Ferruccio Busoni plays Liszt, Bach, Busoni & Chopin

by David Dubal









Throughout the world, a small but educated and potent band of connoisseurs, pianists, critics and music lovers have kept Busoni's name luminous throughout the three quarters of a century since his premature death at 58. Of the major pianists that have been influenced or deeply affected by his playing and music, one may name Egon Petri, Percy Grainger, Edward Steuerman, Artur Rubinstein, Gunnar Johansen, Claudio Arrau, Arthur Loesser, John Ogdon, Ernst Levy, Alfred Brendel, Ronald Smith, Ronald Stevenson and many others. There is no dispute that he was one of the towering pianists in history, ranking in importance with the high immortals of the keyboard such as Chopin, Liszt, Anton Rubinstein, Clara Schumann, Tausig, von Bülow, Schnabel, Paderewski, Hofmann, Rakhmaninov, Richter, Gould, Horowitz and Artur Rubinstein who called him "The awe-inspiring master!... with his handsome, pale, Christ-like face, and his diabolical technical prowess, was by far the most interesting pianist... a shining example to all musicians for the noble way in which he pursued his career so uncompromisingly, for the high standards he set for his own compositions and for his general culture."

Busoni was one of the last great incarnations of Romanticism and his playing projected the feeling that music had no boundaries or limits of expression. As a pianist, Gunnar Johansen recalled, "he outshone all others. In Germany, we didn't speak of Mr Busoni, we spoke of Der Busoni, as if he were a monument. His presence on stage was immense." Arthur Loesser who first heard him in Berlin in 1911 performing six monumental all-Liszt recitals called him "unforgettable, shocking even... one could never forget his playing." The element of shock, mystery and awe is documented in most descriptions of his playing. His great pupil Egon Petri thought that in a Busoni performance, "The music became dematerialised; he brought it into another sphere. It had a mystical quality." Richard Cappel wrote of a 1919 London recital that "(Busoni is) far and away the greatest musical executant now with us; a commanding figure - more, a well-nigh awful one, a maker of music that is tremendous and statuesque; a steely terrible power that regularly cows you as you listen, leaving you almost too humbled to admire." Percy Grainger thought, "He was a twisted genius making the music sound unlike himself, but grander than itself, more super-human - I cannot recall ever hearing or seeing Busoni play a wrong note. He did not seem to 'feel' his way about the keyboard by touching adjacent notes - as most of us do - he smacked the keys right in the middle... I admired him without reservation of any kind and revelled in everything he did pianistically."

Busoni's conceptions seemed to possess a revelatory expressive power and a gigantic sweep. Nadia Boulanger considered him "a genius. To say that he played the piano in an extraordinary way is merely to state the blindingly obvious... He played with the air of composing as he played. Busoni's articulation was perfect, and came not only from the astonishing evenness of his technique, but above all from his prodigious sense of rhythm." It was a rhythm of symphonic proportion yet which was not bound to strict metric playing. It was his ambition to create a musical structure which struck a deep chord in the memory.

In his reverence for the piano, he is the true spiritual son of Liszt. "Take it for granted," he wrote, " that everything is possible on the piano, even when it seems impossible to you, or really is so." His pedalling was perhaps the most original in the history of the art of piano playing, sometimes using the three pedals simultaneously. He said "the potential effects of the pedals are unexhausted, because they have remained the slave of a narrow-minded and senseless harmonic theory. The pedal is decried. Senseless irregularities are to blame for this. Let us experiment with sensible irregularities."

Not that Busoni was immune from criticism. Many disliked intensely his "interpretations." Edward Steuermann (commenting in the late 1950s) felt "Busoni's pianism would not be easily understood today, might even be bewildering compared with today's playing (the avoidance of risks, spiritual or stylistic), his bold individualism... would appear revolutionary, almost rebellious, and so it was fifty years ago."

For example, for many, his Beethoven was too violent, for others it was dryly cerebral. Busoni countered with "I built up an ideal of Beethoven which has wrongly been called modern and which is really no more than live." He knew Beethoven's Pathetique Sonata sounded revolutionary to ears of 1799, and he wanted to retain that feeling. He wrote, "A greater transformation has not taken place in the history of music, than from the Sonata of Haydn and Mozart to the Hammerklavier Sonata. Beethoven created the modern grand piano through his technique, by making the best use of higher, lower and wider positions on the keyboard, by use of pedals and by the improvement and enrichment of the sound."

Busoni said, "Chopin attracted and repelled me all my life." Chopin was the composer that in his playing he was most frequently condemned, his Chopin being too monumental, lacking in romance, bursting its form with too much muscle. Busoni protested that Chopin had been "prostituted, profaned, vulgarised," had been made into "a typical Balzac novel figure of the 1830s - the pale, interesting, mysterious, elegant stranger in Paris." At a Paris recital after performing the four Chopin Ballades, an elderly gentleman in the audience who had known a few of Chopin's pupils loudly proclaimed "In the name of Chopin, I protest."

However the American composer Otto Luening who studied composition with him wrote in his autobiography, "His performances of the Chopin Ballades went beyond brilliant piano playing. Sometimes he made the instrument sound like an Aeolian harp as described by the poets, or like sound floating from a box of electronic resonators with apparently no relationship to hammered-string sound. Under his hands the piano became both a picture projector and a story teller and in the Ballades Busoni became a bard."

One of his enigmatic dictums was "Bach is the foundation of piano playing, Liszt's the summit. The two make Beethoven possible." He loved Bach as a nourishing religion, and devoted endless energy to the Leipzig Cantor. As early as his twenty-third year he produced an edition of Bach's Inventions, fascinating and dense in its details of phrasing, fingering and musical intention. His edition of the Well-Tempered Clavier bristles with a welter of footnotes, often confusing in their application but brilliantly suggestive. Busoni's editions sought to translate Bach into the terms of the sound of the modern piano.

More than any other pianist of his generation Busoni spread the gospel of Bach's keyboard works. His transcriptions of Bach's music remain his best known works. Bach-Busoni Chorales, the Chaconne and various organ works were so well-known that once at a party he was introduced as Mr Bach-Busoni. The universality of Bachian polyphony was a primary influence on him, and was a basis for his own complex music. His 1910 Fantasia Contrappuntistica based on Bach's The Art of Fugue continues to fascinate pianists of intellectual bent and technical endowment.

One of Busoni's goals was to show the public Liszt's importance. Although not a "Liszt pupil," Busoni did more for this composer than most of the army of Liszt's actual students. In 1909, after playing the Liszt Sonata to Liszt's pupil Sgambati, Busoni wrote "he kissed my head and said I quite reminded him of the master, more so than his real pupils." Liszt's life and personality had decidedly influenced Busoni in his own desire to be the complete man and artist, full of altruistic ideals. Busoni doubtless considered Liszt an ideal, and wrote that, "He lifted the piano to a princely position in order that it might be worthy of himself." The two great virtuosos had much in common, and the Italianate Lisztian melody was deeply attractive to Busoni, by temperament, and it lurks in many of his works. Busoni was one of the first to delineate Liszt's historical importance, writing "I am myself respectfully conscious of the distance which separates me from his greatness... We are all descended from him radically, without excepting Wagner, and we owe to him the lesser things that we can do. Franck, Richard Strauss, Debussy, and the Russians are all branches of this tree."

Busoni's Liszt playing inaugurated a new age in Liszt performance. The six recitals for the Liszt centenary included over seventy works. In his biography of Busoni, Edward J. Dent wrote, "The greater works of Liszt, which minor pianists turn into mere displays for virtuosity because their technique is inadequate beyond anything beyond that, often sounded strangely easy and simple when they were played by Busoni. The glittering scales and arpeggios became what Liszt intended them to be - a dimly suggested background - while the themes in massive chords or singing melodies stood out clear."

Busoni thought Chopin had become "over-popularised," while Liszt was often ignored. In a letter to his wife Gerda, he says he had been asked to play Chopin's Fantasie Impromptu. He writes, "This well-known piece, a shallow salon study, will never be criticised badly, in the way Liszt's compositions are so frequently criticised." In a letter to Philipp Jarnach, he commented, "How pure and utterly isolated was the figure of Franz Liszt, that cosmopolitan catholic idealist."

Busoni's repertory was immense. In 1898, he performed fourteen concertos with the Berlin Philharmonic in four concerts, which included the Bach D minor, Mozart A major, K. 488, Beethoven G major, Hummel B minor, Beethoven Emperor, Weber Konzertstück, Schubert-Liszt Wanderer Fantasy, Chopin E minor, Mendelssohn G minor, Schumann A minor, Henselt F minor (the work with which he made his American debut), Rubinstein E flat, Brahms D minor and Liszt A major. In 1913, he gave a series of eight recitals at the Verdi Conservatory in Milan, which he called his Octomeron. "This affair," he wrote, "is a fine demonstration, organised and carried out with the greatest noblesse. The programmes were massive. Recital number 1 was devoted to Bach transcriptions and Beethoven's Waldstein and Op. 111 Sonatas, number 2 - an all-Beethoven recital, numbers 3 and 4 devoted to Chopin, numbers 5 and 6 two all-Liszt recitals, one of original works and the other of transcriptions, number 7 works of Alkan, Schumann, Franck and Brahms, with the final recital of Busoni's own music, including the first performance of the Sonatina Seconda, one of his finest compositions.

His expectations of the qualities a great pianist must possess are uncompromising. He wrote, "The pianist must have unusual intelligence and culture, feeling, temperament, imagination, poetry and finally that personal magnetism which sometimes enables the artist to inspire four thousand people, strangers whom chance has brought together, with one and the same feeling... If any of these qualities are missing, the deficiency will be apparent in every phrase he plays."

And Busoni was relentless in his quest for perfection, often practising through the night after performing a brilliant recital. The piano's fascination never left him and this Faustus of the piano knew that the keyboard relentlessly ate up his relatively limited time on earth, and everything seemed important to his restless intellect. He wrote to his wife from a gruelling concert tour, "I am very nervous, just now, when travelling, and have the continual feeling that time is slipping by me... This makes me bitter sometimes... I take a great deal of trouble to act in the right way, but my life is many-sided... The conflict between what I should like to do, what I could do, and what I must do is very worrying and keeps me in a continual sate of tension." But Busoni, a man of enormous strength and mental stability, typically writes, "But perhaps everything is for the best like this, and who knows if it may not be the means of preserving my energy and even increasing it."

To a friend in 1905, he writes, "What a long road the road to mastery is, even for someone who is very gifted - and often still further for him, because he sets himself bigger problems!" In 1907, he laments to his wife, "It is an effort for me to practise the piano, yet one cannot leave it. It is like an animal whose head always grows again, however much one cuts off." Has there ever been a serious pianist who does not deeply understand these words? In 1910, he writes to the Swiss composer Hans Huber, "I toil away at the Chopin Etudes, which I believed myself to have mastered 25 years ago, yet always have to conquer anew. As late as 1922, writing to Egon Petri, he says, "One says of contagious diseases that what they gain in propagation, they loose in malignity. Do you find a similar phenomenon with our beloved piano-playing?"

Throughout his career, Busoni dedicated much time to teaching piano. The list of his pupils is formidable and includes Guido Agosti, Beryl Rubinstein, Michael von Zadora, Josef Weiss, Egon Petri, Carlo Zecchi, Maria Carreras, Harriet Cohen, Mana-Zucca, Mieczyslaw Münz, Edward Steuermann, Selim Palmgren, Leo Kestenberg, Rudolf Ganz, Leo Sirota, Émile Blanchet and others of virtuoso calibre. He taught at Weimar, Vienna, Zurich, Bologna, Boston, Helsingfors and Berlin. Often he must have been weary from its constant demands, physical and psychological. Writing in 1916 to the great Liszt pupil, the Portuguese pianist Jose Vianna Da Motta he tells, "I have become most disaffected towards teaching the piano. I find it embarrassing to observe others wandering along the same road (with greater or lesser difficulty) as I continuously travelled and have now finally left behind me; to have to listen to something for 20 minutes, when I have already adjudged it from the first 10 bars - does this strike you as unnatural?"

It should be noted that Busoni was also an excellent conductor and as early as 1902, produced for the first time in Berlin works as various and complex as Delius's Paris, Debussy's Nocturnes and L'après-midi d'un faune, Sibelius's Second Symphony, Bartok's Rhapsody for Piano and Orchestra, and many other novel scores.

In November 1919 George Bernard Shaw wrote to Busoni, "But you should compose under an assumed name. It is incredible that one man could do more than one thing well; and when I heard you play, I said, 'It is impossible that he should compose: There is not room enough in a single life for more than one supreme excellence.'" Although we can only touch upon Busoni the composer, it was by his music that he wished to be most remembered. Composing began early for him, and by the time of his 24 Preludes when he was 14 he was a master of his craft. But he travelled a long journey from his incipient romanticism to his later style which is exemplified in his opera Doctor Faustus, finished by his composition pupil Philipp Jarnach. Busoni in his essay, "Wesen und Einheit der Musik" ("The Essence and Oneness of Music") attempted to come to grips with the duality of the absolute musician and the philosophical theatre composer. For Busoni, opera had to be a complete and self-contained composition, not dependent upon its libretto, but using words, scenery and action as a basis for its formal structure.

"It may sound paradoxical," he wrote. "The composition of opera leads us back to purer and more absolute music, because by means of the suggested future and banishment of everything illustrative, only the elements which are organically suitable to music attain their own rights: the content, feeling and the form, synonymous with the spirit, heart and understanding... A composer - creator, brings to a single opera all that moves him, all that swims before his eyes, all that is within his powers to achieve, he is a musical Dante, a musical Divine Comedy." Opera, Busoni felt, must be cleared from business interests as well as from social conventions. An opera should be made into a rare, half-religious and elevating ceremony. For him, Mozart's The Magic Flute was nearest to this ideal "because it unites enigma with drama."

In his own time, his scale of influence was enormous, touching musicians as dissimilar as Sibelius, Varèse, Walton, Schoenberg, and his own pupil Kurt Weill. Few books on musical aesthetics have ever had the impact of his "Entwurf einer neuen Ästhetik der Tonkunst" ("Sketch of a New Aesthetic of Music"). Busoni was open to every new impulse. His thinking anticipated virtually the whole course of twentieth-century music. "I almost think that in the new great music machines will also be necessary and will be assigned a share in it." Of his own place in his art he wrote, "I should like to catch hold of a corner of the coming art of music and, where possible, sew a seam in it myself."

At the end of the twentieth century appreciation for Busoni's music is at its peak. For serious listeners, his often enigmatic works bring to the fore our own perplexing anxieties. Through his brilliant essays, letters, compositions, and the small legacy of his mighty piano playing of which he once said, "I hardly seem to play with my hands anymore," we discover in Busoni one of the most complex artistic personalities of his time. Prophetic, romantic and modern, he was a person of the highest idealism. "Anyone who will master the language of art," he wrote, "must have nurtured his life through the soul."

This amazing disc literally presents another chapter of Busoni study, namely recordings mostly unknown to the general public. Recording was not congenial to Busoni, and his style could never be conducive to being totally reproduced. However, in these performances, one of history's greatest techniques can be heard in passages of frightening executive power. Heard also are aspects of Busoni's entirely original conceptions of the music he played. On this recording we can hear his own arrangements of Liszt's Paganini Etudes, No. 5 La Chasse and the celebrated No. 3 La Campanella. Of Liszt's Paganini Etudes, Schumann wrote, "Whoever masters them, as they should be mastered, in an easy, entertaining way, so that they glide past us like different scenes in a marionette show, may travel confidently all over the world and will return with golden laurels, a second Paganini-Liszt." Surely that mantle had been given to Busoni.

The other Liszt on this CD is a titanic reading of Liszt's treacherous Fifth, Transcendental Etude, Feux Follets ("Will o' the Wisp") where in Busoni's words "ornament is united with colour." Of special interest is the once popular Liszt Polonaise No. 2 in E major which Busoni played with great panache.

Also on this recording is Busoni's transformation of Bach's Chaconne for Solo Violin (Partita No. 2). Busoni completed it in Boston in 1892, where he first introduced it. The score is, as Antony Beaumont points out, "an extension of Brahmsian and Lisztian textures, (and) draws an organ-like richness from the piano." (Antony Beaumont has written the indispensable Busoni the Composer and another volume of selected letters in his own translations.)

Busoni's Chopin was by no means the Camille by moonlight in tears Chopin that had disgusted him in his youth. As Busoni developed, his Chopin became more and more controversial. Edward Dent wrote that "What Busoni does in every case is to bring us closer to the mind of the composer. He shows us, as it were, the music as it existed before the notes were written down." Busoni himself in far less metaphysical terms wrote in December 1906 "the 24 Preludes are not easy... They have given me very much to do. They do not sound so difficult, but they are not any easier than the Brahms Paganini Variations and they are so very varied in technique. One has to be able to spring about..."

In 1920 he writes, "Chopin, it is true that he struggles successfully against growing old, yet the choice of his works is becoming ever more restricted. His dances and most of his Nocturnes have vanished. For me, his 'prophetic' work is the 24 Preludes, which contains the seed of everything following, more or less progressively."

The playing time of a compact disc dictates that nine preludes be left out: numbers 8, 12, 13, 17, 18, 19, 21, 22 and 24 have hence been deleted as they are less historic and successful illustrations of Busoni's intentions. Moreover, the first five pieces on the disc (in the series 5501 up) were recorded in America with more advanced equipment and musical staff, the Preludes having been recorded in England at a rudimentary stage of the local operation.


© 1997 David Dubal

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