When Franz Liszt died, the world lost an innovative composer, mentor, and pianist. Although his influence did not die with him, few of his successors can claim to have walked in his footsteps – to have lived and taught in the same rooms – and to have shared many of his ideals. Ferruccio Busoni did just that when the Grand Duke Carl Alexander invited him to hold piano master classes in Weimar in 1900 and 1901, just as he had invited Liszt to do nearly two decades earlier (1881–1885).

This article shows how Liszt's activities in Weimar as Pedagogue and as Kapellmeister (1848–1861) became models for Busoni as he sought to position himself as a prominent ‘musical polymath’ at the turn of the century. Yet Busoni not only emulated Liszt, he also promoted him in an age when the older composer was considered of only tangential importance.

By producing authoritative editions of Liszt's music, and perhaps more significantly, by emulating Liszt's activities as a transcriber and composer, Busoni enhanced piano sonority while extending Liszt's ideas about the future of music. In that way, he shared attitudes associated with the Zukunftsmusik movement, and his outlook was rooted in Liszt's compositions, as opposed to Richard Wagner's. At the same time, he helped foster a lineage of young musicians who patterned their careers and music after Liszt.

Drawing on surviving memoirs, letters, scores, essays and concert programmes, this article thus explores Liszt's impact on Busoni and his mentees. It reveals a musician not only emulating Liszt, but also expanding upon his ideas and promoting them to others.

‘The new art of music is derived from the old signs – and these now stand for the musical art itself.’1 With this statement, Ferruccio Busoni (1866–1924) summarized his main criticism of traditional music notation – that it was lifeless and outdated. Based on an analysis of Busoni's organic method of keyboard notation (1909), an examination of composition sketches and performance scores, and an investigation of his writings about notation in aesthetic texts – in particular the Sketch of a New Aesthetic of Music (1907) – this article shows how Busoni's multifaceted views about notation forged a middle ground between the work as text and the work as performance in an age enthralled to the idea of Werktreue. In addition, it traces the continuing influence of Busoni's ideas about notation on Arnold Schoenberg and other contemporaneous theorists and composers.

Ferruccio Busoni could be called an advocate of absolute music because of his frequent description of music as ‘absolute’ and his discussion of music as consisting of pure tones and rhythms found in the vibrating universe. However, he developed idiosyncratic theories about the term, its usage and its ideal manifestation in Tonkunst that remain largely unexamined in scholarly literature. True, Carl Dahlhaus noted Busoni's use of the concept to refer to music unconstrained by traditional forms, but this is merely one aspect of Busoni's views, which also, paradoxically, allowed for and included the visual and explicit connections to culture. The hybridity of Busoni's notion, which this article explores through an examination of writings and representative compositions, is especially relevant for current musicological discourse about absolute music. Sitting uneasily with Dahlhaus's more consistent view of absolute music as music apart from text or programme as well as with new musicological approaches that seek to refute the notion of music's autonomy, Busoni's view of absolute music offers a fascinating middle ground between compositions as discrete artistic artefacts on the one hand and as representations of their immediate culture on the other.