Approaching the Essence of Music: Stylistic Heterogeneity in Ferruccio Busoni’s Doktor Faust

Abstract

ABSTRACTFerruccio Busoni uses style the way many other composers use harmony. This is especially evident in his chef d’oeuvre, Doktor Faust, where stylistic contrasts serve structural purposes. Although recent scholarship has documented similar uses of style in the compositions of several contemporaneous composers, Busoni’s approach has been largely overlooked. This article seeks to fill the gap in scholarship by delineating the distinctive features of Busoni’s stylistic heterogeneity and reconstructing the aesthetic premises upon which it was based, while joining the ongoing scholarly discourse about stylistic heterogeneity in the first decades of the twentieth century.