Piano Music Volume 6

He made his début as a pianist in Trieste in 1874, going to Vienna for study and performance the following year. On the advice of Brahms he moved to Leipzig in 1885, studying there with Carl Reinecke, before teaching spells at the conservatories in Helsinki and Moscow. Performing occupied much of his attention until the turn of the new century, when composing began to assume a new importance, but never dominance, in his career. Apart from a period in Zurich during the First World War, he lived in Berlin from 1894 until his death in 1924.

The essence of Busoni's music lies in its synthesis of his Italian and German ancestry: emotion and intellect; the imaginative and the rigorous. Despite acclaim from composer and performer colleagues, his music for long remained the preserve of an informed few. Neither inherently conservative nor demonstratively radical, his harmonic and tonal innovations are wholly bound up with an essentially re-creative approach to the musical past that has only gained wider currency over recent decades. Busoni left a substantial body of orchestral music and four operas (the last, Doktor Faust, being his magnum opus and left unfinished at his death), but piano music forms the largest part of his output. Bach was a pervasive presence from the outset, both in the contrapuntal aspect of his music and in his repertoire as performer; a process of assimilation culminating with the Bach-Busoni Edition published in 1918. Although Busoni's later such work can be seen more as creative interpretation than arrangement, an underlying strength of personality is evident from his earliest transcriptions.

Other than Bach, it is Liszt who features most prominently in Busoni's output as arranger. No performer worked harder to keep Liszt's music before the public, or pursued more vigorously the idea of transcription as a re-creative act that the latter demonstrated in his arrangements of a vast number of pieces (and it is worth recalling the words of pianist and composer Ronald Stevenson that if the works of the major nineteenth-century composers suddenly disappeared, a large part could still be recovered through transcriptions Liszt made of them).