SONATINA PRIMA
Échelonnées sur une période de dix ans (1910-1920), les six Sonatines, sous une forme attrayante, accessible et concise, donnent peut-être le meilleur portrait global de Busoni, dont elles ramassent les multiples facettes en un étonnant microcosme. Ce ne sont pas des sonates en miniature, et l'on n'y retrouve pas trace des formes classiques telles que forme sonate, rondo, scherzo, etc. Le terme doit être pris plutôt dans son sens originel piece brève de forme libre destinée à être «sonnée» (jouée).
La PREMIÈRE SONATINE (K. 257) date de 1910, et succède de peu à la deuxième version de la Fantasia Contrappuntistica. Elle enchaîne quatre épisodes libres, tous basés sur le thème initial dérivé de la mélodie populaire américaine Swanee River, aussitôt variée, soit sur une idée secondaire, exposée en fugato, lors du deuxième épisode, tenant lieu de mouvement lent. Vient ensuite un Allegretto elegante. sorte de valse à la Chopin, mais opposant les gammes par tons de la main droite (à 4/4) aux rythmes de valse de la main gauche en la bémol majeur. Un épilogue lent et rêveur, au charme debussyste, rappelle le thème initial. [La musique de piano - Fayard]
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Although the Sonatina begins and ends with charming and simple music, it entices the listener into unknown and disquieting regions: 'The contents of the piece have nothing to do with that which one had previously expected of a sonatina; they rather lead us into inaccessible territory', wrote one of the Swiss critics at the first performance. A second, led astray no doubt by the use of whole-tone scales, found that the work classified Busoni as a 'modern Impressionist'. Reviews of the first Berlin performance three months later provoked an explosion from the composer: nobody seems to have understood the work. 'The Sonatina has been panned here', he wrote, 'the mildest critics found it an imitation of Debussy!' Even a more recent commentator, H. H. Stuckenschmidt, exaggerates the significance of Busoni's use of whole tones; they were only one of many new possibilities to be fully explored; at no time did he wish to identify himself with any school of composers, least of all with the so-called Impressionists.
In his collection of press-cuttings only one review of the Berlin performance has been preserved, in which the critic seems genuinely to have grasped the significance of the Sonatina:
Certainly this description has not been selected without real justification, but probably also not without a slightly ironical undercurrent of thought. A 'Sonatina' means a piece for beginners, and in this Sonatina the composer may have regarded himself as the beginner or founder of a new system of harmonies.
The forty-four-year-old composer still delighted in being called a beginner. And of his many new beginnings, this period of experiment was the most exciting. Four years later he was to write, 'Couldn't one make it clear to the critics that dissonances don't exist? That the term cacophony has no meaning any more?' And during the frenetically productive summer of 1909, when this phase began, he exclaimed with joy, in a letter to Egon Petri: 'Simply on the piano and with 12 semitones one could progress infinitely; and how much further with a new tone-system and an orchestra! But what a technique and what a long life one would need for that!' [Beaumont, Busoni the Composer]
