Hyperion Records

Ferruccio Dante Michelangiolo Benvenuto Busoni was born in Empoli, near Florence. His father was an Italian clarinettist, his mother a pianist of German descent. As a child encouraged by Anton Rubinstein and written about by Hanslick, as an adoscelent befriended by Goldmark and Brahms, as a man admired by Sibelius and Reger, and as a teacher the inspiration of students like Agosti and Haskil, Harriet Cohen and Eduard Steuermann, Palmgren and Petri, he stood in his lifetime for the embodiment of the complete musician—an artist deeply rooted in the Teutonic, in Bach and Beethoven, in the wondrous majesty of that god of his farewell Berlin concerts, Mozart. Essentially self-taught as a pianist, without allegiance to any school or master, his concern was with the monumental, the titanic, the spiritually transcendental. Busoni was among the last of a line of Romantic pianist/composer/transcribers first glorified in the 1830s by Liszt and Thalberg. He used transcription, the music of others, to learn about composition. Bach and Mozart became like teachers in absentia. Profitably, he essayed Brahms, he gilded Liszt, he delighted in Bizet, he ‘interpreted’ Arnold Schoenberg. ‘In the virtuoso sense,’ he believed (November 1910), ‘transcriptions are suiting another’s ideas to the personality (weak or strong) of the transcriber … a transcription does not destroy the original … The performance of a work is also a transcription [of an original] … [A] musical work of art exists whole and intact before it has sounded and after the sound is finished. It is, at the same time, in and outside of Time’.

Thought of as early as 1917 and first played publicly by the composer in Wigmore Hall on 22 June 1920, the last of Busoni’s six Sonatinas—dedicated to Leonhard Tauber, old family friend and wealthy Parisian hotelier—was completed in March 1920. Busoni loved Paris, if not all its residents: ‘It is like a homecoming for me … to find life on the grand scale again … Here one is not asssessed according to one’s age or how much one spends, whether one is seen in the company of a lady or climbing into an automobile’ … ‘The golden light of these spring days has had an irresistible magic. The South vibrates in the air. And yet the indifferent faces of everybody one meets contrast unpleasantly with these palmy days. Truly: one could scarcely find less agreeable people anywhere’ (from letters to his pupil Philipp Jarnach, 10 & 22 March 1920).

Opening brightly in A major but closing darkly (and quietly) in the minor, the sixth Sonatina pays homage to Liszt—Busoni’s omega of the piano (to Bach’s alpha). Thematically, it is derived from (a) the opening chorus of Act III, Part ii, Allegro deciso; (b) Don José’s ‘Flower Song’, Act II, Andante con amore; (c) the Act I Habanera in its minor and major forms (here reversed), Allegretto tranquillo; and (d) the bustling ‘Arena’ Prelude to Act I Allegro ritenuto quasi Tromba (preceded by a related transition, Tempestoso). The last page, Andante visionario, plummeting a tonal world from F sharp (major/minor) to A minor, elegiacally combines the augmented-second exoticism of the gipsy Carmen’s ‘Fate’ motive with the chromatic descent of the Habanera.

from notes by Ates Orga © 1994