Ferruccio Busoni Research Articles

Личные библиотеки А. Шёнберга и А. Берга как источник изучения творческой биографии

Composers’ personal libraries began to be the objects of research relatively recently, only about a hundred years ago. Meanwhile, it presents a valuable source for research of composers’ artistic biographies, which bears the imprint of the personalities both of the owner of the book collection and of his or her entire generation. The library makes it possible to evaluate the tastes and the predilections of the composer in question, helps reconstruct his or her artistic ideas, at times contains various types of marginalia, which in modern source studies have acquired the status of texts. The fate of Arnold Schönberg’s library and that of his student Alban Berg unfolded differently from each other. Schönberg was not a bibliophile, his personal library served him as a working tool and reflected his multifaceted interests in various fields of knowledge. Despite his numerous relocations, his library retained its integrity. Schönberg himself compiled a partial inventory of it, arranging the books in accordance with his hierarchy of values. The systematic study of his book collection began at the Arnold Schönberg Institute in Los Angeles and was continued at the Arnold Schönberg Center after his archive was moved to Vienna. Of particular value in the Schönberg library are his polemical marginalia, in which he conducts imaginary discussions with contemporaries: Hans Pfitzner, Ferruccio Busoni, Heinrich Schenker and others. They complement the corpus of Schönberg’s published and unpublished music theory texts. Berg’s library is up to the present day located in the composer’s Vienna apartment. Researchers received access to his books at a relatively late date, after the death of Berg’s widow Helena in 1976. The systematization and cataloging of the Berg Library has not been finished up to the present time. Berg came from an antiquarian family, he inherited his bibliophilia from his father. Already from a young age, he perceived his personal library a means of cognition of himself and the world, as evidenced by the large-scale collection of quotations Von der Selbsterkenntnis [About Self-Cognition] compiled by him. Berg, like Schönberg, had a habit of polemizing with opponents in the form of marginalia (such is his polemics with Wilhelm Krug in his book Neue Musik). Of great interest to researchers are Berg’s work copies of Georg Büchner’s dramatic play Wozzeck by, as well as Frank Wedekind’s dilogy of plays Erdgesit [The Spirit of the Earth] and Die Büchse der Pandora [Pandora’s box] which were used by Berg during his work on the librettos for each of his two operas. They make it possible to reconstruct the composer’s creative process and contain valuable instructions regarding the dramaturgy and compositional form, the protagonists’ characteristic features, as well as the formal structures of separate sections of the operas. The ongoing process of digitization of Schönberg’s and Berg’s archives makes it possible for us to hope that researchers on all the continents will be granted access to personal libraries of these two composers, as well as those of other composers.

Movement in Italian Dramatizations of J. S. Bach's Passions: From the Church to the Theater and Back

Abstract: The dramatization of J. S. Bach's Passions is now an accepted fact among audiences and music critics, but what were the beginnings of this tradition? This article examines the first two stagings of the St. John Passion and the St. Matthew Passion . These appeared in 1984–1985, staged by Pier Luigi Pizzi and Jurij Ljubimov, respectively, in two major Italian theaters (Teatro la Fenice in Venice and Teatro alla Scala in Milan) on the occasion of Bach's 300th anniversary and the European Year of Music. The focus is on the dimension of movement and the interaction among stage space, those involved in the production, and the audience. Using the available materials, I sketch the contours of the performance spaces, define the role of the actors on stage, and attempt to reconstruct their movements in relation to Bach's music and the Gospel narrative. These two case studies are related to other experiences with the dramatization of Bach's Passions in the Italian context by Edward Gordon Craig (1913, 1933), Ferruccio Busoni (1924), and Vittorio Biagi (1974, 1983, 1985). The aim is to identify common issues related to the staging of the Passions, and to clarify the ways in which macroand micro-movements were important for mediating Lutheran works such as the Passions for Catholicism.

The Operatic Roots of Performativity: Bodies Decontextualised in Butler, Brecht and Busoni

AbstractIt has long been claimed that opera can give expression to the uneasy relationship between the body and the voice. Operatic voices seem to exceed the capacity of the bodies that produce them in a way that conveys a sense of mechanisation or limited agency, inviting metaphorical comparisons to marionettes. Yet recent studies of gesture have suggested that bodies are not simply passively inscribed with meaning but that they also mediate the process of inscription. Investigating the implications of this claim for opera, this article discusses two recent essays by Judith Butler, in which she draws from Walter Benjamin's account of gesture in Brecht's epic theatre to argue for the performative power of incomplete or decontextualised bodily actions. It then traces this idea to a moment in epic theatre's own prehistory, focusing on Ferruccio Busoni's opera Doktor Faust. The article makes both a theoretical point and an historical claim: it highlights how bodies and words that are decontextualised can perform a critical function despite not enjoying the usual citational supports necessary for a speech act; and it argues that Busoni's Doktor Faust and his theory of opera were a part of the intellectual prehistory to Butler's conceptualisation of bodily performativity.

Ferruccio Busoni and His Legacy by Erinn E. Knyt

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...

Intersections, Divergences, and Cross Sections: Eduard Steuermann, the Busoni-Schoenberg Nexus, and a Broadening of Compositional Procedures in the Twentieth Century

ABSTRACT Eduard Steuermann is remembered primarily as a protégé of Arnold Schoenberg, with whom he studied theory and composition from 1912 to 1914. However, he also studied with Ferruccio Busoni beginning in 1910, maintaining contact with him until at least 1922. Although Schoenberg’s influence on Steuermann is well documented, little has been written about Busoni’s impact, including the lasting effect their relationship had on Steuermann’s activities as pianist, author, composer, and teacher. After documenting the Busoni connection, my article shows that Steuermann helped pioneer a vision of contemporary music that blended ideals from both of his mentors to forge unorthodox treatments of serialism.

«Доктор Фауст» Ферруччо Бузони: черты эстетики

The article presents a musicological and artistic analysis of Ferruccio Busoni’s Doktor Faust. The author discovers the points of connection between Busoni’s final work with Goethe’s tragedy Faust, Dmitri Merezhkovsky’s novel “Voskresshiye Bogi. Leonardo da Vinci” [The Resurrected Gods. Leonardo da Vinci], a number of musical compositions by Mozart, Alban Berg and Richard Strauss, as well as Ferruccio Busoni’s own Second Sonatina and the opera Arlecchino, oder Die Fenster. The questions are examined of Busoni’s opera aesthetics, the philosophical-religious context of Doktor Faust, and the peculiarities of the composition’s libretto, the musical dramaturgy and thematicism. The assumption is expressed that the opera Doktor Faust, which presents the composer’s spiritual bequeathal, may present an interest for Russian producers who are interested in contemporary musical theater.

On the issue of studying the pedagogical activity of Ferruccio Busoni

On the issue of studying the pedagogical activity of Ferruccio Busoni

Rilkes Musikalität by Thomas Martinec

Austrian Studies 29 (2021), 166–207© Modern Humanities Research Association 2021 Reviews Rilkes Musikalität. Edited by Thomas Martinec. Palaestra: Untersuchungen zur europäischen Literatur, 348. Göttingen: V&R unipress, 2019. 174 pp. €35. ISBN 978–3-8471–1032–3. ‘Rilke’s musicality’ may seem an unpromising topic for a conference and subsequent edited collection, for Rilke was, as several of the contributors to this volume point out, notably unmusical in the everyday sense of the word: in a letter to the pianist Magda von Hattingberg he describes his inability to recall a tune, even one that had moved him, as ‘die dichteste Unfähigkeit selber’ [the most profound incapacity, p. 47]. Music was of a more conceptual than technical interest, whether in the notes of 1900 on Nietzsche’s Geburt der Tragödie (pp. 7, 39, 56), or the later poem ‘An die Musik’ (1918): ‘Du Sprache wo Sprachen | enden’ [You language where languages | end]; ‘Du uns entwachsener| Herzraum’ [You, grown out of us | heartspace, p. 133]. In letters to Sidonie Nádherný von Borutin he described music as ‘ein Jenseits’, ‘viel zu viel’ (p. 83), as an experience exceeding the senses, a threat and a temptation. This was, then, a productive kind of ‘Unfähigkeit’, as Thomas Martinec suggests in his contribution to this volume. Many of the — varied but cohesive — contributions are structured around ambivalence or paradox, whether Rüdiger Görner’s opening essay, which begins, ‘Musik eignet etwas beglückend Verstörendes: Preis ihres Erklingens ist ihr Verklingen’ [Music possesses something pleasingly unsettling: the price of its sounding out is its dying away, p. 15], or Robert Vilain’s discussion of Rilke’s many references to Beethoven which are characterized by ideas of simultaneous sterility and possibility — Rilke’s emphasis on his deafness, for instance, and particularly the passage in Die Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge where the composer is imagined in the early Christian desert. Jacob-Ivan Eidt discusses Rilke’s ambivalence towards music within an intellectual-historical constellation (Goethe and Nietzsche), and Antonia Egel, making the case for music being of greater importance in the Neue Gedichte than is usually acknowledged in the collection’s tension between form and flowing force, addresses an ambivalence towards music in Rilke criticism. Lothar van Laak similarly presents music as a poetic principle, using the interplay between sound and silence in Malte as a case study for a definition of musicality in literature. In the final essay, Eva-Tabea Meineke looks at music in the reception of Rilke among the Surrealists (Aragon and Savinio) — writers far less afraid of the danger of an art form beyond all senses — using Rilke’s interactions with the composer and writer Ferruccio Busoni as a fulcrum. This follows a pair of essays on Rilke’s late poems, rather different examples of a ‘grenzüberschreitende Ästhetik’ [boundary-crossing aesthetic, Meineke, p. 171] to that of the Surrealists: Winfried Eckel’s on the Reviews 167 Quatrains Valaisans and the landscape as ‘soundscape’ between art and nature, and Charlie Louth’s on the metrical form of the bilingual ‘Gong’ poems, where the lyric, in dealing with that which lies beyond the reach of the senses, almost becomes it. As this brief summary shows, there is variety here in what music is given to mean and understood to include. This could be said too of Rilke’s own use of the term, and a number of contributors draw on Egel’s distinction, from her monograph, ‘Musik ist Schöpfung’: Rilkes musikalische Poetik (2014), between ‘MUSIK’, Rilke’s theoretical conception of music as the origin of all art, superordinate to individual art forms, and ‘musik’ as an art form made of sound. Martinec argues that it is precisely Rilke’s lack of technical skill in and connoisseurship of the second of these that allowed for the development of the former. But it is also the tendency to see music in such abstract terms that fuelled his wariness towards it, and he exaggerated this abstraction, for instance in an often-quoted letter to Lou Andreas-Salomé on Rodin, where music is opposed to art as a ‘Nicht-Ver-dichten’ [non-concentration], a ‘Versuchung zum Ausfließen’ [temptation to...

Ferruccio Busoni, the Boston Symphony Orchestra, and the Impact of Anti-Germanismusaround World War I

Ferruccio Busoni, the Boston Symphony Orchestra, and the Impact of Anti-<i>Germanismus</i>around World War I

Microtonal Restraint

AbstractThis article proposes that the beginnings of twentieth-century microtonal music and thinking were shaped more by restraint in composers’ thinking than by a full embrace of the principle of ‘progress for progress’s sake’. Pioneering microtonal composers such as Ferruccio Busoni, Julián Carrillo, John Foulds, Alois Hába, Charles Ives and Richard Stein constitute an international group of breakaway modernists, whose music and writings suggest four tropes characterizing this first-generation microtonal music: the rediscovery of a microtonal past, the preservation of tonality, the refinement of tonality and the exercise of restraint. The article traces these tropes of early twentieth-century microtonal experiment in works by Carrillo, Foulds, Hába, Ives and Stein with reference to writings and music by Busoni, Nikolay Kul′bin, Harry Partch, Karol Szymanowski and Ivan Vyschnegradsky. It adds to the growing scholarship about early twentieth-century tonally based aesthetics and techniques, and broadens perspectives on the history of twentieth-century microtonal music.

Franz Werfels andere Moderne: Musikästhetische und kunstsoziologische Konzepte in Franz Werfels Roman "Verdi. Roman der Oper" by Amanda Baghdassarians

Reviewed by: Franz Werfels andere Moderne: Musikästhetische und kunstsoziologische Konzepte in Franz Werfels Roman "Verdi. Roman der Oper" by Amanda Baghdassarians Steven R. Cerf Amanda Baghdassarians, Franz Werfels andere Moderne: Musikästhetische und kunstsoziologische Konzepte in Franz Werfels Roman "Verdi. Roman der Oper." Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2019. 278 pp. Despite its sixteen-word earful of a title, this study, based on the author's doctoral dissertation in German Studies at the University of Zurich, is most helpful. Concentrating on Werfel's contemporary theoretical sources of music criticism that, in part, inspired him to write his first novel, Verdi: Roman der Oper (1924), Baghdassarians divides her book into four telling chapter-sections ranging from thirty-five to seventy pages. These deal respectively with the theories of the post–World War I musical sociologist Paul Bekker, the anti-Wagnerian writings and works of such composer-critics as Ferruccio Busoni and Kurt Weill, and a close discussion of the dominant role of Verdi as the eponymous protagonist of the novel itself, before concluding with a [End Page 108] discussion of the thematic relationship between this first novel and Werfel's later prose fiction. The first chapter, properly titled "Paul Bekkers Musiksoziologie," is informed by a discussion of the importance of Paul Bekker's anti-Wagnerian criticism in the early 1920s. Baghdassarians pinpoints Werfel's own interest in Bekker's musical-sociological theories as an inspiration for the novelist's characterization of Verdi and the Italian composer's inability to understand either Wagner's music or his coterie of followers, who view him as a quasi-religious, trans-national prophet figure. Her arguments throughout this forty-five-page portion are most convincing, and they provide Baghdassarians' greatest contribution to recent Werfel secondary criticism. According to the author, it was Bekker's sociological view of music of the past and of the present that fascinated Werfel in the early 1920s. Formulated as they were during the sociopolitical fragmentation after World War I, Bekker's writings, which championed the grounding of past and present great composers in their own political societies, inspired Werfel in shaping his contrast between Verdi and Fischböck throughout the novel. Werfel's depiction of the "music for music's sake" compositions of Fischböck, devoid of any societal context, stand in marked contradistinction to Verdi's grounded politically social stance as reflected in his operas. The second chapter, properly an extension of the discussion of Bekker's writings, emphasizes such anti-Wagnerian composer-writers as Busoni and Weill as contemporary allies of Bekker and underscores Werfel's creative admiration of these composers. As opponents of Wagnerian illusionistic staged opera, both Busoni and Weill sought to anchor their contemporary audiences' experience in the actual action of what is taking place on the operatic stage. Baghdassarians fittingly brings into her discussion Werfel's 1920 essay "Dramaturgie und Deutung des Zauberspiels Spiegelmensch," in which the essayist roundly attacks Wagner's illusionistic view of the stage. According to Werfel, it is the lack of humor and the starched exclusion of irony that informs Wagner's pseudo-religious view of the stage. Baghdassarians wisely concludes the chapter with a discussion of Werfel's mid-1920s German translations of three of Verdi's mid-period operas, La Forza del Destino, Simon Boccanegra, and Don Carlos and explains how their staging boosted the major Verdi revival during the Weimar Republic. Baghdassarians's third chapter, a close textual interpretation of the novel itself, is literally at the heart of her study. That it is close to double the length of [End Page 109] each of the other three chapters is a key to the critic's penetrating interpretation of Werfel's Verdi. Regarding the novel as a series of duets between Verdi and the novel's other key characters works convincingly. In particular, her treatment of Verdi's extended conversations with the centenarian Senator, Fischböck, the singer Mario, and Dario, the old porter at the opera house, portray Verdi as a committed composer eager to engage others during his incognito two-month stay in Venice during the winter of 1882/83. Baghdassarians's interpretation is so telling that the reader wants even more in her...

Book Review: Ferruccio Busoni and His Legacy, by Erinn E. Knyt

Book Review: <i>Ferruccio Busoni and His Legacy</i>, by Erinn E. Knyt

Franz Liszt's Heir: Ferruccio Busoni and Weimar

When Franz Liszt died, the world lost an innovative composer, mentor, and pianist. Although his influence did not die with him, few of his successors can claim to have walked in his footsteps – to have lived and taught in the same rooms – and to have shared many of his ideals. Ferruccio Busoni did just that when the Grand Duke Carl Alexander invited him to hold piano master classes in Weimar in 1900 and 1901, just as he had invited Liszt to do nearly two decades earlier (1881–1885).This article shows how Liszt's activities in Weimar as Pedagogue and as Kapellmeister (1848–1861) became models for Busoni as he sought to position himself as a prominent ‘musical polymath’ at the turn of the century. Yet Busoni not only emulated Liszt, he also promoted him in an age when the older composer was considered of only tangential importance.By producing authoritative editions of Liszt's music, and perhaps more significantly, by emulating Liszt's activities as a transcriber and composer, Busoni enhanced piano sonority while extending Liszt's ideas about the future of music. In that way, he shared attitudes associated with the Zukunftsmusik movement, and his outlook was rooted in Liszt's compositions, as opposed to Richard Wagner's. At the same time, he helped foster a lineage of young musicians who patterned their careers and music after Liszt.Drawing on surviving memoirs, letters, scores, essays and concert programmes, this article thus explores Liszt's impact on Busoni and his mentees. It reveals a musician not only emulating Liszt, but also expanding upon his ideas and promoting them to others.

Ferruccio Busoni and His Legacy by Erinn E. Knyt

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...

“The New Harmony” of Ferruccio Busoni’s Fantasia Contrappuntistica

ABSTRACTIn Ferruccio Busoni's writings, an important nexus emerges between his general views on contemporary harmony, the theories and practices of Bernhard Ziehn and Wilhelm Middelschulte, and his approach to harmony in his Fantasia Contrappuntistica (1910). Busoni’s broader harmonic viewpoint, one he shared with Ziehn and Middelschulte, is characterized by the primacy of melody and the notion of harmony resulting from a renewed interest in polyphony. Various aspects of Fantasia Contrappuntistica are grounded in this viewpoint and are reflective of aesthetic concepts Busoni would more fully articulate in the early 1920s. Central to this discussion is a consideration of the influences that came to bear on the genesis of Fantasia Contrappuntistica and Busoni’s harmonic experimentation in creating the work.

“A History of Man and His Desire”: Ferruccio Busoni and Faust

Relying on knowledge of Karl Engel's edition of the Volksschauspiel, Karl Simrock's version of the puppet play, Gotthold Lessing's Faust fragments, and versions of the Faust legend by Christopher Marlowe and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, among others, Ferruccio Busoni crafted his own hybrid libretto that depicts a mystical and broadminded Faust. Busoni's music reflects the richness of Faust's mind, combining heterogeneous timbres, forms, and styles. Busoni juxtaposes a Gregorian Credo, Palestrina-style choral settings, a reformation hymn, a Baroque instrumental dance suite, an organ fantasia, recitatives, a lyrical ballad, and orchestral variations, with impressionistic symphonic writing, and experimental passages. While stylistic heterogeneity can be heard throughout many of his mature instrumental and vocal works, Busoni also used this heterogeneity in a descriptive way in Doktor Faust to characterize Faust. At the same time, Busoni sought to write “a history of man and his desire” rather than of a man and the devil. It is Faust's own dark side, rather than the devil, that distracts him and prevents him from completing his greatest work. With Kaspar removed from the plot, Mephistopheles, who as spirit is not always distinct from Faust the man, becomes Faust's alter ego. This duality is expressed musically when Faust assumes Mephistopheles's characteristic intervals. Although Busoni's incomplete Doktor Faust, BV 303, has already been studied by several scholars, including Antony Beaumont, Nancy Chamness, and Susan Fontaine, there is still no detailed analysis of Busoni's treatment of Faust. Through analyses of autobiographical connections, Busoni's early settings of Faustian characters, and the text and music in Doktor Faust, with special attention on the Wittenberg Tavern Scene that has no precedent among the versions of the Faust legend, this article reveals Busoni's vision of Faust as a broadminded, and yet conflicted character, shaped idiosyncratically to convey Busoni's personal artistic ideals. In so doing, the article not only contributes to ongoing discourse about Doktor Faust, but also expands knowledge about ways the Faust legend was interpreted and set musically in the early twentieth century through intertextual comparisons.

Adapting live classical music performance for different venues

Name: Gregor Dešman Main Subject: Classical Piano Research Supervisor: Anna Scott Title of Research: Adapting Live Classical Music Performance for Different Venues Research Question: In what ways can a musician adjust his or her performance approach by taking into account the characteristics of a specific type of venue? Summary of Results: Each performance is unique, and depends on many factors including a performer’s physical and psychological condition, their connection to the repertoire, and most importantly, the conditions presented by a given venue. In this research project I have concentrated primarily on the latter, and have sought to determine the particular challenges and possibilities presented by varying types of venues, and how such knowledge can be used to guide the conscious decisions performers make in order to adapt their performances accordingly. My methodology first involved carrying out background research, using relevant academic literature as well as my own experiences as a pianist. By focusing on three types of venues (concert halls, music clubs, and private homes), I was then able to compile a list of the advantages and challenges presented by each type of performance space. From this list I then prepared three different interpretations of Ferruccio Busoni's transcription of the Chaconne from J. S. Bach's Partita in D Minor, with each interpretation being specially adapted to the limitatons and possibilities presented by each of the three venue types. I then tested each interpretation by performing it in its respective venue, the results of which I documented via audio and video recordings. I was then able to analyse the effectiveness of my venue-specific interpretative decisions in these recordings, after which I compiled a table that can function as a guide for adjusting one's performances to specific venues. By carrying out this research project, I have found that in order to better communicate with their audiences, musicians can and should adjust their performances to specific types of venues. While musicians make many smaller adjustments instinctively, as related to voicing or phrasing for example, learning the logic and mechanics behind such modifications emboldens one to make larger changes as related to tempo and even character – an interpretive flexibility towards which all musicians should strive. Biography: Pianist Gregor Dešman studies with Prof. Naum Grubert at the Royal Conservatory of The Hague. He completed postgraduate studies with Prof. Ruben Dalibaltayan in Zagreb and graduate studies in Ljubljana with Prof. Hinko Haas. Gregor has successfully competed in many international competitions and as a soloist has performed with the Ljubljana Opera and Ballet Orchestra and with the Slovenian Philharmonic Orchestra. Gregor performs across Europe with internationally successful musicians such as Tibor Molnar and Joachim Eijlander, and with the GUD Piano Trio, who have an international career and have studied with Prof. Tomaž Lorenz and Trio di Parma in Duino, Italy.

Ferruccio Busoni and the “Halfness” of Frédéric Chopin

Ferruccio Busoni (1866–1924) championed Frédéric Chopin’s music. Yet his performances often elicited responses of shock or amusement because they rebelled against the prevalent sentimental style of interpretation associated with an “effeminate” Chopin. Even some of his staunchest admirers had trouble appreciating his unprompted repeats of measures or structural wholes in the preludes or etudes, his registral alterations, and his overly intellectualized approach. Also unusual was his choice to program the preludes as a complete cycle. Scholars have documented Busoni’s interpretive eccentricities, but the rationale behind them and their significance for the evolution of Chopin interpretation in the twentieth century remains largely unexplored. Through analyses of recordings, concert programs, recital reviews, and Busoni’s little-known and unpublished essay from 1908 titled “Chopin: Eine Ansicht über ihn,” I connect Busoni’s unconventional Chopin interpretations to an idiosyncratic perception of Chopin’s character. In the nineteenth century Chopin and his music were commonly viewed as effeminate, androgynous, childish, sickly, and “ethnically other.” Busoni’s essay indicates that he, too, considered Chopin’s music “poetic,” “feminine,” and “emotive.” But this was problematic for Busoni, who was obsessed with “manliness” in an age in which gender roles were gradually changing. He discovered “half-manly” and “half-dramatic” elements in the music and in Chopin’s character—that is, a heroic, monumental side. In striving to portray the “whole” of Chopin and his music while distancing himself from the gendered “halfness” of earlier writings, Busoni became a pioneer of bolder Chopin interpretation and of monumentalist programming. His portrait of Chopin reveals how cultural ideas inform the evolution of performers’ interpretations.

From Bach–Busoni to Bach–Grainger: Adaptation as Composition

Percy Grainger’s nearly lifelong fascination with the music of J.S. Bach began when he encountered the Bach interpretations of Louis Pabst in Australia at the age of ten and then subsequently studied the Well-Tempered Clavier and other compositions by Bach with him. Yet it was after a few weeks of studying Bach–Busoni transcriptions with Ferruccio Busoni in Berlin during the summer of 1903 that the compositions of Bach took on greater aesthetic and poietic significance for him. Even despite the fact that the relationship eventually ‘soured’, discussions with Busoni in Berlin (and subsequently in London and the United States) reinforced some of Grainger’s burgeoning countercultural aesthetic ideas, especially ones deriving from the music of Bach: scepticism about the concept of ‘originality’, an interest in flexible instrumentation, and an idealization of polyphony. Although several scholars have discussed the Busoni–Grainger relationship, its importance for Grainger’s artistic ideals has yet to be explored in any degree of detail. Through analyses of scores, manuscripts, essays, concert programmes, recordings, and letters, including unpublished documents from the Grainger Museum at The University of Melbourne, this article presents the first detailed exploration of the ways Grainger’s aesthetics, poietics, and interpretations were influenced by Busoni’s vision of Bach. In so doing, the article lends greater insight into the development of Grainger’s unique compositional style, and contributes to current discourse about the role and value of adaptations in the early twentieth century. In particular, it reveals that while participating in an early-twentieth-century fascination with the music of Bach, the ideas Busoni transmitted to Grainger held even wider ranging significance. They represent a move away from the modernist notion of progress into a proto-postmodernist mindset in which appropriation, reuse, adaptation, and reshaping hold as much value as the original and new.

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

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.