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Busoni: Visionary or Pasticheur?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 1965

John C. G. Waterhouse
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Extract

The reputation of Ferruccio Busoni has always been a rather confused and unformulated thing, usually based on the sketchiest knowledge. It is true that some of his works (not necessarily the best) have hovered uncertainly but persistently on the fringe of the repertoire, and that he has long had a small band of devoted admirers. But on the whole most people have been content to accept certain vague ‘received opinions’ about him, which are thrown around anew every time one of his works comes momentarily into the forefront of public attention. We are told again and again that his acute intellect stifled his creative spontaneity; that the Italian side of his nature was at war with the German; that he remains an isolated figure, without direct successors and with almost no influence on younger composers; and that his constant contact, as pianist, with other men's music prevented him from ever finding a language of his own.

Type
Research Article
Information
Proceedings of the Royal Musical Association , Volume 92 , 1965 , pp. 79 - 93
Copyright
Copyright © 1966 The Royal Musical Association and the Authors

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References

1 Busoni's opus numbers are very confusing. For an explanation see Dent, E. J., Ferruccio Busoni, London, 1933, p. 337 (Appendix IV).Google Scholar

2 Entwurf einer neuen Aesthetık der Tonkunst. 1st edn., Trieste, 1907; 2nd edn., Munich, 1910. American translation of 1st edn. (from which quotations are taken) tr. T. S. Baker, New York, 1911; reprinted (along with Debussy's Monsieur Croche and Charles Ives's Essays before a Sonata) in Three Classics in the Aesthetic of Music, New York, 1962 (Dover Paperback).Google Scholar

3 ‘The New Harmony’, written in Chicago, Jan. 1911 for the periodical Signale, Berlin. Included, along with many other writings by Busoni, in The Essence of Music and other Papers, tr. Rosamond Ley, London, 1957, pp. 23–4 (the book has recently reappeared as a Dover Paperback, New York, 1965).Google Scholar

4 ‘Self-Criticism’, first printed in Pan, Berlin, Feb. 1912. Included in The Essence of Music and other Papers (cf. n.3), pp. 46–50 in London edition.Google Scholar

5 Des Mannes Wiegenlied am Sarge seiner Mutter.Google Scholar

6 ‘The Problem of Busoni’, Music and Letters, xviii (1937), 240–247.CrossRefGoogle Scholar