Ferruccio Busoni: Elegien, Sonatina IV, Toccata

Description

Ferruccio Busoni stands as one of the most enigmatic and intellectually fertile figures of early modernity: a pianist of legendary stature, a radical theorist, a composer who holds together the German inheritance of counterpoint and the Italian inheritance of theatre without ever allowing himself to be confined within the boundaries of any school. In his Abbozzo di una nuova estetica della musica, dedicated to Rainer Maria Rilke, he formulates the principle of a Young Classicism that refuses to repudiate the past, but rather gathers up its entire legacy and re-inscribes it within new, solid and transparent forms. It is scarcely accidental that in the very year in which Rilke publishes the Neue Gedichte, Busoni begins work on the Elegien – Sieben neue Klavierstücke BV 249: two coeval cycles which, each in its own medium, re-examine the relationship between memory and modernity. Within this horizon, the programme presented here delineates a true triptych of Busoni’s late manner, from the interiorised turning of the elegies to the virtuosic and formal manifesto of the Toccata. Nor is it without significance that these pages were conceived and disseminated through the editions of Breitkopf & Härtel, the house which accompanied Busoni throughout his maturity, and which today stands as partner in this project.
The Elegien are, in Busoni’s own words in a letter to Robert Freund, a decisive stage in his artistic journey, virtually a moment of transfiguration. He explains that the title of the first piece, Nach der Wendung, derives precisely from this consciousness: after the turning, the new coordinates of the language reveal themselves in more fully realised form in the first, third and sixth elegies, and he confides that the third is particularly dear to him. In the same text he discloses a detail which is often overlooked: Erscheinung. Notturno is a pianistic paraphrase of the apparition scene in Die Brautwahl and follows the opera with striking fidelity from the moment when the musical image succeeds in convincing the listener. Around this nucleus there is organised a cycle which Busoni himself redefined on several occasions. Initially conceived in five movements, it was then expanded to six and finally to seven, with the addition at the head of a prelude of clear symbolic import and, at the close, of the concentrated piano version of the orchestral Berceuse élégiaque. Each elegy, with the sole exception of the prelude, reworks material from an earlier work or prepares a future one: All’Italia! In modo napolitano draws on the Piano Concerto op. 39 and, in its Andante barcarolo, on the song Fenesta ca lucive; Meine Seele bangt und hofft zu Dir. Choralvorspiel is built upon the Lutheran chorale Allein Gott in der Höh sei Ehr and will become the chorale prelude of the Fantasia contrappuntistica; Turandots Frauengemach. Intermezzo and Die Nächtlichen. Walzer are rooted in the theatrical universe of Turandot; Erscheinung condenses an entire operatic scene; the Berceuse takes up the sonic fabric of the symphonic work of the same name. The pattern of dedications reveals the human geography of this turning point: each piece is entrusted to a pianist drawn from Busoni’s own circle, from Gottfried Galston to Egon Petri, from Michael von Zadora to Leo Kestenberg, destined to become a central figure in the reform of musical education in Prussia. It is as though the new style were being bequeathed, almost in the form of a testament, to his favoured interpreters. Structurally, the Elegien constitute a cycle which is at once open and circular. The musicologist Sergio Sablich has shown how Nach der Wendung resumes sottovoce the final bars of Erscheinung, which originally brought the cycle to a close: beginning and ending thus call to one another according to a design that is not serial but recursive. The meditative progress of the prelude, with its arpeggiations poised between major and minor triads, introduces a conception of melody as an interior line, broadly unfolded, no longer a theme to be varied but the innermost soul of the polyphony. In All’Italia the contrast between major and minor upon the same harmonic framework, which presents the Neapolitan song, dilates the tonal space far beyond traditional oppositions, while the central tarantella preserves its dancing profile only outwardly, transforming itself into an uneasy and ever-shifting perpetual motion. In the third elegy the chorale emerges at first as a kind of summons in octaves, followed by a chromatic passage marked by expressive indications of fear and tension; when the chorale at length unfolds in full, it is harmonised through a superimposition of centres of attraction which renders the traditional triads curiously cold, almost spectral. Here the theses of the Abbozzo take on concrete form: the underlying identity of major and minor modes, conceived as distinct psychological shadings of one and the same material, and the pursuit of an expanded tonality, emancipated from dissonances and open to polytonal stratifications. In Die Nächtlichen. Walzer this exploration reaches one of its most extreme points: the opening figure, fashioned from semitones and augmented seconds, traverses virtually the entire chromatic space with only two repetitions, like an ante litteram twelve-note series which dissolves into a deformed waltz with visionary overtones. The writing, nevertheless, remains unfailingly governed by a legible, almost classical form, in accordance with the ideal of Young Classicism: to advance the boundaries of harmony and tonal superimposition without renouncing the clarity of the architecture.
The Sonatina in diem nativitatis Christi MCMXVII BV 274 belongs to the group of six piano sonatinas, small workshops of form and language in which Busoni condenses entire worlds into a few minutes of music. Dated 22 December 1917 and dedicated to his son Benvenuto, at that time called up for military service as an American citizen, it takes shape within the at once sheltered and anxious climate of the Zurich exile, whilst Europe remains lacerated by war. It is hardly surprising that many commentators have discerned in this sonatina a kind of domestic prayer, an interior oratorio in miniature. The score, conceived in a single movement, nonetheless presents three clearly articulated sections: an opening Allegretto, with limpid three-part writing interwoven according to modal connections that transcend the major-minor dichotomy; a more animated central portion, preceded by an episode of chorale character marked by the indication armonioso sottovoce; a concluding return of the initial material, ever more pacified, marked at the close quasi trasfigurato. The almost organ-like sonorities arise from a finely calculated interplay of attack and resonance, of sustained and released pedals, to the point that the sonatina becomes an implicit study in the ways of generating and sustaining sound at the piano. In the central section, against a background of carillon figures in the lower register, fragments of chorale and a Neapolitan saltarello motif surface: it is as if the composer, confined to Switzerland by the hostilities, were seeking to recompose in music his two homelands, Italy and the Germanic world, then in mutual conflict, by fusing popular dance and liturgical song into a single line. The writing almost everywhere remains sotto voce, with dynamics constantly held in check, and evokes a sense of distance, a rarefied space.
The Toccata (Preludio, Fantasia, Ciaccona) BV 287 carries the discourse onto an apparently opposite plane, returning to an overtly virtuosic dimension. The work is dedicated to the Franco-Hungarian pianist Isidor Philipp and bears at its head a motto taken up and modified from Frescobaldi: one does not attain the goal without difficulties. Already the choice of genre declares the intention to engage with historical forms in a resolutely modern perspective. The Preludio. Quasi presto, arditamente is constructed upon a motif derived from the opera Die Brautwahl, from the ballad of the usurer Lippold: a fragment of theatre is thus sublimated into pure energy, into an interweaving of scales, broken chords and compact sound-masses which some performers have described as a torrent of chords in orchestral guise. The central Fantasia, articulated in brief contrasting sections, revolves around a nucleus of five notes which returns under ever-changing disguises. Within it there twice surfaces the theme entrusted to the Duchess of Parma in Doktor Faust, the last opera on which Busoni was working in those years: what in the theatre will become an aria and a scene of dialogue is here a distant recollection, almost an echo that traverses a chromatic and mobile harmonic fabric. The concluding Ciaccona, built upon an ostinato bass of baroque lineage, carries the principle of variation to a point of extreme saturation: the ground line is expanded, contracted, transposed, superimposed upon polychordal blocks, until a close in which the organ-like power of the writing is joined with a strikingly lucid constructive rationality. In letters from his final years, Busoni describes the Toccata as a piece born amidst sufferings and conflicting emotions, and criticism has frequently read it as the most fitting conclusion to his output for solo piano, solemn and at the same time projected towards achievements still entirely to be explored. The historical destiny of the work appears to confirm this vocation as a bridge. In 1923 the Toccata resounds in Weimar during the Bauhaus-Woche, in the hands of Egon Petri: Busoni’s music, fashioned in layers, arches and masses of sound, enters the laboratory in which architecture, the visual arts and design are reshaping the aesthetic landscape of the twentieth century.
Set alongside the Elegien and the Sonatina in diem nativitatis Christi MCMXVII, the Toccata ideally brings the circle to its close: from the pages that mark the definitive farewell to late Romanticism, born in dialogue with Rilke and with the new poetics of the word, through the small Zurich Christmas breviary written for his soldier son, to the great pianistic construction that enters into dialogue with Doktor Faust and with Bauhaus culture.
Giuliano Marco Mattioli © 2025