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A CENTURY AGO IN Berlin, the young Arthur Rubinstein played for many of the leading musicians -- Josef Hofmann, Joseph Joachim -- but he regretted to the end of his days that he did not play for Ferruccio Busoni. ''He was the one person who might have oriented my talent in a better direction -- a man with a broad view, both artistically and culturally, a genuinely great human being,'' Rubinstein wrote in his memoirs. He called Busoni ''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, so rare among artists.'' It can be hard to recover the enthusiasm another era felt for one of its own. Busoni, who died in 1924, at 58, has become an odd man out in history. He wrote on philosophy and esthetics, and was a poet and a voluminous correspondent, but his writings are mostly forgotten. He was a conductor and a famous pedagogue. As a virtuoso, he was regarded during his life as the heir to Liszt, though his few, late recordings, reluctantly done after he had mostly quit the piano for composing, don't really show what made him, as Rubinstein put it, ''by far the most interesting pianist alive.'' Also as with Liszt, Busoni's reputation as a pianist, somewhat to his grief, always overshadowed his work as a composer, at which he proved to be an eccentric genius. It is no wonder that his following is small and cultish. He is part late Romantic, part modernist, a cusp figure whose music swerves between remarkable harmonic adventure and bombast: by turns wild, galling, bloated, cerebral, even sterile. He could also be a spiritual composer (Liszt again). His early piano settings of Bach chorale preludes (1898), for instance, have a rectitude and grandeur that go beyond their occasional passages of interpolated virtuosity, which, obsessed as we are today with historical correctness, we focus on too much. I think Busoni's Bach arrangements often express a deeper sort of faith than just faith to a score. David Buechner, an American pianist who some years ago recorded several of Busoni's own works, has now recorded a variety of his Bach transcriptions, including three of the chorale preludes and, most substantially, what is said to be the first recording of Busoni's version of the ''Goldberg Variations'' (Connoisseur Society 4212; CD). It is a tricky task for a contemporary pianist to play late Romantic versions of Baroque music, and Mr. Buechner provides an excellent introduction to Bach-Busoni, which he performs with unusual intelligence and grace. Perhaps it will inspire others to bring this music back to the stage. Transcription is a loose term. In Busoni's case it could mean relatively simple alterations, like the doubling of notes, or the shifting of registers to exploit the piano's range and to avoid hand-crossings that are easier on the multiple keyboards of a harpsichord or an organ. More elaborately, a Busoni transcription might involve the rearrangement or elimination of entire movements, the dropping of sectional repeats, and other adaptations that reflect his own performance practice. The ''Goldberg Variations'' (1914) are an example. Busoni shuffled the variations, skipping some, then added his own rather voluptuous coda to create a three-movement structure; each movement has a distinct, arcing shape, and the whole becomes a more tightly organized drama than the original. You can listen to Mr. Buechner play Busoni's version and think you are hearing just an abbreviation of Bach's score until details begin to catch your attention: an added tenuto bass voice in the 8th variation; a new, bell-like melody in the 13th variation, appearing first in the upper register, then in the middle register; a slight change to the 20th variation that creates a jazzy triplet rhythm. But the ''Goldberg'' transcription is still fairly close to Bach's score compared with the works Busoni based on fragments by Bach, like the ''Sonatina Brevis in Signo Joannis Sebastiani Magni'' (1918) on Mr. Buechner's disk. It weaves original sections with passages of the Fantasy and Fugue in D minor now questionably attributed to Bach, to which Busoni also adds new contrapuntal material. A highly chromatic work, it seems constantly in search of its own key. (It begins with a wild riff -- D in the bass; E flat, F sharp, B flat, C sharp in the treble -- then ends, unresolved, on A.) The sonatina seems the clearest proof that Bach was, for Busoni, the foundation of modern music. To put it differently, Busoni realized that Bach, though the composer with the most rules, was for that very reason the one who offered a performer the most freedom: a basic paradox of creative life. It happens that his analysis of the D major Prelude and Fugue includes a few measures in which, almost as an aside, he weaves the prelude and fugue together to show their melodic similarity. This turns out to have become the basis, 15 years later, for his ''Preludio, Fuga e Fuga Figu rata,'' a gem on Mr. Buechner's disk. It is from the second book of Busoni's ''An die Jugend,'' a collection of short, experimental pieces derived from works by other composers (Liszt and Mozart as well as Bach). Clearly Busoni needed these composers for more than just vague inspiration. A pupil of his once put it this way: ''The Bach transcriptions of Busoni are entities in which Bach and Busoni live at the same level of interest and emotion. Busoni finds his goal in the personality of Bach, as a poet finds his goal in nature.'' This is true, but I would add that for Busoni, Bach's music was also an anchor that tended to steady his own work, so that the more tethered it was to Bach, the more stable and nuanced it sounded. And vice versa: his ''Fantasia Nach Johann Sebastian Bach'' is a big, rambling piece, blending bits of three Bach chorale settings, though mostly it's Busoni. The result is discursive and overwrought, except for the ending, which is an autobiographical curiosity, a quietly arpeggiated coda marked ''reconciliato'' and ''Pax Ej!'' (''Peace Forever!''). Composed in three days in 1909, the fantasia was intended as a memorial to Busoni's father, a clarinetist with whom he had had a stormy relationship, as the music implies. Eventually Busoni made peace. ''I have my father to thank for my good fortune, because during my childhood he insisted on my studying Bach at a time and in a country that did not rank the master much higher than Carl Czerny,'' Busoni wrote in 1923. ''He was an Italian and an admirer of the bel canto. How did such a man, ambitious on behalf of his son, happen to hit upon exactly the right thing? The only way I can explain it is as a mysterious revelation.'' Mr. Buechner plays the fantasia with the requisite bravura and color. It was said about Busoni that he made extraordinary use of the pedals (all three of them, once the middle pedal was introduced, allowing the pianist to sustain a particular note or harmony while continuing to play other notes -- still the most underutilized resource on the piano). The American composer Otto Luening recalled how Busoni ''sometimes used two or three pedals at the same time, setting sonority patterns that were somewhat veiled but within which he played with great, bell-like clarity.'' Mr. Buechner clearly has mastered this technique. Only his performances of the familiar chorale preludes ''Wachet Auf, Ruft Uns die Stimme'' and ''Nun Komm' der Heiden Heiland'' are a little lugubrious, with too much rubato and a certain coy pulling-back from climaxes. That said, this is a first-rate disk of music that deserves reviving, by a highly gifted artist. The last person I know to have played Busoni's version of the ''Goldberg Variations'' was his student Egon Petri, at a Town Hall recital half a century ago. Any other takers? |
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