THE INFLUENCE OF BUSONI

The Problems of Modern Music

Book by M. M. Bozman, Adolf Weissmann;
J. M. Dent & Sons, 1925


Since the beginning of the twentieth century, Ferruccio Busoni devoted himself with praiseworthy energy to rousing German music from its inertia. Of Italian birth but of mixed race, he was spiritually akin to Bach and the German metaphysicians, though as an incomparable virtuoso and an enterprising conductor, he was the self-chosen advocate of everything new in French music from the days of Impressionism onward. As a composer, however, his trend was elsewhere.

His development as a creative musician was set about with difficulties. In the first place he had to forget much which he had learnt from the "feel of the keys" as an infant-prodigy; and secondly, like his model Liszt, his individuality was imperilled by his intensely sympathetic interpretation and arrangement of other people's work. Nevertheless his determination to produce really original work was unshakable, and despite his connection with the Musical Entente he was not content merely to follow any "movement" but dug down to secure foundations of his own. It must, however, be admitted that, both as man and musician, he wavered between the two poles of society and solitude.

The problems and difficulties of the time are very clearly mirrored in Busoni. Quite consciously, and not without a suspicion of pose, he cultivated the spirit of Liszt in himself till he developed a kind of secondary personality. He certainly exemplified Liszt's saying "génie oblige," and in his readiness to help others, to share his artistic conquests without a thought of self-interest, he was the most idealistic composer of the age. The extraordinarily suggestive power of his art has given it a world-wide hearing and brought him disciples from all countries. Busoni was a veritable cultural power, the creator of a dolce stil nuovo, in the artistic world. He had the rare capacity for approaching both interpretative music and original composition on a higher level, for expressing a new synthesis of arts with music as starting-point and as goal.

Something of Faust in his character, however, prevented his approach from being perfectly direct, but he never followed the car of Dionysius. The influence of Bach was very powerful, but although Busoni cultivated polyphony with the formal skill of a true Latin, he was able to make it express his period, his individuality, and the modern heightened sense of tonecolour. In all his work, from the Konzertstück to the phenomenal Concerto with choir of male voices and the Indian Fantasia, there is a superfluity of virtuoso passages, but they are as it were transfigured, and the Fantasia contrappuntistica is unsurpassed of its kind. It shows Busoni's unique self-abandonment to the spirit of Bach, how he identified his creative imagination with that of the master. His Bach studies, his arrangement of the Choral Preludes, are but rungs in the ladder to original work. His own half-doubting mysticism leans upon Bach's strong faith. His manner of linking the fugues in the Fantasia contrappuntistica, of surrendering himself to dreamy tone-visions, veils the chorale - that great confession of faith - in half-lights, yet he had power and mastery enough to mould the whole to an artistic unity; it is a remarkable demonstration of what mixed blood and lofty artistic expression can accomplish. Such works as Berceuse élégiaque, Nocturne symphonique and the Sonatinas are an attempt to find a new way of music, independent of contemporary movements. He was interested also in opera. In Die Brautwahl he made a fanciful and significant comedy out of Hoffmann's fantastic tale. It has at least one brilliant moment, the "FrogSpawn" scene; but it is to be heard to-day only in the form of a concert-suite.

Busoni had an exploring mind and laid down a scheme of musical æsthetics which presupposes the enrichment of music by third- and quarter-tones, a doctrine which he was himself naturally unable to put in practice. Moreover he sought a way back to artistic naïveté, to instinct, to a new classicism. In this spirit, he has revived the commedia dell' arte. Turandot and Arlecchino are his tributes to an operatic art at which he secretly laughed; he had no faith in it, though he would have Eked to achieve success in it. When he died [27th July, 1924] he was engaged, in accordance with the Faust in his nature, on the composition of a Doctor Faust, for which he had been his own librettist.