Ferruccio Dante Michelangiolo Benvenuto Busoni (1 April 1866 – 27 July 1924) was an Italian composer, pianist, conductor, editor, writer, and teacher. His international career and reputation led him to work closely with many of the leading musicians, artists and literary figures of his time, and he was a sought-after keyboard instructor and a teacher of composition.
From an early age, Busoni was an outstanding, if sometimes controversial, pianist. He studied at the Vienna Conservatory and then with Wilhelm Mayer and Carl Reinecke. After brief periods teaching in Helsinki, Boston, and Moscow, he devoted himself to composing, teaching, and touring as a virtuoso pianist in Europe and the United States. His writings on music were influential, and covered not only aesthetics but considerations of microtones and other innovative topics. He was based in Berlin from 1894 but spent much of World War I in Switzerland.
He began composing in his early years in a late romantic style, but after 1907, when he published his Sketch of a New Esthetic of Music, he developed a more individual style, often with elements of atonality. His visits to America led to interest in North American indigenous tribal melodies which were reflected in some of his works. His compositions include works for piano, among them a monumental Piano Concerto, and transcriptions of the works of others, notably Johann Sebastian Bach (published as the Bach-Busoni Editions). He also wrote chamber music, vocal and orchestral works, and operas—one of which, Doktor Faust, he left unfinished when he died, in Berlin, at the age of 58.
Ferruccio Dante Michelangiolo Benvenuto Busoni was born on 1 April 1866 in the Tuscan town of Empoli, the only child of two professional musicians, Ferdinando, a clarinettist, and Anna (née Weiss), a pianist. Shortly afterwards, the family moved to Trieste. A child prodigy, largely taught by his father, he began performing and composing at the age of seven. In an autobiographical note he comments "My father knew little about the pianoforte and was erratic in rhythm, so he made up for these shortcomings with an indescribable combination of energy, severity and pedantry."
Busoni made his public debut as a pianist in a concert with his parents at the Schiller-Verein in Trieste on 24 November 1873 playing the first movement of Mozart's Sonata in C major, and pieces by Schumann and Clementi. Commercially promoted by his parents in a series of further concerts, Busoni later said of this period, "I never had a childhood." In 1875, he made his concerto début playing Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 24.
From the ages of nine to eleven, with the help of a patron, Busoni studied at the Vienna Conservatory. His first performances in Vienna were glowingly received by the critic Eduard Hanslick. In 1877, Busoni heard the playing of Franz Liszt, and was introduced to the composer, who admired his skill. In the following year, Busoni composed a four-movement concerto for piano and string quartet. After leaving Vienna, he had a brief period of study in Graz with Wilhelm Mayer, and conducted a performance of his own composition Stabat Mater, Op. 55 in the composer's initial numbering sequence, (BV 119, now lost) in 1879. Other early pieces were published at this time, including settings of Ave Maria (Opp. 1 and 2; BV 67) and some piano pieces.
He was elected in 1881 to the Accademia Filharmonica of Bologna, the youngest person to receive this honour since Mozart. In the mid 1880s, Busoni was based in Vienna, where he met with Karl Goldmark and helped to prepare the vocal score for the latter's 1886 opera Merlin. He also met Johannes Brahms, to whom he dedicated two sets of piano Études, and who recommended he undertake study in Leipzig with Carl Reinecke. During this period, Busoni supported himself by giving recitals, and also by the financial support of a patron, the Baronin von Tedesco. He also continued to compose, and made his first attempt at an opera, Sigune, which he worked on from 1886 to 1889 before abandoning it. He described how, finding himself penniless in Leipzig, he appealed to the publisher Schwalm to take his compositions. Schwalm demurred, but said he would commission a fantasy on Peter Cornelius's opera The Barber of Baghdad for fifty marks down, and a hundred on completion. The next morning, Busoni turned up at Schwalm's office, and asked for 150 marks, handing over the completed work, and saying "I worked from nine at night to three thirty, without a piano, and not knowing the opera beforehand."
Helsingfors, Moscow, and America (1888–1893)
In 1888, the musicologist Hugo Riemann recommended Busoni to Martin Wegelius, director of the Institute of Music at Helsingfors (Helsinki, in present-day Finland, then part of the Russian Empire), for the vacant position of advanced piano instructor. This was Busoni's first permanent post. Amongst his close colleagues and associates there were the conductor and composer Armas Järnefelt, the writer Adolf Paul, and the composer Jean Sibelius, with whom he struck up a continuing friendship. Paul described Busoni at this time as "a small, slender Italian with chestnut beard, grey eyes, young and gay, with ... a small round cap perched proudly on his thick artist's curls".
Between 1888 and 1890, Busoni gave about thirty piano recitals and chamber concerts in Helsingfors; amongst his compositions at this period were a set of Finnish folksongs for piano duet (Op. 27). In 1889, visiting Leipzig, he heard a performance on the organ of Bach's Toccata and Fugue in D minor (BWV 565), and was persuaded by his pupil Kathi Petri—the mother of his future pupil Egon Petri, then only five years old—to transcribe it for piano. Busoni's biographer Edward Dent writes that "This was not only the beginning of [his] transcriptions, but ... the beginning of that style of pianoforte touch and technique which was entirely [Busoni's] creation." Returning to Helsingfors, in March of the same year Busoni met his future wife, Gerda Sjöstrand, the daughter of the Swedish sculptor Carl Eneas Sjöstrand, and proposed to her within a week. He composed Kultaselle ("To the Beloved") for cello and piano for her (BV 237; published in 1891 without an opus number).
In 1890, Busoni published his first edition of Bach works: the two- and three-part Inventions. In the same year he won the prize for composition, with his Konzertstück ("Concert Piece") for piano and orchestra, Op. 31a (BV 236), at the first Anton Rubinstein Competition, initiated by Anton Rubinstein himself at the Saint Petersburg Conservatory. As a consequence he was invited to visit and teach at the Moscow Conservatoire. Gerda joined him in Moscow where they promptly married. His first concert in Moscow, when he performed Beethoven's Emperor Concerto, was warmly received. But living in Moscow did not suit the Busonis for both financial and professional reasons; he felt excluded by his nationalistically-inclined Russian colleagues. So when Busoni received an approach from William Steinway to teach at the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston, he was happy to take the opportunity, particularly since the conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra at that time was Arthur Nikisch, whom he had known since 1876 when they performed together at a concert in Vienna.
Busoni's first son, Benvenuto (known as Benni), was born in Boston in 1892, but Busoni's experience at New England Conservatory proved unsatisfactory. After a year he resigned from the Conservatory and launched himself into a series of recitals across the Eastern US.
Berlin, 1893–1913: "A new epoch"
Busoni was at the Berlin premiere of Giuseppe Verdi's opera Falstaff in April 1893. The result was to force on him a re-evaluation of the potential of Italian musical traditions which he had so far ignored in favour of the German traditions, and in particular the models of Brahms and the orchestral techniques of Liszt and Wagner. Busoni immediately began to draft an adulatory letter to Verdi (which he never summoned the courage to send), in which he addressed him as "Italy's leading composer" and "one of the noblest persons of our time", and in which he explained that "Falstaff provoked in me such a revolution of spirit that I can ... date the beginning of a new epoch in my artistic life from that time."