A Bridge to the Future

A tiny figure in tails came toddling to the center of the stage at Manhattan's Carnegie Hall, made a nervous little bow, and sat down almost unobserved at a Steinway the size of Florida. "Give me the Cleveland every time," a critic murmured contentedly to his companion. "Never a lapse in taste, never a bar without breeding!" Even as he spoke the Cleveland Symphony rumbled like a drain in difficulty and belched forth a stentorian blat of brass. Whereupon the tiny man, exploding chords like cannoncrackers, hurled himself upon the piano, and for the next 72 minutes, while the orchestra bawled like a herd of lovesick hippos, blasted away with a display of percussive pianistics that rattled the hall so hard nobody noticed the sound of a subway train thundering within 40 feet of the stage.

After the last horrendous arrabbiato, in which pianist and orchestra were joined by a chorus of 72 men, the audience sat stupefied for several seconds and then released a roar of approval that persisted through eleven curtain calls. Soloist Pietro Scarpini and the Cleveland had safely and on the whole admirably negotiated the longest and, in the opinion of many pianists, the most difficult piano concerto ever composed. It was, in fact, a monstrosity, as some critics limply acknowledged. But they had to concede, along with Cleveland's crusty old George Szell, that it was "a monstrosity full of genius," and that the man who wrote it was a genius full of monstrosity, one of the most spectacular figures in the history of Western music.

Moneymaking Prodigy. He is a figure largely forgotten. On the 100th anniversary of his birth-now being celebrated through the efforts of the vigorous new Busoni Society-Italy's Ferruccio Dante Michelangelo Benvenuto Busoni is remembered by the music public as a mere arranger: the man who transcribed Bach's organ music for the pianoforte. In fact, says Pianist Artur Rubinstein, Busoni was "the greatest pianist of his time." Many musicians consider him a titanic technician and volcanically creative interpreter; all agree that his radical re-examination of the instrument and its literature struck a body blow at the romantic style and inspired the modern approach to the piano. Yet in the long view, Busoni was most significant where he most significantly failed: as a composer who longed to be great but was merely grand, as a pioneer who built a bridge to the future but could not pass over it himself.

Busoni was born in Tuscany in 1866.

His father Ferdinando was a village Vivaldi who blew a mean clarinet-- and all the cash he could get his hands on. He had improvidently wed a gifted but relatively impecunious pianist who promptly presented him with a son. At three, Ferruccio was playing scales. At six, he was forced to practice four hours at a stretch by a father determined to produce a moneymaking prodigy. At seven, he made his debut in Trieste, and for the rest of his life, with brief intermissions, he was chained to the concert circuit like a monkey to a street organ. Father had expensive tastes, and Ferruccio, seeking frantic compensations for the frantic life he lived, soon developed a few of his own.

Prophetic Inspiration. As a young man he was everything northern women love about Italy: wild mane and burning eyes, sensuous lips and rich, soft voice. Wherever he played, and he played from St. Petersburg to San Francisco, Ferruccio was besieged by women who wanted to make beautiful music with him. It cannot be said that he was always faithful to his piano, but in the broad Italian construction of the term he was loyal to his wife, a placid Swedish girl who thought he was simply wonderful.

One way and another, he was. He was a formidable intellectual who could write almost as well as he could play.

He was a personality whose mere presence raised the hair on a spectator's scalp. Above all, he was a pianist of fantastic splendor, acknowledged today as the mightiest technician of all time.

His power was awesome, his speed be yond belief, his touch so delicately pre cise that he could transform the most complicated passages into washes of pure color. And yet technique was not an end in itself; Busoni invariably sub ordinated pianistic skill to musical mean ing. Passion and intelligence were reconciled in sensibility, and in the last years of his life, says Busoni's biographer Ed ward Dent, his performances reflected "the spirit of a seer and visionary" and achieved a "grandeur" amounting to "prophetic inspiration."

A Master, a Slave. He couldn't have cared less. By the time he was 40, Bu soni was sick of performing and wanted only to compose. During the summer, when the concert circuit closed down, he wrote music like a madman; and what he wrote, though not great music, is sometimes music of great fascination and historical importance. Busoni is an important moment of transition in mu sic. He falls between two styles, the romantic and the modern. In his struggle to reconcile the two, he helped to break up the romantic tradition and in his late compositions --the six Poly phonic Studies and the superb but rarely performed opera Doktor Faust --he struck out in the same general direction as Schoenberg and Stravinsky.

Busoni did not live to see direction become destination. Worn out by half a century of continual concertizing, he died in 1924 at the age of 58. He was, in his own words, "a weak man, yet a stout wrestler, whom doubts drive hither and thither; master of thought, slave of instinct, exhausting all things, finding no answer." A Faustian figure.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.