Ferruccio Busoni and His Legacy by Erinn E. Knyt

Abstract

Reviewed by: Ferruccio Busoni and His Legacy by Erinn E. Knyt Marc-André Roberge (bio) Erinn E. Knyt. Ferruccio Busoni and His Legacy (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2017). x, 357 pp. Full text available with subscription (otherwise excerpts) at https://muse.jhu.edu/book/52470. The literature on Ferruccio Busoni (1866–1924) has seen surges of various orders of magnitude on five occasions: first, on the tenth, thirtieth, and fiftieth recurrences of his death year in 1934, 1954, and 1974; and then on the centenary and sesquicentennial of his birth year in 1966 and 2016. Such anniversaries have offered authors of all stripes the opportunity to recall Busoni’s achievements both as a pianist and as a composer, outline the reasons for his importance as a transition figure at the beginning of the twentieth century, summarize his aesthetic ideas about music that left a mark on later composers, and discuss his best-known works. Publications, both scholarly and introductory, as well as recordings (starting especially in 1966), have been part of the untiring efforts of friends, disciples, and other champions to plead for better recognition. The sesquicentennial in 2016 was such a lavish year for Busoni research that a full article could be devoted to the topic. Especially in his native Italy and his adopted Germany, Busoni weeks (including public installations, flash mobs, and postage stamps), exhibitions, scholarly meetings, courses and seminars, publications, concerts, recordings, and radio programs helped put him in a brighter light than is usually the case. In the years preceding this anniversary, highly polished scholarly editions showed that the composer was being taken increasingly seriously in Germany. For example, in 2012 Busoni’s correspondence with his main publisher, Breitkopf & Härtel, was published by Eva Hanau in two hefty volumes, and in 2015 the unexpurgated edition of his letters to his wife, Gerda, also in two big volumes, was edited by the indefatigable Martina Weindel.1 Between 1999 and 2006 Weindel published no fewer than six editions of letters and writings pertaining to Busoni. This impressive editorial activity, supported by hundreds if not thousands of documentary notes, was made possible by much easier access to the huge [End Page 123] resources of the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin’s Busoni-Nachlass, most of which was housed in East Berlin before German reunification. Starting in the 2000s, locating items in the collection became considerably easier thanks to the cataloguing of the composer’s huge correspondence in the search engine Kalliope (more than 7,000 items) and the growing body of high-quality online reproductions of letters, documents, manuscripts, and rare editions on the library’s website (around 800 items). Another sign that Busoni’s heritage is valued by the state library that houses his massive bequest is the luxurious catalogue for the exhibition Freiheit für die Tonkunst! that opened in Berlin in the fall of 2016.2 All this activity is in keeping with the continual growth of the literature on Busoni, especially since the publication of my reference book in 1991, which contains annotations for 1,325 publications.3 This has reached such proportions that the update to be offered on my forthcoming Busoni website currently consists of more than 2,200 titles, of which 65 percent have been published since 1990. Much previous writing on Busoni has too often consisted of regurgitating the same well-known facts culled from a limited body of literature, usually about his Entwurf einer neuen Ästhetik der Tonkunst, the concept of Junge Klassizität, and masterpieces such as the Fantasia contrappuntistica and the four completed operas, especially Doktor Faust. Recently, however, work based on primary sources, in the form of both scholarly articles and contributions to edited collections (including symposia) as well as several dissertations partly or entirely devoted to Busoni’s music and thinking, has become much more frequent. This is now redefining the kind of research likely to help Busoni take a more central place in music history. It is in this context, benefiting from easy access to sources, that Erinn E. Knyt has become a major actor in the field during the past decade. Knyt—referred to as Assistant Professor of Music at the University...