Ferruccio Busoni

Ferruccio Busoni (1866-1924), Italian composer, pianist, conductor, and author, born in Empoli. He received his first musical instruction from his parents, both musicians, and later studied composition at Graz, Austria, and Leipzig, Germany. He taught piano and composition in Berlin, Helsinki, and Moscow, as well as at the New England Conservatory, Boston (1891-1893). His tours of Europe and America established Busoni as one of the great concert pianists of the early 20th century. Devoted to the progress of modern music, Busoni invented several new scales; as a conductor he emphasized the works of his contemporaries. He wrote several books on musical theory and criticism. Much of his critical writing was collected in English translation in The Essence of Music (1965). Although he composed an enormous amount of music, his most important contributions were in fostering modern music; in teaching; and in transcribing, arranging, and annotating much of the keyboard music of Johann Sebastian Bach. His monumental unfinished opera Doktor Faust (1916-1924), for which Busoni wrote his own libretto, was completed after his death by his pupil the Spanish-German composer Philipp Jarnach, while another unfinished opera, Turandot (with a libretto after Gozzi) was completed by the British academic Anthony Beaumont. His piano music, often of extreme technical difficulty and predominantly contrapuntal in texture (reflecting his lifelong devotion to Bach), includes a large scale piano concerto, which employs a male chorus singing a Danish text in the last movement. As a whole, however, his music was perhaps too diverse in style to be seen as part of any compositional school or trend, and consequently has not become as well known as it might have been.