Explore the vast range of titles available.

On Mar 10-11, 2017, Symphony Hall in Boston MA resounded with the strains of Ferruccio Busoni's approximately seventy-minute-long Piano Concerto in C Major, BV 247 (1901-4), which the Boston Symphony Orchestra was performing for the first time. Conductor Sakari Oramo and pianist Kirill Gerstein performed impressively, and critics provided largely positive reviews of the piece. The belatedness of this performance of Busoni's piano concerto with the Boston Symphony Orchestra is striking, given Busoni's close connection with that institution. It was Karl Muck, conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra from 1912 to 1918, who directed the concerto's premiere in 1904 in Berlin Germany. Busoni (1866-1924) also appeared as soloist thirty-six times between 1891 and 1911, more than with any other major US orchestra during his lifetime. In addition, the Boston Symphony Orchestra performed more of his compositions during his lifetime than any other orchestral institution in the US.

Relying on knowledge of Karl Engel's edition of the Volksschauspiel, Karl Simrock's version of the puppet play, Gotthold Lessing's Faust fragments, and versions of the Faust legend by Christopher Marlowe and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, among others, Ferruccio Busoni crafted his own hybrid libretto that depicts a mystical and broadminded Faust. Busoni's music reflects the richness of Faust's mind, combining heterogeneous timbres, forms, and styles. Busoni juxtaposes a Gregorian Credo, Palestrina-style choral settings, a reformation hymn, a Baroque instrumental dance suite, an organ fantasia, recitatives, a lyrical ballad, and orchestral variations, with impressionistic symphonic writing, and experimental passages. While stylistic heterogeneity can be heard throughout many of his mature instrumental and vocal works, Busoni also used this heterogeneity in a descriptive way in Doktor Faust to characterize Faust. At the same time, Busoni sought to write \"a history of man and his desire\" rather than of a man and the devil. It is Faust's own dark side, rather than the devil, that distracts him and prevents him from completing his greatest work. With Kaspar removed from the plot, Mephistopheles, who as spirit is not always distinct from Faust the man, becomes Faust's alter ego. This duality is expressed musically when Faust assumes Mephistopheles's characteristic intervals. Although Busoni's incomplete Doktor Faust, BV 303, has already been studied by several scholars, including Antony Beaumont, Nancy Chamness, and Susan Fontaine, there is still no detailed analysis of Busoni's treatment of Faust. Through analyses of autobiographical connections, Busoni's early settings of Faustian characters, and the text and music in Doktor Faust, with special attention on the Wittenberg Tavern Scene that has no precedent among the versions of the Faust legend, this article reveals Busoni's vision of Faust as a broadminded, and yet conflicted character, shaped idiosyncratically to convey Busoni's personal artistic ideals. In so doing, the article not only contributes to ongoing discourse about Doktor Faust, but also expands knowledge about ways the Faust legend was interpreted and set musically in the early twentieth century through intertextual comparisons.

Student memoirs provide a vivid portrait of what it must have been like to study with Ferruccio Busoni (1866-1924) in private lessons or in master class in Weimar (1900/1901), Vienna (1907-8), Basel (1910), and Berlin (1921-24). In private lessons, Busoni never liked to hear a work more than two times during piano lessons, and expected the piece to be polished and ready for performance at the second hearing. He often used colorful metaphors to make interpretive or musical suggestions. Here, Knyt talks about Busoni and the New England Conservatory.

An anecdote circulating among pupils of Egon Petri (1881–1962), a protégé of Ferruccio Busoni (1866–1924), was the story Petri told of how on more than one occasion Busoni's wife was mistakenly introduced as \"Mrs. Bach-Busoni.\" Whether fact or fiction, this socialfaux pasillustrates how closely Busoni's name has been associated with the names of composers whose works he arranged. Despite his prolific compositional career, he is remembered more as a transcriber and arranger than as a composer of original works. His practice of arranging others' works also affected his own compositions, which frequently contained borrowed material. Busoni's creative art thus blurred conventional boundaries between what is traditionally considered to be primary \"original\" works and subsidiary transcriptions or arrangements. While Busoni's tendency to blur boundaries between new pieces and arrangements has been already noted, his compositional aesthetics has only been cursorily studied. Relying on the essay \"How I Compose,\" the section on notation fromThe Sketch of a New Aesthetic of Music(1907), and unpublished sketches from the Staatsbibliothek Berlin,I examine Busoni's idiosyncratic compositional ideology, explain the meaning of his termsIdee, Einfall, TranskriptionandBearbeitungin his compositional process, and show that Busoni valued the creativity involved in transforming already existing musical material no less than invention of the new. I illustrate Busoni's compositional aesthetics through analyses of his arrangements of Liszt's sixth Paganini Etude, Mozart's Piano Concerto, K. 453,and hisFantasia nach J. S. Bach.

It has long been claimed that opera can give expression to the uneasy relationship between the body and the voice. Operatic voices seem to exceed the capacity of the bodies that produce them in a way that conveys a sense of mechanisation or limited agency, inviting metaphorical comparisons to marionettes. Yet recent studies of gesture have suggested that bodies are not simply passively inscribed with meaning but that they also mediate the process of inscription. Investigating the implications of this claim for opera, this article discusses two recent essays by Judith Butler, in which she draws from Walter Benjamin's account of gesture in Brecht's epic theatre to argue for the performative power of incomplete or decontextualised bodily actions. It then traces this idea to a moment in epic theatre's own prehistory, focusing on Ferruccio Busoni's opera Doktor Faust. The article makes both a theoretical point and an historical claim: it highlights how bodies and words that are decontextualised can perform a critical function despite not enjoying the usual citational supports necessary for a speech act; and it argues that Busoni's Doktor Faust and his theory of opera were a part of the intellectual prehistory to Butler's conceptualisation of bodily performativity.

In his debut work for the theater, Musik zu Gozzis Märchendrama Turandot, Busoni attempted to realize a new genre for music theater he described as a “musical illustration” of Gozzi’s fiaba teatrale. While the Turandot-Suite (1905) derived from it was highly successful in the concert hall, the incidental music, first performed by Max Reinhardt in 1911, remained unsuccessful, the publishing of its score delayed, and, to this day, the autograph not yet rediscovered. An analysis of the correspondence between Busoni and his publisher reveals that the composer’s unfamiliarity with theatrical customs and practice led him to consider his incidental music as an autonomous musical work. Only in later years did Busoni successfully realize his anti-naturalistic musical dramaturgy in the opera Turandot (1917).

Ferruccio Busoni (1866–1924) championed Frédéric Chopin’s music. Yet his performances often elicited responses of shock or amusement because they rebelled against the prevalent sentimental style of interpretation associated with an “effeminate” Chopin. Even some of his staunchest admirers had trouble appreciating his unprompted repeats of measures or structural wholes in the preludes or etudes, his registral alterations, and his overly intellectualized approach. Also unusual was his choice to program the preludes as a complete cycle. Scholars have documented Busoni’s interpretive eccentricities, but the rationale behind them and their significance for the evolution of Chopin interpretation in the twentieth century remains largely unexplored. Through analyses of recordings, concert programs, recital reviews, and Busoni’s little-known and unpublished essay from 1908 titled “Chopin: Eine Ansicht über ihn,” I connect Busoni’s unconventional Chopin interpretations to an idiosyncratic perception of Chopin’s character. In the nineteenth century Chopin and his music were commonly viewed as effeminate, androgynous, childish, sickly, and “ethnically other.” Busoni’s essay indicates that he, too, considered Chopin’s music “poetic,” “feminine,” and “emotive.” But this was problematic for Busoni, who was obsessed with “manliness” in an age in which gender roles were gradually changing. He discovered “half-manly” and “half-dramatic” elements in the music and in Chopin’s character—that is, a heroic, monumental side. In striving to portray the “whole” of Chopin and his music while distancing himself from the gendered “halfness” of earlier writings, Busoni became a pioneer of bolder Chopin interpretation and of monumentalist programming. His portrait of Chopin reveals how cultural ideas inform the evolution of performers’ interpretations.

Bruno Mugellini (1871-1912), pianist and composer from the Marche region, organised two concert seasons in Bologna (where was teacher of piano in the Liceo Musicale), in 1904 and 1906. These were later named 'Concerti Mugellini'. He also founded a concert society in collaboration with two other teachers from the Liceo Musicale, namely Guido Alberto Fano and Filippo Ivaldi. Mugellini trived to organize performances of Italian music, with many premières by young composers graduated from the Liceo Musicale (Respighi, Gandino, Ivaldi and himself), as an aside of the 'Società del Quartetto' concert season. The decisively inexpensive price and a 50% reduction for Quartetto's members attracted numerous subscribers from the biggest concert society. He invited Ferruccio Busoni for the 1906 season to perform his Concerto op. 39 for piano, orchestra and male chorus, and to direct his Turandot Suite op. 41. The great success of the recital played a role in Busoni's decision to accept the invitation to become the new director of the Liceo Musicale in 1913. Busoni's expectations to renew the city's musical life, however, were disappointed.