Ferruccio Busoni and His Legacy by Erinn E. Knyt

Abstract

Reviewed by: Ferruccio Busoni and His Legacy by Erinn E. Knyt Jonathan Kregor Ferruccio Busoni and His Legacy. By Erinn E. Knyt. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2017. [xii, 372 p. ISBN 9780253026286 (hardback), $85; ISBN 9780253026842 (paperback), $38; ISBN 9780253026897 (e-book), price varies.] Illustrations, music examples, tables. Ferruccio Busoni's activities as critic, pianist, and composer are usually characterized as products of their time, bringing about no lasting impact. Yet as Erinn Knyt argues throughout Ferruccio Busoni and His Legacy, his presence was [End Page 549] profoundly felt in the twentieth century and continues well into the twenty-first. Specifically, she identifies various manifestations of Busoni's "aesthetic ideals" (p. 5) in the activities and output of selected students that Busoni mentored or inspired, including Jean Sibelius, Edgard Varèse, Louis Gruenberg, Otto Luening, and Philipp Jarnach. Many of these students became musical pioneers in their own right, whether in exploring "how technology and new instruments could expand musical possibilities, how sonority could become an integral material of music," or "how stylistic heterogeneity could be used to break away from traditional forms" (p. 8). Chapter 1, "Unconventional Maestro," focuses on Busoni's general pedagogical approach, which on the surface does not seem to have been unique. It was, however, strikingly conservative. Johann Sebastian Bach provided his students with countless solutions to age-old questions of form, counterpoint, and thematic cohesion, with book 2 of Das wohltemperierte Klavier (The Well-Tempered Clavier) serving as the closest thing to a one-stop composition manual that Busoni would ever allow. Instead of Richard Wagner, Richard Strauss, or Gustav Mahler, it was Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart who guided Busoni's advice on orchestration. Busoni's abandoned orchestration treatise from around 1905 emphasizes Mozartian principles of spacing, voice leading, and "diverse instrumental timbres and colors" (p. 16) as do the exercises in orchestral transcription using Mozart's concertos that Busoni regularly assigned to his pupils. Indeed, Austro-Italian models dominated Busoni's examples of dramatic forms, musical characterization, stylistic cohesion, and even subject matter, with Mozart also serving as the source of an operatic tradition that ran through Vincenzo Bellini, Gaetano Donizetti, and Giuseppe Verdi. On the other hand, a strongly Germanic line of philosophers from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe to Friedrich Nietzsche shaped Busoni's aesthetics, which in turn attracted him to various contemporary movements, such as Jugendstil and futurism, while developing his own ideas that jelled in his Entwurf einer neuen Ästhetik der Tonkunst ([Sketch of a New Aesthetic of Music] Leipzig: Insel, 1907). Knyt is keen to point out that, despite its title, the Entwurf is not about breaking with the past. Rather, it reflects Busoni's pedagogy of "embrac[ing] the stylistic characteristics of all the compositions [a student admires] and to combine them, reflecting the multiplicity of musics in the sounding universe" (p. 24). Syncretism, however, does not a system make, and Knyt rightly notes the unpredictability and even contradictions of Busoni's pedagogical statements. Improvisation was a recommended compositional stimulus, but so was having a clear vision for the work. Students were inspired to seek out the unknown, yet Busoni cautioned against prioritizing originality. Serendipitous human experience could form the characteristic marrow of a work, just as much as the calculated lines and angles of centuries old architectural masterpieces. Knyt's comparisons of the teaching styles of Arnold Schoenberg and Nadia Boulanger at the close of chapter 1 hammer home just how distinctive Busoni's was for its day. In the next four chapters, Knyt examines how selected students put Busoni's esoteric prescriptions into practice. Sibelius, although never an official student, benefited enormously from Busoni's counsel for almost thirty-five years. According to Knyt, the breadth of their relationship has made it difficult for scholars to treat it comprehensively. She seeks to remedy that situation in chapter 2, "Janus-Faced Modernism," by arguing Busoni [End Page 550] "stimulated Sibelius's imagination and was a catalyst for his experimentation with sound, color, and structure. He helped Sibelius discover a distinctive style that was an alternative to both the avant-garde and the conservative trends of the day. At the same time, he promoted his music across Europe...