His Criticism

Busoni’s critical and theoretical work was overshadowed during his lifetime by his immense fame as a pianist.

The inevitable reassessment has come only slowly over the last decades. Today he is generally counted as one of the main protagonists of that whole period.

His personal aesthetic is characterised by an aversion to the late-Romantic habit of incorporating literary elements in instrumental music and by his search for a new objectivity in musical language.

Taking the classics as his point of departure, in particular Bach (a number of whose works Busoni brilliantly transcribed for piano), Busoni arrived at a sort of renewed purity of expression, rooted in and justified by the processes of thematic exploration.

Busoni’s harmony reveals, in its culminating moments, a chromatic fusion that tends to suspend or hide all tonal points of reference and resolution.