page_title: Ferruccio Busoni
section_title: Berlin, 1893–1913: "A new epoch"
hierarchical_section_title: Ferruccio Busoni / Biography / Berlin, 1893–1913: "A new epoch"
caption_attribution_description: English: Cartoon drawn by Busoni of his 1904 USA tour
context_page_description: Ferruccio Busoni was an Italian composer, pianist, conductor, editor, writer, and teacher. His international career and reputation led him to work closely with many of the leading musicians, artists and literary figures of his time, and he was a sought-after keyboard instructor and a teacher of composition.
  From an early age, Busoni was an outstanding if sometimes controversial pianist. He studied at the Vienna Conservatory and then with Wilhelm Mayer and Carl Reinecke. After brief periods teaching in Helsinki, Boston, and Moscow, he devoted himself to composing, teaching, and touring as a virtuoso pianist in Europe and the United States. His writings on music were influential, and covered not only aesthetics but considerations of microtones and other innovative topics. He was based in Berlin from 1894 but spent much of World War I in Switzerland.
  He began composing in his early years in a late romantic style, but after 1907, when he published his Sketch of a New Esthetic of Music, he developed a more individual style, often with elements of atonality. His visits to America led to interest in North American indigenous tribal melodies which were reflected in some of his works.
context_section_description: Busoni was at the Berlin premiere of Giuseppe Verdi's opera Falstaff in April 1893. The result was to force on him a re-evaluation of the potential of Italian musical traditions which he had so far ignored in favour of the German traditions, and in particular the models of Brahms and the orchestral techniques of Liszt and Wagner. Busoni immediately began to draft an adulatory letter to Verdi (which he never summoned the courage to send), in which he addressed him as "Italy's leading composer" and "one of the noblest persons of our time", and in which he explained that "Falstaff provoked in me such a revolution of spirit that I can ... date the beginning of a new epoch in my artistic life from that time."
  In 1894, Busoni settled in Berlin, which he henceforth regarded as his home base, except during the years around World War I. He had earlier felt unsympathetic toward the city: in an 1889 letter to Gerda he had described it as "this Jewish city that I hate, irritating, idle, arrogant, parvenu". The city was swiftly growing in population and influence during this period and determined to stake itself as the musical capital of the united Germany, but as Busoni's friend the English composer Bernard van Dieren pointed out, "international virtuosi who for practical reasons chose Berlin as their abode were not so much concerned with questions of prestige", and for Busoni the city's development as "the centre of the musical industry [was to] develop an atmosphere which [Busoni] detested more than the deepest pool of stagnant convention".
  Berlin proved an excellent base for Busoni's European tours. As in the previous two years in the USA, the composer had to depend for his living on exhausting but remunerative tours as a piano virtuoso; in addition at this period he was remitting substantial amounts to his parents, who continued to depend on his income. Busoni's programming and style as a recitalist initially raised concerns in some of Europe's musical centres. His first concerts in London, in 1897, met with mixed comments. The Musical Times reported that he "commenced in a manner to irritate the genuine amateurs [i.e. music-lovers] by playing a ridiculous travesty of one of Bach's masterly Organ Preludes and Fugues, but he made amends by an interpretation of Chopin's Studies (Op. 25) which was of course unequal but, on the whole, interesting". In Paris, the critic Arthur Dandelot commented "this artist has certainly great qualities of technique and charm", but strongly objected to his addition of chromatic passages to parts of Liszt's St. François de Paule marchant sur les flots.
  Busoni's international reputation rose swiftly, and he frequently performed in Berlin and other European capitals and regional centres (including Manchester, Birmingham, Marseilles, Florence, and many German and Austrian cities) throughout this period, as well as returning to America for four visits between 1904 and 1915. This journeying life led van Dieren to call him "a musical Ishmael" (after the Biblical wanderer). The musicologist Antony Beaumont considers Busoni's six Liszt recitals in Berlin of 1911 as the climax of his pre-war career as a pianist.
  Busoni's performing commitments somewhat stifled his creative capacity during this period: in 1896 he wrote "I have great success as a pianist, the composer I conceal for the present." His monumental Piano Concerto (whose five movements last over an hour and include an offstage male chorus) was written between 1901 and 1904. In 1904 and 1905, the composer wrote his Turandot Suite as incidental music for Carlo Gozzi's play of the same name. A major project undertaken at this time was the opera Die Brautwahl, based on a tale by E. T. A. Hoffmann, first performed (to a lukewarm reception) in Berlin in 1912. Busoni also began to produce solo piano works which clearly revealed a more mature style, including the Elegies (BV 249; 1907), the suite An die Jugend (BV 252; 1909) and the first two piano sonatinas, BV 257 (1910) and BV 259 (1912).
  In a series of orchestral concerts in Berlin between 1902 and 1909,
caption: Cartoon by Busoni of his 1904 US tour, drawn for his wife: "Map of the West of the United States showing the long and dolorous Tour, the anti-sentimental journey of F.B., 1904, Chicago"
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