BRANO SCELTO

Dalla Prefazione [p. 13]

Dalla Section One: The Composer [pp. 39-42]

Traduzione di Giuseppe Mariotti 

When Edward Dent published his excellent biography of Busoni in 1933, he made no attempt to write in any detail about the composer's works, explaining that to deal with them 'at all adequately would have required a second volume... with extensive musical illustrations and written in a technical style'. I first visualized this book as fulfilling exactly that function - and, to a large extent, it has remained so. In 1970 I planned its overall form and dimensions and set to work, consulting countless manuscripts, press-cuttings and other unpublished material in Berlin, Cambridge, Washington, Winterthur, Zurich etc.
Busoni's literary interests have been of particular significance to me. By referring to the books mentioned in his letters and diaries, or to the source material of his several libretti, one gradually came to realize how predominant a part the world of literature actually played in his work as a composer: one discovered that many of his works, even instrumental compositions, were directly inspired by what he read. Naturally this has often thrown new light on the music. Here I found myself parting company with Dent's initial conception and examining the scores from a literary and philological angle as well as considering their technical aspects. Such analysis is sometimes subjective and I would not always claim, as Dent could, that every statement in this book is 'related to positive evidence'. But from the 'positive evidence' alone emerges a portrait of Busoni as a composer more complete than technical data could ever offer.
Because Busoni is not yet well known as a composer, it seemed essential to provide a basic introduction to his mature works. The book therefore offers an outline of the music's anatomy rather than a dissection of it, an orientation, but nothing which would presume to be the last word. This is supplemented by a large amount of factual information: details of first performances and of the whereabouts of manuscripts have been provided, so far as these are known, as well as the scoring of those instrumental works discussed in the book and the (approximate) duration of each piece. A complete list of Busoni's works is also included: of the 314 pieces catalogued, I have discussed only the last fifty-eight. It is a fond hope of mine that a public better acquainted with Busoni will one day create a demand for a book about the others.
In the interests of homogeneity I have made most of the translations from German, French and Italian myself, even when other versions already existed. Translations by other hands are acknowledged in footnotes as and when they occur. [...]
[...] In his letter to Paul Bekker on Young Classicality (quoted on p. 25), Busoni made one statement which calls for closer examination: 'This art should be based on... a final end to motivic working [Thematisches]'. He was referring to that logical development of small motifs which we associate with sonata form structures from Mozart to Brahms (or beyond), and he called for its 'final end' because he felt that it had become a cul-de-sac. His own methods of developing themes are complex. He approaches the question of musical coherence rather like a chess player. At each stage of the game he carefully calculates the state of play, weighs up the possibilities and finally makes the next move. Of course, many composers think this way but they commit their intermediate calculations to paper (one could take as a random example the concise motivic argument of Brahms's op. 51 quartets). Busoni, on the other hand, only shows us so to speak the completed move. He generally works with longer melodies rather than motifs (and sometimes very long ones) and, as the processes of development which we are accustomed to listen for are absent, his music often seems, at first hearing, to lack organization. Yet growing familiarity yields greater rewards. One discovers ingenious transformations of themes in the manner of Liszt and a host of new techniques, devised intuitively from the material at hand. Once his logic has made itself apparent, one begins to sense the cogency of his forms.
Another point of contact with Liszt is in Busoni's propensity for using themes by other composers. This first manifests itself involuntarily in his two traditional operatic fantasies of the 1880s, but from the Piano Concerto onwards his manner becomes more individual, the material more eclectic. In particular, he seeks melodies that one could justifiably describe as common property Gregorian or synagogal chant, folksongs, Lutheran chorales (most of which can in turn be traced back to plainsong or folk melody) or Oriental themes (which have wandered in their history as much as the peoples themselves). In using such material - and there is an enormous amount of it in his music - he seeks the voice of Nature; he points to the timelessness of melody (a reaffirmation of the omnipresence of Time) and he indicates his belief in a universal music. Selective use of appropriated material is also characteristic of the music of Mahler, but it is enlightening to observe how both composers, drawing on quite different sources for their materials, create their individual sound-worlds with just as much assurance as those composers who draw entirely on their own resources.
An initially instinctive sense of this universality led Busoni to his activities as a transcriber, taking his cue once again from Liszt. His first works, arrangements of organ music by Bach, date from the late 1880s. Almost at once, their style began to affect his compositions and to bring radical changes in his piano writing. The textures of his Bach arrangements led in particular to the rich sonorities of the Second Violin Sonata and the Fantasia after J. S. Bach. Then the style became more economical, he moved away from Brahmsian chordal spacings towards a leaner, cleaner sound. This was one of the major revelations of the Elegies, whose tonal palette added muted tremolandi, washes of pastel colours and the converse paradoxes of harmonious dissonance and jarring consonance to the techniques he had already perfected. The range of colours in a short piece like 'All' Italia!', and the swiftness with which they change, were novelties: Busoni's new sounds inevitably invited comparison with Debussy, and the fact that both composers owed so much to Liszt only served to confuse the issue.
A comparison between Schoenberg's Piano Piece op. 11 no. 2 and Busoni's concertante transcription of it strikingly demonstrates the state of his elegiac art: the hard, ungracious textures of the original are softened and refined; the dissonances which Schoenberg had proclaimed with such conviction are beautified and - many people would say—trivialized. Certainly Busoni's version deodorizes the music, but it points to his ability to subjugate any music to his will.
In 'Nuit de Noel', the 'Berceuse' for piano and «An die Jugend» he came nearer to establishing his individuality and brought his technical control to a peak. Coupled with new, acrid harmonies and free rhythms, the «Sonatina seconda» then became the masterpiece amongst his piano works although, for all its novelty, the shadow of Liszt still stands distinctively over it. One of the first measures of his period of Young Classicality was a turn away from virtuosity. Yet, although the third, fourth and fifth Sonatinas are much less demanding than most of his piano music, the «Red Indian Diary» and the «Carmen Fantasy» retain the bravura element, while the «Toccata» shows that there was still plenty of fight in him. It is a work of immense power and energy, authoritative and bitter. To a greater or lesser extent, these are the qualities of all the other late piano works: the Chopin variations, for all their intended charm and good humour, have the same furious drive; the «Prelude et étude» look back to the occult world of the «Sonatina seconda» while sharing the forward impetus of the Toccata; in the Albumleaves the more delicate world of the Elegies is re-invoked, but with a new terseness, while the «Perpetnum mobile» and the little known Trills Study (Busoni's last piano work) are glittering, diabolic inventions.
Although his skills as an instrumentalist were devoted entirely to the keyboard, Busoni also acquired a remarkable insight into the orchestra. As a boy he was taught the rudiments of the violin (certainly he learnt enough to write idiomatically for strings) while his father also passed on to him a working knowledge of wind instruments. The technical foundation of Busoni scores is clean, uncluttered texture and virtuosic writing. His mentors in the former were Mozart and Rossini, from whom he learnt the necessity of concentrating on essentials. Thanks to them (and formerly also to Brahms) his orchestras are usually small: only few works call for triple woodwind, none calls for more than five horns, and even Doktor Faust, the most lavish of his scores, is modest by the standards of the time. In the question of orchestral virtuosity, his clearest influence is Berlioz (especially in «Turandot», «Die Brautwahl» and the «Sarabande and Cortège»), and like Berlioz he learnt to think entirely orchestrally. His scores never sound like orchestrated piano music.
In his early years he wrote very little for orchestra: an overture begun in 1876 was left unfinished and the motet (op. 55) 'Gott erbarme sich unser' (1880) would appear to be his first completed piece for larger forces. So it was with relatively little experience as an orchestrator that he presented his «Konzertstuck» for the Rubinstein Prize in 1890 and, all things considered, it is a great success. The score is clean, if not particularly imaginative (this can also be said of the following works, the «Sinfonisches Tongedicht» op. 32a and the «Geharnischte Suite» op. 34a). The Violin Concerto is a work of altogether greater stature while the «Comedy Overture», written a few months later, recalls Mendelssohn as much as Mozart and represents a conscious attempt to break out of the Brahmsian sound-world. There followed a pause of some six years, a period in which Busoni became acquainted with many of the most recent scores of Strauss, Mahler, Debussy, Elgar and others. Then came the Piano Concerto, whose orchestration is masterly, with only a few miscalculations and many original touches. A large orchestra is deployed with reassurance and power. The «Turandot Suite», written one year later, is simpler in layout and more cunning in its use of conventional resources.
For another four years Busoni wrote no orchestral music at all. When he started to work on the score of «Die Brautwahl» in the spring of 1909 his orchestral style was still close to that of the Piano Concerto. The real breakthrough came in October of the same year with the composition of the «Berceuse élégiaque». Here he discovered how to restrict his ensemble to the barest essentials, dispensing with bassoons, trumpets and trombones and employing just thirty-eight instruments: the harp plays only harmonics, the celesta plays triads in one simple rhythm, the strings remain muted throughout; only the wind instruments have more freedom, but with total abstinence from virtuosity; the highest registers are avoided, the only percussion instrument (a gong) contributes a mere four soft notes.
The same precepts of economy and intimacy are observed in the «Nocturne symphonique» the «Song of the Spirit Dance» and the «Sarabande», while in the other orchestral works of the period 1912 to 1919 (the «Red Indian Fantasy», «Rondo arlecchinesco», Clarinet Concertino and «Cortège») they are combined with more conventional writing. «Die Brautwahl», when it was first performed in 1912, proved to be an orchestral embarras de richesse with elements of the new elegiac style gracing the score at its most mystic moments.
In «Doktor Faust» the refinements of the later years are combined with the dramatic effects of the Piano Concerto and «Die Brautwahl», together with a new, 'Gothic' quality. Some orchestrations are lifted bodily from the works written as studies for the opera (for example, «Nocturne symphonique», «Tanzwalzer»), while other interesting comparisons can be drawn between those Faust studies orginally written for the piano and their orchestrations in the opera (for example, «Sonatina seconda», «Toccata»). Another sonic element, the invisible chorus, which had been used rather superfluously in «Die Brautwahl», comes into its own to intensify the air of magic in the score.
It may seem curious that Busoni wrote no chamber music of note after 1898 and no songs at all between 1886 and 1918. In both cases this was part of the process of freeing himself from his Leipzig background: both forms of musicmaking evoked worlds of middle-class respectability in which he was not at home, and the shadows of Schumann, Brahms and Wolf loomed too large. If the Goethe songs, which he wrote between 1918 and 1924, reflect a certain reconciliation with that world, it is because other composers had meanwhile demonstrated (especially outside Germany) that the art-song could still be viable in the twentieth century. With songs like the'Lied des Unmutst or the 'Zigeunerlied' Busoni achieved forward-looking, unconventional essays.
It was not easy to decide at which point in Busoni's creative development this study should begin. In 1905 he said, …My existence as a composer only truly begins with the (second) Violin Sonata», but three years later he felt that he had found his entire personality «at last and for the first time in the 'Elegies'». Four years later still, he wrote of the «Berceuse élégiaque», «In this piece... I succeeded for the first time in creating an individual sound», and when Hugo Leichtentritt was commissioned to prepare a short biography to celebrate the composer's fiftieth birthday, Busoni was unhappy about any mention of his formative years: «My early works on your desk. I blush!» If one ignored everything before the Elegies or the Second Violin Sonata, the picture would be considerably less than complete; if one went back to the very beginning, it would become over-cluttered with juvenilia. Furthermore, most of the early works are unpublished and even those which did appear in print are generally almost inaccessible. To draw an analogy with Mozart: there would be little point in writing about the first twenty-four symphonies if the world were still only vaguely acquainted with the last three; there would be little value in an analysis of «L'Oca del Cairo» - no matter how brilliant - if one then failed to do justice to Don Giovanni. I have, therefore, resolved to begin in medias res, not with the Second Violin Sonata but with three works which preceded it, all of which were performed in the retrospective orchestral concerts which Busoni conducted in 1921.
A further decision, made with some reluctance, was not to linger over the many transcriptions, critical editions and cadenzas which Busoni published. Nor did it seem feasible to touch more than fleetingly on his long and brilliant career as a pianist or on his development as a conductor, from inexpert but enterprising beginnings to a considerable level of assurance and eloquence. In these and other fields there is still plenty to be written.