A Brilliant Career Travelling and Performing
Ferruccio Busoni was born in Empoli (Province of Florence) in 1866. His parents, both musicians, started him on music lessons, and he developed into a widely renowned composer and pianist.
He began to travel when still very young. From Italy he went to Vienna where he met Brahms, then to Leipzig where he had contacts with Tchaikovsky, and so to Helsinki in 1888-89 where he encountered Sibelius. In Helsinki Busoni taught the piano.
The principal stages of his career are as follows:
• In 1890 he obtained a teaching position at the Moscow Conservatorium and won the Rubinstein competition for composition.
• Between 1891 and 1894 he transferred to America and taught at Boston.
• In 1894, now an established concert pianist, he stopped teaching at the Conservatorium and based himself in Berlin, remaining there almost continuously until his death in 1924.
• He spent 1913 and 1914 in Bologna as Director of the musical high school.
• He transferred to Zurich to escape the war and lived there from 1915 to 1920.
• In these years Busoni did not interrupt his concert and academic activity, as teacher of composition at the Music Academy of Berlin.
He was a superb interpreter of Bach, Beethoven and Liszt, and had few rivals as a concert pianist.
|
 |
Busoni the Musicologist
Busoni was also an esteemed musicologist and musical critic. He wrote some basic theoretical texts:
• Entwurf einer neuen Aesthetik der Tonkunst, 1907 (Sketch of a New Aesthetic of Music, 1911)
• Von der Einheit der Musik, 1922 (“The Oneness of Music”, in The Essence of Music and Other Papers, 1957).
These works deal among other things with the dissolution of the western musical system.
|
|
 |
|
