Ferrucio Busoni: The lone ranger of music

‘It is the invisible and inaudible, the spiritual processes of the personages portrayed, which music should render intelligible.’ If this statement from Ferrucio Busoni’s lengthy and complex 1911 treatise, Sketch of a New Esthetic of Music, feels abstruse, then it has succeeded in evoking the most essential quality of so much of his music: an elusive intangibility that often reflects ambivalence, ambiguity and unstable complexities of feeling and perception. In this particular passage, Busoni was specifically referring to what he called ‘modern theatre music’, couching his statement within a criticism of what he saw as one-dimensional theatrical representation in much of the world’s operatic heritage, but his words equally apply to his view of other musical genres. Be it in his four operas, his prolific output of piano works (including his Piano Concerto), or his relatively small number of songs, instrumental music and orchestral compositions, from the time, towards the close of the 19^th Century, that he started to experiment with what he referred to as his discovery of the existence of 113 scales (89 more than the traditional 24 in Western music), he stood as a complete lone ranger in music, sounding wholly unlike anyone else.

At face value one might conclude that he had totally abandoned traditional tonality – but he had not. He was still basically a ‘tonal’ composer and he had not embraced the atonality of his contemporaries Arnold Schoenberg, Alban Berg, and Anton Webern. Conductor Sir Mark Elder explains this in the light of what drove Busoni’s musical orientation: ‘Busoni was a loner. Born near Florence (in 1866), he couldn’t find what he needed staying in Italy, and so he thrust himself forward into Northern Europe where he immersed himself in its cultural and artistic legacy. There, living in Berlin, he then developed his own harmonic world unlike anyone else’s. His music was tonal, but he put it together with the broadest approaches to how far tonality can go.’

The motivation was not academic: on the contrary, he was haunted by bizarre and often freely roaming musical landscapes that so strongly defied formal control that he strove to find a technical method of his own with which he could handle them in as coherent (and as spontaneously improvisatory) a manner as possible. Hence the often enigmatic and even opaque impressions that his music conveys – ingeniously so to his avid admirers, but puzzlingly so to many music-lovers, which accounts for his relative lack of popularity. In this centenary year of his death there are relatively few commemorations taking place in Britain, Europe or the United States – certainly vastly less than for Giacomo Puccini who also died 100 years ago – but Busoni’s oeuvre is profoundly admired by some of the world’s most outstandingly distinguished musicians. They, as I do, find his compositions strikingly compelling and, as the pianist Marc-André Hamelin tells us, deeply edifying: ‘I don’t think you would call him a great melodist, which is of course probably the main element that makes music attractive for the general public, but if you are willing to penetrate his world, you have also to be willing to make the effort – and if you do, you will be repaid a thousandfold. One his most appealing and also most remarkable qualities is his innovative spirit – in almost any way you could mention: not only harmonically and structurally, but also in the strength of his ideas.’

©Wikimedia commons

This idea is most dramatically shown in Busoni’s extraordinary Piano Concerto, which he completed in 1904. Five movements played without a break, lasting about 70 minutes in all, with an enormous orchestra, and – in the final movement – a men’s chorus, singing a text from Aladdin, a verse drama by the Danish playwright Adam Oehlenschlaeger. ‘It broke a new mould in such an explosive manner vis a vis whatever we were used to before’, continues Hamelin. ‘No one had ever attempted anything like it. If you listen to it with a more symphonic frame of mind, you have a much better chance of appreciating it for what it is. It just isn’t a traditional piano concerto. The only movement that approximates an accepted concerto form is the first one: all the others go way beyond the usual architectures of traditional concerto movements.’

The third movement alone, titled Pezzo serioso, has four separately delineated parts with sub-titles, and the third part, Sommessamente, includes one of the most unexpectedly bizarre of all Busoni’s apparitions, which sounds especially weirdly powerful in the Hyperion recording Hamelin made with Sir Mark Elder conducting: ‘I had a fantastic collaborator in Sir Mark. He got me to change a very important detail in the very stormy section of the third movement. He asked me to play it a lot slower, and the picture he had of it was so compelling that I just had to adopt it. He saw it like “a dinosaur advancing through the forest and knocking over everything in its way”. That was such a powerful association that I couldn’t not go along with it. He was an impeccable collaborator, and I’ll always be very grateful for that’.

It was Sir Mark who, to great acclaim, introduced Busoni’s final opera, his magnum opus Doktor Faust, to British theatre audiences in 1986 with its very belated UK stage debut at English National Opera. The composer had never managed to finish this ingenious multi-dimensional work, so it had been given its world premiere the year after his death with a posited completion by his pupil Philip Jarnach, after he had studied some of the composer’s sketches for the work. It had been heard in Britain in concert performances conducted by Sir Adrian Boult in 1937 and 1959, but the English National Opera production, conducted by Sir Mark, directed by David Pountney, and starring Sir Thomas Allen as Faust, was its first stage incarnation in Britain. That was also just the second production of a new edition prepared by the world’s most important Busoni scholar, authority and biographer Anthony Beaumont, following its premiere performance in Bologna in 1985. For this edition, after rigorously studying newly discovered sketches of some of Busoni’s unfinished passages, Beaumont offered a new completion of the opera that cast a radically different light on how Busoni might have finished the work.

More on this further on in this Busoni anniversary commemoration, but first, baritone Thomas Hampson, one of the most highly acclaimed interpreters of the title role of Doktor Faust, gives us a very lucid introduction to one of the most challengingly complex and shadowy operas ever conceived: ‘Busoni wrote his own libretto, taking various puppet plays as his sources, and so he had no wish to reshape or set Goethe’s famous Faust drama – he wrote his own new Faust. If anything, it is some kind of amalgam that is the Wandering Jew and the genius of Leonardo da Vinci. He invited us into a three-to-five-dimensional discussion of the issues of existence, knowledge, too much knowledge, evil, good, and more. His Doktor Faust already carries in himself a far more developed blasphemous attitude not just to religion but also to power than the naïve Doktor Faust of Gounod’s famous opera, and to some extent Part One of Goethe’s play, where he is challenging forces he wants to be in contact with, be they extra-terrestrial spirits or witchcraft, in the hope that they will help him fulfil his desires. In Busoni’s opera it is much more complicated, and he takes us into a kind of tunnel: a channel between reality and non-reality, another kind of existence, a metaphysical existence versus our own life’s internal existence. It’s an invitation to open a door that may be uncomfortable to do, but to understand Busoni’s Faust one must realise that he is all the time provoking us into a passage in between the other side of reality and our side of reality, and importantly his Faust is already in that passage when three strange students give him an extraordinarily magical book that unlocks the various doors and dimensions of the ultimate side of our life.’

Portrait of Ferruccio Busoni with Ottorino Respighi, Arrigo Serato, Ernesto Consolo and Chiarina Fino-Savio. Zurigo, 1917. ©Wikimedia commons

Clavis Astartis Magica (The Key to the Magic of Astarte) is the book that catalyses Faust’s journey to self-destruction, and while in his pursuit of total knowledge and power it introduces him to Mephistopheles, it is he, the Devil, who reveals to him his true romantic and erotic yearnings that are yet all deceptions of his uncontrollable inner desires. Thus, he seduces and abandons both Gretchen and the Duchess of Parma – and when Mephistopheles conjures up a vision of Helen of Troy, although Faust thinks he sees at last his ideal vision of perfect beauty, he cannot be fulfilled as she disappears, a phantom of his imagination and fantasy yearning.

For Busoni, Faust’s instability not just of emotion but of consciousness – the, as Thomas Hampson said, ‘passage in between the other side of reality and our side of reality’ – provided the ideal fitting aspiration for his very radical musical and dramaturgical style, as the conductor Kent Nagano, extolled for his Doktor Faust performances and recording, explains: ‘In looking back to the original legend of Faust, Busoni finds vehicles for a very progressive musical language. I think that the existential multi-dimension of this opera – looking backwards in order to go forwards, and also going into the idea of the supernatural and questioning whether it comes from the past or the future or whether it’s something that is a completely different dimension – this is very challenging for an artist and most especially for a singer going in and out of these various dimensions. Indeed, the casts in Busoni’s Arlecchino and Turandot are also presented with this challenge of portraying characters of the past who travel to different eras, all while artistically exchanging with a public of the present.’

Kent Nagano has recorded Doktor Faust with both the Philip Jarnach and the Anthony Beaumont completions. Maybe Beaumont’s most important discovery was that Jarnach, for some reason, had left out part of the libretto where Faust, as he breathes his soul into the dead body of the child he had fathered with the Duchess of Parma, declares just before he dies that he hopes his new found freedom repenting the folly of all the mistakes he has made will bring about a new order that rises ‘above good and evil’ (thereby implying above God and the Devil). Beaumont restored that omission and this, as well as finding other sketches, impelled him to make a new ending for the opera. In Jarnach’s version, the opera closes as Mephistopheles appears and, speaking aloud, sarcastically mocks Faust’s dead body whereas in Beaumont’s edition, after Mephistopheles has sung rather than spoken his jibe, the sounds of New Year bells and an invisible chorus repeating Faust’s final words ‘I, Faust, one eternal will’ herald in a new era. If Busoni’s music in Doktor Faust – a creation with strong autobiographical connotations – had so revealingly conjured up the blurring of consciousness in pathological desire, the composer seemed at his own demise to be grappling with a resolution.