Will the Revival Take Hold This Time?

During the first quarter of the 20th century, Ferruccio Busoni was a star. As a pianist, he was considered Liszt’s successor; and the transcendental nature of the piano music he composed makes that not an immoderate claim. His music was heard and admired. He wrote the century’s most ambitious and impressive piano concerto; he wrote one of the greatest of all 20th century pieces of contrapuntal piano music, the “Fantasia Contrappuntistica”; he wrote one of the most important 20th century German operas, “Doktor Faust.” His ideas about music were both visionary and pragmatic, and they attracted considerable attention and debate.

Busoni was by all accounts a fascinating man who dabbled in occult thought, science, philosophy and architecture. He knew Liszt and Tchaikovsky; he hobnobbed with Shaw, Rilke, Schoenberg and Mahler. He was poet, theorist and visual artist as well as composer and pianist. He was a famed educator, mentor of Kurt Weill and Edgard Varese. His influence has been pervasive in 20th century music, even reaching as far as the American avant-garde--John Cage, David Tudor and Morton Feldman all studied with Busoni pupils or associates. John Adams is Busoni-besotted; he has made arrangements of Busoni’s music and based the slow movement of his recent symphonic masterpiece, “Naive and Sentimental Music,” on a Busoni berceuse, or lullaby.

Yet Busoni is best remembered now for his Bach transcriptions. That situation almost changed in the 1960s, when there was a concerted effort at a Busoni revival, and it looked, for a brief minute, as though he might catch on with the public the way Mahler, Ives and Satie were then catching on. Extraordinary British pianist John Ogden made important recordings of the concerto and “Fantasia,” and Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau was an extraordinary Faust in the opera’s first recording. Still, these were not persuasive enough; Busoni didn’t take.

Now, however, 76 years after his death and with little fanfare, a Busoni rediscovery is happening again, this time by some of the biggest names in the business. Suddenly and simultaneously, we have truly great recordings of Busoni’s three greatest works. And with them, the best case yet for Busoni has been made.

The Piano Concerto is the place to begin. Premiered in 1904, it was the culmination of Busoni’s early music. It is the Romantic piano concerto to end all Romantic piano concertos. It lasts an unprecedented 75 minutes and requires not just a huge orchestra but also, in the last movement, a male chorus. The size and scope of a Mahler symphony, it is a wild, epic ride.

Everything about this concerto is extravagant, from its long-lined lyric melodies to its climaxes that crush everything in sight. An Italian who settled in Germany at a young age and spent his adult life in Berlin, Busoni loved his native music, and the scherzo is an over-the-top tarantella that turns into a dance of mass frenzy; the nearly half-hour slow movement eagerly dives into spiritual depths. The piano solo is an astonishing bravura marathon.

There have been convincing recordings of the concerto (John Ogden’s pioneering one has just been reissued as part of the Philips great pianist series), but nothing to match the new disc by Marc-Andre Hamelin. The pianist has a glittering technique that simply stuns, and Mark Elder conducts with dramatic inspiration--the recorded sound is as grandiose as the music, which combines with the spectacular performance to knock an audiophile’s socks off.

“Fantasia Contrappuntistica” represents the high point of another phase in Busoni’s career, the creation of elaborate but spring-water-clear abstract contrapuntal music. The starting point here is the incomplete final quadruple fugue of Bach’s “Art of the Fugue.” Busoni finishes it but also does much, much more in a massive series of fugues and variations. It was written in 1910 in several slightly different versions for one piano (one of them created for Los Angeles’ Richard Buhling) and later, in 1921, revised in its final, most extravagant and compelling form, for two pianos.

The later version is the one Andras Schiff and Peter Serkin chose to play in a performance of rapt concentration and lucidity, as part of a two-disc set that also features stellar performances of two-piano works by Mozart and Reger.

That Busoni made several versions of his “Fantasia” was not uncharacteristic of the composer. He was a man of obsessions; his compositions frequently recycle and reinterpret material. Chief among Busoni’s obsessions was the Faust story, and “Doktor Faust” was the culmination of Busoni’s career, incorporating a considerable amount of his earlier music. Now, at last, we have a complete and worthy recording of it led by Kent Nagano (who also conducted a new production at the Salzburg Festival that is a co-production with the Metropolitan Opera). For all the benefits of Fischer-Dieskau’s 30-year-old recording, which is now out of print, it was abridged and it was made before Busoni’s sketches for the final scene (he died shortly before completing it) came to ight.

The opera is yet another Busoni epic, this time a spiritual one. Yet typical of Busoni at his most extravagant, the magical elements and festive ones bang up against one another and create a new kind of theatrical experience of ecstasy and spiritual transformation. The recording is excellent. The fine cast is headed by Dietrich Henschel, whose Faust practically matches the eloquence of the legendary Fischer-Dieskau’s (who makes an appearance in the spoken prologue and epilogue). Nagano well appreciates the music’s richness, and his Lyon Orchestra sounds highly disciplined. The set allows for the option of hearing the traditional score or the preferable new ending by Anthony Beaumont based upon Busoni’s sketches.

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Busoni had other fixations besides Faust, and they included Merlin, Aladdin, Dante, Da Vinci, Don Juan and the Wandering Jew. The last found its way into several of Busoni’s pieces as well as his most controversial opera, “Die Brautwahl” (The Bridal Choice), based on a supernatural E.T.A. Hoffmann story that includes elements of “The Merchant of Venice.” It is an imperfect work, overlong and convoluted, but it contains much marvelous music. Its first recording comes from a live performance at the German State Opera of Berlin in 1993, conducted by Daniel Barenboim. The patronage of the Israeli conductor helps remove the stigma of anti-Semitism that has sometimes stuck to the work, but the performance (cut by about a third) is not quite strong enough musically or dramatically to survive the move from theater to loudspeaker.

Despite the allure of opera and other forms, the piano remained central to Busoni, and a young pianist, Jeni Slotchiver, who, three years ago, gave the first all-Busoni program in New York since the ‘60s. Slotchiver has now introduced herself on recordings with the first of what is promised to be several all-Busoni discs. This one, called “Busoni the Visionary,” includes one of the composer’s most important sets, the Seven Elegies, written shortly after the Piano Concerto but applying new, futuristic thinking. These are startling pieces, full of wonderfully fancy Lisztian piano writing and also somber Bachian profundity. The last one is that berceuse that so impressed Adams.

Slotchiver is a player devoted to these pieces and tells their tales effectively. And she also fills in a few other pieces of the Busoni puzzle on the disc with his famous transcription of the Bach D-Minor Chaconne, as well as four of Busoni’s pungent studies based upon music by Native Americans that the composer heard on an American tour in 1910. These experimental pieces are prescient of the world music movement of today (Busoni’s American contemporaries were also drawn to this music but none captured its flavor so well, or originally). For Busoni, Indian music and Bach were all part of a higher music order. His goal, and he went remarkably far in reaching it, was to find the limit of musical universality.

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FERRUCCIO BUSONI

**** Piano Concerto. Marc-Andre Hamelin, piano; City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra; Mark Elder, conductor. (Hyperion)

**** “Fantasia Contrappuntistica.” Andras Schiff and Peter Serkin, piano. (ECM)

*** 1/2 “Doktor Faust.” National Opera of Lyon; Kent Nagano, conductor. (Erato)

** 1/2 “Die Brautwahl.” German State Opera; Daniel Barenboim, conductor. (Teldec)

*** “Busoni the Visionary.” Jeni Slotchiver, piano. (Centaur)