - something of a social centre, as he used to do in Berlin; and there were many cheerful and animated evenings spent in the restaurant of the railway station.

Busoni was always fascinated by the station; he would even sit there alone in the evenings, watching the arrivals of trains from other countries with their strange company of passengers. The station at Zurich may well have reminded him of those early days at Frohnleiten, when he used to watch the trains that came up from Trieste to travel on to Vienna and Berlin. And the street which leads to the chief station of Zurich, the Bahnhofstrasse, was the regular evening promenade of the town. A Swiss writer describes Busoni as walking along the Bahnhofstrasse quaerens quod devoret, looking at every woman with the eye of a connoisseur. But Busoni, though always attracted by women of all kinds (except intellectual women), looked at everybody. An English pupil of his who tended him like a daughter when he visited London in later years, found it uncomfortably embarrassing to walk with him; half absorbed in his own thoughts, half fascinated by the human types around him, he would stop and stare at any one with a disconcerting air of both curiosity and absent-mindedness.

In 1916 Busoni had acquired a young St. Bernard dog to whom he gave the name of 'Giotto'. As the invariable companion of Busoni's solitary walks Giotto soon became a well-known figure in Zurich, and his master, who was utterly unable to keep him in order, contributed, no doubt with secret pleasure, to Giotto's becoming something of a character. He was a most amiable dog, but he insisted on going his own way. One hot day in summer he thought he would like to take a bath in the fountain opposite the railway station. The basin was small and Giotto large, so that a good deal of water was splashed about, but Giotto thoroughly enjoyed himself. A policeman came up to Busoni and informed him that dogs were not allowed to bathe in the fountain; Busoni merely said to the policeman in his politest tones, 'Won't you go and tell him so yourself?' On another occasion, when Busoni was sitting in the station restaurant, a Swiss officer in uniform came in. He divested himself of his sword and leant it up against the wall; Giotto, being in restless mood, knocked it down. The officer looked a little annoyed, so Busoni bowed to him and remarked very sweetly, 'Please excuse him; he is an anti-militarist.' It was impossible to resent or even resist the monstrous friendliness of Giotto.

But in the autumn of 1917 Busoni gave up drinking wine with his friends at the station restaurant and took to spending his evenings at home with Giotto and his books. There was always work to be done, and he had already started on the music of «Doctor Faust»; but he did not work happily in solitude, «although solitude is often associated with men of genius - I am not one» (letter to Jella Oppenheimer). Among the minor works of this autumn were some of the exercises and studies eventually collected under the name of «Die Klavierübung». They are intended mainly for virtuoso pianists, but even the amateur can attempt some of them, and they are all extraordinarily interesting and stimulating. They are interesting too as helping to elucidate some of Busoni's other compositions, for the studies show how certain of his harmonic devices grew out of purely pianistic principles based on definite positions of the hands on the keyboard. Every one of the studies has genuine musical originality, and even the exercises to be repeated in all keys are a good deal more musical than such forms of torture are generally made to be.
The last work of 1917 was the exquisite little «Sonatina in diem Nativitatis Christi».

Another year began, and Busoni's depression deepened . Benni (Benvenuto Busoni) was called up for military service as an American citizen; Busoni wrote anxious letters to Mrs. Lanier in the hopes that he might in some way be released. Through Baroness Jella Oppenheimer, with whom he was in fairly frequent correspondence, he heard that the faithful Kapff was in great distress. Baroness Oppenheimer was anxious to help him, but Kapff's scrupulous sense of honour in all financial matters made it impossible for him to be dependent on her, and only Busoni could persuade him to accept a gift from 'an anonymous benefactor'.

Busoni gave a few pianoforte recitals in Berne and elsewhere, but the main work of the year was the score of «Doctor Faust». Loneliness (solitudine) grew more oppressive; he felt himself more and more cut off from the rest of humanity, even from such intimate friends as Petri and Anzoletti.

Letter-writing was no great pleasure if every letter was read by a censor when it crossed a frontier. More than once Busoni had to do what he could to soothe an irritation which some hasty outspoken words of his had caused, for everybody in all countries was suffering from a mental fever which inevitably led to misunderstanding.

In November the armistice brought the whole world relief from the interminable agony of the war. Busoni saw at once (as is clear from a letter which he wrote to Marchese Casanova) that the military defeat of Germany was the signal for Germany's spiritual resurrection, that the Revolution would set free the voices of those elect souls who had hitherto been condemned to silence, and that Germany would find a nobler way in which to show her greatness than in the pageantry of flying flags and glittering helmets.

The final conclusion of peace made it possible to travel again, and after a series of five concerts at Zurich in the spring of 1919 designed to illustrate the history of the pianoforte concerto, Busoni set out for Paris and London. He had at first no idea of playing in Paris; London was his main objective, and his chief purpose in visiting Paris was to seek the advice of his old friend Philipp:

Zurich is exhausted, and now that peace is concluded, the town is returning to its normal condition, I see that it is time for me to make an end of its limitations. Do you think that Paris would welcome me, and have you any suggestions to make? You are really the only man in whom I have complete confidence, so bear with me. For four years I have lived in a state of inward hostility towards this remote world, from which I have shut myself off. While judging it to have become uncivilized, I have perhaps become uncivilized myself. On the other hand I think that my art has become more subtle, and that it expresses all that remains of "good" within me.

Busoni reached Paris in the middle of September. Paris to him seemed strangely Americanized, and for a victorious city it was strangely melancholy.
«One sees a great many American soldiers with insolent and expressionless faces, and even officers of my age with cheap cocottes who have got themselves up smart for the occasion. They walk along with them without talking or laughing, simply because they think it is the proper thing to do in Paris. They call themselves "Knights of Columbus". People do not like them.»
Busoni was thankful that he had avoided the belligerent countries during the war. He called on Philipp, but in spite of being touched by Philipp's devoted affection and admiration for him, there was still a faint sense of misunderstanding between the two men. Busoni could not understand the 'conception feroce' which Philipp, like most Frenchmen, had of Zurich.
Philipp could not understand why Busoni resolutely refused to go back to Bologna. Busoni wanted him to say that he must make his home in Paris; Philipp talked of concerts at Paris in the spring, but would go no farther. Busoni described him to Gerda as beginning to look like 'un Clemenceau bienveillant'. If he was lonely in Zurich, he was still more lonely in Paris. «I think of Giotto,» he wrote to Gerda; «I feel touched whenever I see a dog.»

A few days later he was in London. His first impression was a happy one, for there was a letter waiting for him from Gerda, to say that Benni had arrived in Zurich.

Kiss Benni for me,» he wrote to her, «tell him I want him to feel happy and to like the little town that has given us so much that was good - until things take a turn for the better. He ought to consider now what path he means to follow, get over America and that drifting life, develop his splendid abilities. I expected a redemption from London, and I certainly have had beautiful first impressions. The town has not changed, but I have. I notice that I expect nothingfrom outside, whereas formerly I expected everything. This does not make me unhappy, but it makes me more tranquil and more solitary. Nothing that has been ever returns, says Anatole France; that gives the past its charm. England, which before the war was the most democratic of all countries, is now - though unchanged - the most aristocratic, compared with the others. What a sense of dignity there is here! How attentive and individually considerate people are, in spite of all the rush and hurry!

The old friends were unchanged too, from Henry Wood to the little secondhand bookseller in Shaftesbury Avenue. Before the end of September the great railway strike broke out - it was «the very Bach of strikes, so polyphonic and contrapuntal!» Busoni left his hotel, where butter, milk, and sugar were scarce, and took refuge with Maud Allan at her house in Regent's Park. 'She has such a motherly way of realizing a situation.'

What I like best about London is the Embankment, the river with its bridges, Westminster, St. Paul's, the Tower, the wharves and the ships, the wonderful rich facade of Buckingham Palace. One can see some of it from the back windows of the hotel, always beautiful whether in sunshine or in fog. I look at the people less than I used to do; their expression is very unpleasant to me. The architecture of London I should describe as "cautious" (vorsichtig). It is as if some one played a piece of music accurately, tastefully and not without understanding, but too slow and too softly. I remember what I said before, that the English can be men of taste, but not artists. Even in their architecture they want "not to attract notice", and woe, when they do try to attract notice! I remembered too, how the architecture stands out as a quiet and firm background to the movement of history; that I call strength and victory.

One of his most striking impressions was that of Mary-lebone Road at sunset with the endless perspective of yellow street-lamps - «a féerie that no theatre could ever reproduce».
Busoni's first recital at the Wigmore (formerly Bechstein) Hall was an unexpected success, and he was deeply touched by his reception. «You will find me very much changed,» he wrote to one of his English friends. But his public had changed too; England, despite his despair over first impressions, had become more musically intelligent since his last visit, and was ready to appreciate him in a way that it had never done before. Whenever he played in London he chose the Wigmore Hall for his recitals; it held only a small public, but that public was certain to include the fine flower of London musical life. After one of his London recitals Pachmann ran up to him, kissed his coat-tails and called out - 'Busoni grösster Bachspieler - ich grösster Chopinspieler!' There were concerts in the provinces too, but those, as always, filled Busoni with nothing but disgust.
«You ask me if I am happy,» he wrote to Philipp. «I confess I am not. To begin this strolling player's life (cet existence de saltimbanque) again is humiliating at my age, and at the moral and artistic phase that I have reached, it is unendurable. And I see no end to it.»
London provided Busoni with another of those curious experiences which affected him with a Hoffmanesque sense of mystery. One afternoon as he was coming back from a solitary walk he found himself enveloped in a thick fog. He managed to reach Regent's Park, but once inside it, the fog was so thick that he lost his bearings completely. A man came up to him through the gloom and Busoni asked if he could direct him to West Wing; the stranger took him by the arm and without the least hesitation led him straightto the house. In the light of a street-lamp Busoni realized with a sudden shock that his guide was blind. The episode would have seemed less disturbingly mysterious if Busoni had been aware that the roads in Regent's Park were all provided with a handrail to guide the blinded soldiers living at St. Dunstan's Lodge, next door to the house where he was staying.

In December Busoni passed through Paris again on his way back to Switzerland. He went with Maud Allan to see M. Carre, the director of the Opera Comique, about certain projects of her. At the end of the interview, M. Carre, as one might expect, took a polite leave of Miss Allan - «Je suis charmé et flatté, Mademoiselle, de vous serrer la main.» To Busoni he merely said, «Bonsoir, Monsieur.» He apparently took Busoni for a hired interpreter. Most people would have taken this episode as a joke, and laughed over a typical Frenchman’s ignorance of all that concerned music apart from his own professional interests. Busoni was deeply aggrieved, and expected Philipp to take some step towards an explanation.
The ordinary reader may well be led to think that Busoni was a man of inordinate vanity. This certainly was not the case. There can be no doubt that he was genuinely surprised at the respect with which he was treated in London after an absence of nearly seven years. The period of seclusion at Zurich had caused him to concentrate profoundly upon himself and upon his own interior development. He had almost forgotten, one might say, that he was a pianist; to himself he was a composer, as indeed he had been all his life. Solitude had formed in him a habit of living in the future, rather than in the present. Each work that he completed was but a step towards the next. No sooner had he conceived the first germ of Doctor Faust than his mind looked forward to it as a finished achievement. For years he had seen himself in imagination as the prophetic leader of Italian music. It was no desire to be enthroned as a national newspaper hero like Puccini or Caruso; it was a sense of duty rather than a desire, an intense inward (intima) conviction that a mission lay before him which he only could fulfil. It was a mission to the whole art of music, not merely to Italy alone; Italy, he felt, was only to be the chosen instrument through which that mission was first to be launched. Italy rejected him. At this moment of his life he did not know which way to turn. But the consciousness of the mission remained as steadfast as ever. M. Carre's polite indifference offended him not as an insult to himself but as an indifference to the whole future of music.

Christmas was spent at Zurich. Here Busoni was content to be a father and no more; Benni had come back from America «like Caspar Hauser from his prison», and needed all the affection that father, mother, and brother could give him. Busoni had always recognized his artistic gifts as a painter, and he had been resolved from the first that Benni should have a happier chance of developing them than he himself had had under the parental discipline of Ferdinando. «He is a gifted boy of sound character» he gently described him to Philipp, «but at this moment he needs tender handling.»
Concerts for Paris had to be planned, and as soon as his own Concerto was suggested, Busoni immediately proposed that he himself should conduct it - in order that he might thus secure an opportunity for Petri to make an appearance in Paris. «Petri is a Dutch subject - how wretched to be obliged to add that!»

There was a short visit to Italy early in
1920. «My impressions of Italy were discouraging. Italy will soon be nothing but a historical curiosity.»
Philipp tried to soothe his irritation, but hardly stento, understood Busoni's inward thoughts. «I expressed myself badly» Busoni replied; «it is not success which I miss, it is the possibility of working in peace, whereas I have to waste my strength and the years that are slipping by for a thing which has always been of secondary importance to me. Voila.»

He went to Paris in March, accompanied by
Gerda. She had not left Switzerland since they first established themselves at Zurich. The years of trouble had told upon her too; her health had suffered severely. But there were few things she enjoyed more than travelling with Ferruccio on his concert tours, looking after him - he needed it badly - and sharing in the pleasure of his successes. Her presence radiated affection and kindness; if Ferruccio was unsociable and difficult of approach, she was always gentle and serene. Since the first years of her marriage she had been beloved of all her husband's friends and pupils; she accepted their love and rejoiced in it, for she regarded it as but given to her in trust, not so much for herself as only for Ferruccio.
There were six concerts at Paris, three recitals and three concerts with orchestra. In Paris, as in London, Busoni was overwhelmed at the cordiality of his welcome. The superb playing of the French orchestras aroused his enthusiastic admiration, and at the same time he was delighted at the success won by his Swiss friend Edmondo Allegra of Zurich, who played the solo in his Concertino for clarinet. The visit brought him into contact with some of the most distinguished French musicians, and of these none attracted him more than Maurice Emmanuel, whose immense learning, sensitive musicianship, and keen philosophical intelligence made him a man thoroughly after Busoni's own heart. And in addition to all the artistic and intellectual side of Paris there was the magnificent and affectionate hospitality of an old friend whom he had not seen for forty years - Leonhard Tauber, once the young innkeeper at Klagenfurt who had listened to him as a boy, now the proprietor of a number of the most sumptuous hotels in Paris, still passionately devoted to music and the generous friend and host of all musicians.

Another visit to London followed in June, when he conducted the Brautwahl Suite and Liszt's Faust Symphony, as well as playing the solo part of his own Indian Fantasy. This concert provoked an amusing and characteristic letter from Bernard Shaw, who advised Busoni to produce his compositions under another name, since the public could never be induced to believe that one man could be so supremely great in two departments of music at once. Busoni was considerably puzzled by the letter, never having met the writer personally, and it took some little explaining to make him understand that it was the expression of a whole-hearted admiration, in spite of the jesting language in which it was couched. Maud Allan arranged a meeting between the two; it was not quite so successful as she had hoped. Busoni's experience of Germany had led him to expect the world's great men, or those who considered themselves such, to behave in a more monumental manner. Mr. Shaw seemed to adapt himself only too charmingly to the elegant badinerie of a lady’s drawing-room.
From London Busoni wrote to Andreae at Zurich:

The London Symphony Orchestra, which I had at my disposal, is quite excellent, technically accomplished and equally quick at understanding. And it has kept the dignity and good manners too that I appreciated so much before the war.... In this clear and sunny season London is enchanting, though I take a peculiar delight in the mystic drama (Mysterium) of the fog.
I note that my years in Zurich have not been without an effect for me in other countries; my position in rhe world of music has distinctly risen, without any help from me, just as a work ripens within oneself, without one's being consciously occupied with it. I am all the more grateful to your country for the quiet activity which it made possible for me. But now that chapter too is finished; sadly and seriously, I must say good-bye... Parting will not be easy, but my sense of form tells me that the length of this movement must not be exceeded.

On the same day he wrote to Petri in much the same words. For a year he had been unable to make up his mind where the next chapter of his life was to be spent. The decision came from outside. The German Revolution had affected music as well as politics. Busoni's pupil Leo Kestenberg had been appointed to an important post in the Prussian Ministry of Education. The result was that Busoni was offered the direction of a class for advanced musical composition under the State (formerly Royal) Academy of Arts and Sciences. The State Opera was planning the production of Turandot and Arlecchino. Busoni decided to go back to Berlin. The future became clear to him at once. He would have a position of honour in Berlin under the new regime and an opportunity for carrying on his mission as a trainer of young composers. For six months in the year he would be free to travel. He visualized his new life as divided between Paris, London, Berlin, and Rome. America should see him no more.
Yet still he hesitated; the contract with Berlin should be for one experimental year only. There had been other contracts for an experimental year - with Vienna and Bologna.

It was with a sense of homelessness that Busoni had come to Switzerland. There were many cities that he loved - Helsingfors, London, Paris, Bergamo - but none had ever been a home to him. Not even Berlin had ever given him that sense of home which means that one belongs to the place rather than that the place belongs to oneself. In Switzerland a new feeling seems to have taken possession of him, however little he may himself have been conscious of it. Affectionate by nature, it was impossible for him to receive so much affection as surrounded him in Switzerland without responding to it in a degree that subtly influenced his whole personality. To those who were cut off from him during the years of war he appeared changed in many ways. The change in his outward appearance was indeed distressing, and hardly less distressing the sense of melancholy remoteness that he so often conveyed. Those characteristic explosions of laughter had begun to seem almost artificial, spasmodic, and deliberate attempts to recover something of his old self, or to disguise - perhaps to himself as well as to his friends - the transformation that had taken place within him. One might think him grown less exhilarating, even less cordial; but he had acquired a new gentleness and tenderness, a new power of tranquil inspiration for those who had the sympathy to receive it. He had entered into Swiss musical life in a way that was new to him; he had made friends with the Swiss composers, had learned to take a helpful interest in their works and in their aspirations, almost as if he belonged to Switzerland himself; he had in fact come to feel himself spiritually at home in Switzerland - far more intimately than the foreign musicians who bought (acquistarono) themselves properties in picturesque landscapes, even when they found it convenient to acquire legal Swiss nationality.

When the University of Zurich conferred an honorary Doctorate of Philosophy upon him in July 1919, Busoni expressed his thanks in an open letter to Andreae both for this honour, which he sincerely felt to be the most distinguished that he had ever received, and for all that Zurich and Switzerland had done for him.

He had felt that he himself was receiving help and benefit from the high level of intellectual and artistic culture that characterized the Swiss; the consciousness that he was understood and that others were willing to bring him understanding had produced an ideal harmony of collaboration.
A pale autumn settled down upon Zurich; it had lost all that made it tolerable during the 'good' time of the war! Busoni tried to devote himself to composition, but it was impossible in a house full of packing-cases and straw. The one person who seemed to enjoy the situation was Giotto, who pushed his way between the packingcases like Gulliver in the streets of Lilliput, looking for a heap of straw on which he could settle himself to sleep.

He looks up at me and his eye says, "I've no business here, but you won't turn me out, will you?" Poor Giotto - I can hardly bear that look of his; he seems to know.
My heart is bursting. I leave my sons behind. I am going - at 54 - into the unknown.