PAUL JACOBS

THE SIX SONATINAS FOR PIANO

For the listener unfamiliar with the music of Ferruccio Busoni, there is no better introduction than the six Sonatinas for Piano. These remarkable works are representative of his late style, and, in addition, extremely varied from one to the other. The span of ten years during which the Sonatinas were written also encompasses the rapid transition from expressionism to neo-Classicism.

There is a tendency today to divide music of the early 20th century into one of two aesthetic viewpoints and harmonic languages: the one, usually thought of as Russian-French, with Debussy as the fountainhead and Stravinsky the most prominent figure; the other, an Austro-German school centering around Schoenberg. Yet, given the flourishing of independent artistic activity in the first decades of the century we cannot so conveniently account for all composers of that time. In addition to those who primarily continued 19th-century practices, there existed a disparate group whose music eroded the past more subtly than did the innovations of Stravinsky and Schoenberg. These composers generally came from more peripheral music centers - Sibelius from Finland, Nielsen from Denmark, Janácek from Moravia, Charles Ives from the then provincial United States, and the peripatetic Ferruccio Busoni, born in a small town in northern Italy of an Italian father and a mother of German lineage.

Although Busoni's music is still not widely performed, as a figure he exerted considerable influence on composers and performers. Varese, Weill, and Wolpe worked with him, and countless others either studied with him intermittently or were acquainted with him as a hospitable and generous friend. During World War I, Busoni met Stravinsky in Switzerland, and the Russian paid him the compliment many years later of being the "first neo-Classicist." He knew Sibelius in Finland, and while he was living in New York he became friends with Mahler. There is no evidence of a meeting with Charles Ives, but Busoni shares with him a certain attitude towards intellectual experimentation. He carried on a voluminous correspondence with Schoenberg, Mahler, Strauss, Toscanini, and other important musicians of his time; wrote numerous articles; published a short treatise in 1906 entitled Eine neue Ästhetik der Tonkunst (translated in 1911 as A Sketch of a New Esthetic of Music); and, as a conductor during several years spent in Berlin, introduced many new and unfamiliar works by contemporary composers.

Despite his achievements as composer and theoretician, Busoni's name remains most familiar today in its hyphenated form connected to that of Bach- many of whose works Busoni reworked early in his career in brilliant and imaginative piano transcriptions- or as that of a virtuoso whose playing was a legend in his own time. As pianist, he differed from his colleagues both in the style of his playing (invariably described as monumental") and in his choice of repertory- for he eschewed the superficial and the purely bravura, which were the hallmarks of his contemporaries, concentrating instead on the works of Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Chopin, and Liszt.

Busoni's powerful and highly original music is characterized by a number of features that should be immediately apparent. His themes are bold, simple, and short. The melodic and rhythmic elements are well-defined and remain perceptible even in elaborate contrapuntal manipulations and contrasting textures. The resonances of the modem grand piano called forth in his writing for that instrument, together with the "feel" of this music under the performer's hands, bear witness to a pianist-composer of extraordinary resource and imagination: the writing for piano is at once idiomatic and ingenious. The one-movement Sonatina No.1, dedicated to Rudolf Ganz, is, like the other works heard here, unconventional in form; at least it does not follow the sonata-allegro prototype suggested by its title. The various short sections, all interconnected, are based on materials derived either from the opening theme or from the "second subject," itself first heard in fugal form following the initial development of the opening material. The scale patterns, employing alternating major and minor modes, also include the whole-tone scale, occasionally resulting in a dissolution of tonality (In 1910, the year this sonatina was written, Busoni had published his own concert version of the second of Schoenberg's Three Piano Pieces, Op. 11; the Three Piano Pieces are generally considered the first instance of an entire work governed by the suspension of tonality) Busoni achieves an interesting rhythmic counterpoint in this work by juxtaposing duplets and triplets, a musical idea that reaches its climactic realization in the central section of the movement, which pits the second theme in triple meter against whole-tone figurations in duple time. With regard to harmony and the general treatment of form in short, concentrated sections, the Sonatina No. 2, dedicated to Mark Hambourg, is perhaps the most "advanced" of the six. The music's seeming unpredictability is, on closer scrutiny entirely logical. Its mood inhabits the shadowy dream world between sleep and awakening - a fantastic landscape, suggested perhaps by E.T.A. Hoffmann. Busoni would later use the chorale-like theme that occurs after the first climax and again at the end of the piece in his opera Doktor Faust in the scene where the three students from Krakow dressed in black, present Faust with the magic book. The melody is accompanied here by chords that ultimately become mere opaque noises slowly rising up from the murky depths of the keyboard's lowest register.

The title of the "Sonatina for the Use of the American Child, Madeline M., Composed for the Harpsichord" is somewhat misleading. In the first place, the work is actually a short suite; secondly the designation "for the Use of the... Child" does not mean that the piece is necessarily to be played by a child, or even that it is intended as a piece primarily for a child's enjoyment, but rather that it is written in a simpler style. Significantly this piece dates from the time when Busoni was becoming increasingly interested in Mozart's music, which represented for him the model for his own "Young Classicism" (a term he preferred to "neo-Classicism"). "Composed for the Harpsichord" is also a questionable point. It is true that during a tour of the United States for the Chickering Piano Company of Boston before World War I Busoni had met the instrument builder and early-music enthusiast Arnold Dolmetsch and ordered a harpsichord from him. However, the Sonatina ad usum infantis appears to have been written in Zurich in 1915, when Busoni was separated from his instrument. In any event, the piece not only leaves the range of the harpsichord, if momentarily but its pedal effects and dynamic inflections belong properly within the sphere of the piano. The work is in five sections, of which the first, second, and fourth share a common theme. The fifth section, a Polonaise marked "un poco cerimonioso," might be music for an imaginary puppet show (an art form that greatly intrigued the composer); this music reappears in Busoni's later opera Arlecchino.

The Sonatina for Christmas Day 1917, which is dedicated to the composer's son Benvenuto, seems to adumbrate the later Hindemith, and at times even Prokofieff. An introspective mood is sustained almost without break, Christmas Day being gently suggested by the tolling of bells. Busoni is extremely economical with the melodic material; most of the piece is derived from the germ heard at the very opening, a motif that appears in many guises, as at the "quasi transfigurato" on the last page, where it is presented very slowly while the music ends in a mood of serenity tinged with sadness.

In a letter from Zurich dated August 20, 1918, Busoni wrote to his wife, "Yesterday and the day before I composed a short sonatina on three bars of Bach, with which I am very satisfied." The next day he wrote, "I gave Jarnach the score, and it pleased him very much." The work in question is the Short Sonatina under the Banner of the Great Johann Sebastian, dedicated to Philipp Jarnach (the composer's pupil, who completed Doktor Faust); it is a free paraphrase of the short Fantasy and Fugue in D minor, BWV 905 (a work considered today to be of doubtful authenticity). The "three bars'" Busoni works with are not consecutive in the source piece, more than two having been taken from the Fantasy the "third" being the two-measure subject of the Fugue. An additional motif, original with Busoni but derived from the intervals of the Fantasy is also worked into this powerful and cohesive display of contrapuntal virtuosity a masterpiece that far outdistances its model.

The Sonatina No.6, dedicated to Leonhard Tauber, was first published under the title Chamber-Fantasy on Bizet's Carmen. It reflects at once Busoni's admiration for Liszt, whose many similar opera paraphrases it recalls, and for Bizet's opera, which Busoni, like Nietzsche, saw as the Latin counterfoil to the Wagnerian aesthetic. The sonatina presents the familiar themes in unexpected guises, but it is not an amusing piece; on the contrary it presents an encapsulated version of the tragedy with strange modulations functioning like cinematographic dissolves between the few moments from the opera that are evoked: the crowd scenes from the first and fourth acts, the "flower song," the Habanera, and the "fate" motif. The final page, marked "Andante visionario," combines the "fate" motif with a suggestion of poor Carmen's Habanera in an ending of true sadness.