Mozart wrote his opera
Don Giovanni in 1787. In the early 1920s Ferruccio Busoni produced his enormous work of piano pedagogy, the
Klavierübung. In the volume dedicated to the study of staccato playing he included this splendid transcription of Don Giovanni’s
Serenade ‘Deh vieni alla finestra’ which features a solo mandolin in the original and here conspires to stretch the hand so as to give the effect of two outer staccato parts with the lyrical melody taken in the middle, as if by a third hand.
from notes by Leslie Howard © 2004
