FERRUCCIO BUSONI

Twentieth-Century Music: A History of
Musical Style in Modern Europe and America

Book by Robert P. Morgan
Norton, 1991

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Although Ferruccio Busoni (1866-1924) was born in Italy of an Italian father, his mother was of German descent, his musical education was acquired mainly in Graz and Leipzig, and his professional career was centered largely in Berlin. Busoni was one of the most celebrated pianists of his age, greatly admired for the freely Romantic style of his playing and for his virtuosic transcriptions of Bach keyboard compositions. He was also a noted conductor, and introduced works by most of the important composers of the younger generation, including Schoenberg and Bartók.

Though active as a composer from his earliest years, Busoni's interest in composition seems to have increased markedly after the turn of the century. Whereas his earlier works, culminating in the gigantic Piano Concerto of 1904 (which introduced a male chorus in the finale), were written in an expansive, full-blown style typical of the late Romantic period, his subsequent music began to take on a leaner, more economical quality and a more forward-looking technical basis. The Elegies for piano, composed in 1907, were considered by Busoni to be the first works in which he completely found his own voice. During the following years he wrote a series of compositions, mostly of modest length, that are notable for their exploration of new compositional tendencies.

Busoni formally announced this change in attitude in a small volume entitled Sketch of a New Esthetic of Music, published in 1907, which represents the earliest attempt to formulate a comprehensive philosophical statement of the technical and esthetic foundations of a new twentieth-century music. A critical document in the history of the early modern movement, the New Esthetic had considerable influence on the younger composers of the time. It argues for the liberation of music from what Busoni considered to be the confining shackles of outmoded compositional practices. New music should be infinite and absolute, unencumbered on the one hand by the representative and descriptive limitations of program music, and on the other by the rigid and stereotyped formal schemata of "absolute music" as defined and prescribed by the academic theoreticians. Traditional musical "laws" were not to be accepted in blind faith, for the music of the future must be free to develop according to the requirements of its own inherent potentialities.

In place of what he refers to as the "tyranny of the major and minor system", with its rigid distinction between consonance and dissonance, Busoni proposes an undoctrinaire use of new scalar possibilities (which, as he remarks, had only just begun to be investigated in the music of such composers as Strauss and Debussy). He even sketches out a system of microtonal divisions of the octave, and discusses the potential of electronic instruments and new notational strategies in opening up as yet unimagined possibilities of entirely new musical systems. Busoni later gave the name Young Classicism to this visionary conception of a hoped-for new music, which would take into account "all the gains of previous experiments and their inclusion in strong and beautiful forms." This turn away from Romanticism toward a new kind of classicism was to prove remarkably prophetic, as we shall see, especially when we consider musical developments following World War I.

In his works after the publication of the New Esthetic, Busoni himself attempted at least a first step toward the kind of music he envisioned in his theoretical writings. Notable in this regard are the six sonatinas for piano, composed between 1910 and 1920. In these relatively short works, largely contrapuntal in conception and strongly influenced by the music of Bach, Busoni explored a number of novel compositional techniques: bitonal chordal complexes, "artificial" scalar patterns (such as whole-tone), and unmetered rhythm, for example, can all be found in the Second Sonatina of 1912. Example II-3a, notated without indication of meter, represents the opening of the first main thematic idea, heard over a dissonant, arpeggiated chordal complex that forms the harmonic basis for the entire first section of the piece. In Example II-3b multiple levels of triadic harmonies move in parallel motion and combine with one another to form richly sonorous "polytonal" aggregates.

Equally suggestive is Busoni's wish to combine and reconcile stylistic traits drawn from diverse historical periods, in keeping with his view of the interconnection and ultimate oneness of all musical expression (an attitude he forcefully argued in a famous essay entitled "The Unity of Music"). This view is particularly evident in his later works. Both the Fifth (1919) and Sixth (1920) Sonatinas, for example, make explicit use of earlier music (Bach's D-minor Fantasy and Fugue and Bizet's Carmen, respectively), mixing actual quotations with freely composed distortions of the borrowed material, producing a distinctly modern effect that has parallels with Stravinsky's music of the same time.

Even in his most chromatic and experimental works, such as the Second Sonatina, Busoni never completely gave up the notion of tonality.

[EXAMPLE FROM THE SECOND SONATINA]

But tonality is here something quite different from what it formerly was - more inclusive and encompassing, capable of combining pure diatonicism with extreme chromaticism, major and minor scales with unusual new modalities, and traditional harmonic successions with complex vertical aggregates that, despite their dissonant structure, function as referential sonorities for entire sections.

Busoni's later works include three operas. Arlecchino (1916) and Turandot (1917) both contain spoken dialogue and rely upon eighteenth-century commedia dell'arte precedents, another reflection of Busoni's interest in revitalizing older traditions in modern guises. Doktor Faust, left unfinished at the composer's death in 1924, was completed by his friend the Spanish-German composer Philipp Jarnach; with its clearly defined numbers and traditional forms, it also exemplifies Busoni's very personal idea of Young Classicism. Based on old German puppet versions of the legend rather than on Goethe's Faust, the opera is, somewhat like the composer himself, a curious mixture of seemingly incompatible elements. At once remote yet visionary, it combines dramatic austerity with musical opulence.

Busoni is a puzzling figure, difficult to place within the larger picture of twentieth-century music. Especially in its moments of uninterrupted diatonicism and its frequent adherence to an unambiguously triadic harmonic structure, his music looks backward, yet it also contains innovations that point to the future. In his eclectic vision of a new music that would draw upon the widest possible range of technical and stylistic sources, Busoni helped stake out one of the principal paths that subsequent music would follow.