Ferruccio Busoni was born on April 1, 1866, and died on July 27, 1924. He was an Italian composer, pianist, conductor, editor, writer, and teacher. His work with famous musicians, artists, and writers around the world made him well-known. He was also highly respected as a piano teacher and a composer instructor.
From a young age, Busoni was a talented pianist, though his style sometimes caused debate. He studied at the Vienna Conservatory and later with teachers Wilhelm Mayer and Carl Reinecke. He taught briefly in Helsinki, Boston, and Moscow before focusing on composing, teaching, and performing as a skilled pianist in Europe and the United States. His writings on music influenced others and covered topics such as musical beauty, microtones, and other creative ideas. He lived in Berlin from 1894 but spent much of World War I in Switzerland.
Busoni began composing in his youth using a late romantic style. After 1907, when he published Sketch of a New Esthetic of Music, he developed a more unique style, often using atonality. His time in America inspired him to include melodies from North American indigenous tribes in his music. His compositions included piano works, such as a large Piano Concerto, and arrangements of other composers’ music, especially Johann Sebastian Bach (published as the Bach-Busoni Editions). He also wrote chamber music, vocal and orchestral pieces, and operas. One of his operas, Doktor Faust, was left unfinished when he died in Berlin at the age of 58.
Biography
Ferruccio Dante Michelangiolo Benvenuto Busoni was born on April 1, 1866, in the Italian town of Empoli. He was the only child of Ferdinando, a clarinet player, and Anna (née Weiss), a pianist. Soon after his birth, the family moved to Trieste. A young talent, Busoni began performing and writing music at age seven, mostly taught by his father. In a personal note, he wrote, "My father knew little about the piano and had trouble keeping rhythm, but he made up for this with great energy, strictness, and attention to detail."
Busoni gave his first public piano performance at a concert with his parents in Trieste on November 24, 1873. He played the first movement of Mozart's Sonata in C major, as well as pieces by Schumann and Clementi. His parents promoted his concerts, and later he said, "I never had a childhood." In 1875, he performed Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 24 for the first time.
Between the ages of nine and eleven, Busoni studied at the Vienna Conservatory with the help of a patron. His performances in Vienna were praised by critic Eduard Hanslick. In 1877, he met Franz Liszt, the famous composer, who admired his skill. The next year, Busoni wrote a four-movement concerto for piano and string quartet. After leaving Vienna, he briefly studied in Graz with Wilhelm Mayer and conducted a performance of his own work, Stabat Mater, Op. 55 (now lost). Other early compositions, such as Ave Maria (Opp. 1 and 2) and piano pieces, were published during this time.
In 1881, Busoni was elected to the Accademia Filharmonica of Bologna, becoming the youngest person to receive this honor since Mozart. In the 1880s, he lived in Vienna, where he met Karl Goldmark and helped prepare the vocal score for Goldmark's opera Merlin (1886). He also met Johannes Brahms, who recommended he study with Carl Reinecke in Leipzig. During this time, Busoni earned money through recitals and support from a patron, Baronin von Tedesco. He also composed his first opera, Sigune, which he abandoned after working on it from 1886 to 1889. He once asked a publisher, Schwalm, for 150 marks for a completed composition, saying, "I worked from nine at night to three thirty, without a piano, and not knowing the opera beforehand."
In 1888, the musicologist Hugo Riemann recommended Busoni for a teaching position in Helsinki, Finland, then part of the Russian Empire. This was Busoni's first permanent job. He worked with colleagues like Armas Järnefelt, Adolf Paul, and Jean Sibelius, who became a lifelong friend. Paul described Busoni as "a small, slender Italian with a chestnut beard, grey eyes, and a small round cap on his thick curls."
Between 1888 and 1890, Busoni gave about thirty piano recitals and chamber concerts in Helsinki. He also composed a set of Finnish folk songs for piano duet (Op. 27). In 1889, he heard Bach's Toccata and Fugue in D minor performed on the organ and transcribed it for piano at the request of his pupil Kathi Petri. He later married Gerda Sjöstrand, the daughter of a Swedish sculptor, and composed a piece for cello and piano, Kultaselle (BV 237), for her.
In 1890, Busoni published his first edition of Bach's Inventions and won a prize for his Concert Piece for piano and orchestra (Op. 31a) at the Anton Rubinstein Competition in Saint Petersburg. He was invited to teach at the Moscow Conservatoire, where he married Gerda. His performance of Beethoven's Emperor Concerto in Moscow was well-received, but he left due to financial and professional challenges. He later accepted a teaching position in Boston, where his son, Benvenuto (Benni), was born in 1892. However, his time at the New England Conservatory was unsatisfactory, and he resigned after a year, touring the United States.
Busoni attended the Berlin premiere of Giuseppe Verdi's opera Falstaff in April 1893. This experience made him rethink Italian musical traditions, which he had previously focused on German styles. He wrote a letter to Verdi praising him as "Italy's leading composer" and "one of the noblest persons of our time," saying Falstaff inspired a "new epoch" in his artistic life.
In 1894, Busoni settled in Berlin, which he considered his home base until World War I. Earlier, he had disliked the city, calling it "this Jewish city that I hate." However, Berlin became a good base for his European tours. He relied on exhausting but profitable piano recitals for income and supported his parents financially. His performance style initially raised concerns in some European musical centers.
Music
Alfred Brendel, a pianist, said that Ferruccio Busoni’s playing showed that thoughtful playing was more important than showy performances, especially after the time of Franz Liszt. Busoni himself once said, “Music is made up of many different situations, and each one should be treated as special. Once a problem is solved, the same solution cannot be used again in a different situation. Music is a place for surprises and new ideas. It comes from the deepest parts of human nature and should be shared with others.”
Sir Henry Wood was surprised when he heard Busoni play a Mozart concerto. Busoni used both hands to play notes that were far apart in range, even though Mozart had written them as single notes. Donald Tovey said Busoni was a true purist because he did not strictly follow Mozart’s written notes, even though Mozart might have done the same. Percy Scholes, a music expert, said Busoni was the greatest pianist he had ever heard because of his deep understanding of music and how every part of a piece connects to the whole.
Busoni created many types of music, including original compositions, adaptations, transcriptions, recordings, and writings. He gave many of his works numbers called opus numbers. Some numbers were used for more than one piece, and not all numbers followed the order in which the pieces were written. A music expert named Jürgen Kindermann made a list of all of Busoni’s works and transcriptions. This list uses letters like BV (for Busoni Verzeichnis) or KiV (for Kindermann Verzeichnis) followed by numbers to identify each piece. The letter B is used for Busoni’s transcriptions and piano parts in concertos. For example, BV B 1 refers to Busoni’s piano parts for Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 4.
In 1917, Hugo Leichtentritt said that Busoni’s Second Violin Sonata, completed in 1900, was a turning point in his career. However, another expert, van Dieren, said Busoni did not claim this work was special compared to others he wrote before 1910. Busoni considered his own piano pieces, like An die Jugend and the Berceuse, as the start of his creative journey as an independent composer. These works were actually written in 1909. The Kindermann catalogue lists more than 200 pieces Busoni wrote before 1900, which are rarely performed today. These pieces often feature the piano as a solo instrument or with other musicians, and some are for small groups or orchestras, including two large suites and a violin concerto.
Antony Beaumont noted that Busoni wrote little chamber music after 1898 and no songs between 1886 and 1918. He said this was part of Busoni’s effort to move away from his early experiences in Leipzig, where the music of composers like Schumann, Brahms, and Wolf had a strong influence. Brendel described the first decade of the 20th century as a time when Busoni paused his creative work, after which he developed his own unique artistic style.
During this time, Busoni wrote his Piano Concerto, one of his longest and most complex works. A music critic named Dent said the concerto is hard to analyze because themes from one section often appear in others. Busoni wanted the piece to be played without breaks, as a single continuous performance. When the concerto was first performed, the audience was shocked. One newspaper called it “noisy, eccentric, and improper,” while another said Busoni should have stayed within simpler musical styles. Another major work from this time was the Turandot Suite, which used musical ideas from Chinese and other Eastern traditions. Leichtentritt said the suite was created by a Western composer, not a direct copy of Eastern music. The suite was first performed in 1905 and later became part of an opera in 1917.
In 1894, Busoni published the first part of his edition of Johann Sebastian Bach’s music for the piano, including the first book of The Well-Tempered Clavier. This edition included extra material, such as a section on how to adapt Bach’s organ music for the piano. This project, called the Bach-Busoni Edition, took over 30 years to complete. Busoni edited seven volumes of Bach’s works, including the Two- and Three-Part Inventions from 1890. He also created piano versions of Bach’s music, which he performed in his concerts. These included pieces like the Chorale Preludes, the Toccata and Fugue in D Minor, and the Chromatic Fantasia and Fugue.
Busoni’s piano transcriptions of Bach’s music were not exact copies. He changed the music to make it suitable for the piano, adding details like tempo, dynamics, and performance notes. In his version of Bach’s Goldberg Variations, for example, he suggested omitting some variations for concert performances and rewriting others in a style that reflected his own ideas more than Bach’s. Kenneth Hamilton said the final four variations were completely reworked into a free, expressive piece that sounded more like Busoni than Bach.
After his father died in 1909, Busoni wrote a piece called Fantasia after J. S. Bach in his memory. The next year, he created a longer piece based on Bach’s music, called Fantasia contrappuntistica.
Busoni also wrote essays about music. One of his most important works, Sketch of a New Esthetic of Music, published in 1907, explained his ideas about performance and composition. He believed that the true meaning of a piece of music remains the same over time, but the way it is written and performed changes. He said music was born to be free and that performers should use their own creativity to express the composer’s ideas. He criticized strict rules about music, calling them “constricting.” He admired the music of Beethoven and Bach, saying their work was the essence of music itself. He believed performers should use their own imagination to bring music to life, even if the composer’s original notes were not perfect.
Legacy
Ferruccio Busoni's influence on music came mainly from his students and his writings, rather than his own compositions. His style did not directly inspire later composers. Alfred Brendel noted that works like his complex Piano Concerto may make it harder to see the excellence of his later piano music. He also pointed out that the first two sonatinas and the Toccata of 1921 remain relevant and largely unknown. Brendel also said that Doktor Faust continues to stand out as a major work in musical theater. Helmut Wirth wrote that Busoni's mixed personality, his effort to balance tradition with new ideas, and his skill as a composer and writer about music theory make him one of the most important figures in 20th-century music history.
The Ferruccio Busoni International Piano Competition was started in 1949 to honor Busoni's legacy, marking the 25th anniversary of his death.