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The first Elegy alone would have been sufficient to announce the drastic change in his outlook. Stemming from the late Liszt pieces (from which Bartók, a few years later, was to draw inspiration) this first Elegy immediately brings us into the spectral, half-lit world of the mature Busoni, where the chromatic rather than the diatonic scale is the medium and where the pedal is used to cloud and merge sonority. But it is characteristic of Busoni that he builds the new on the old, and the Elegies are a musical demonstration of this principle. [Sitsky, 62] |
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