First major study of the music of Italian composer Feruccio Busoni (1866-1924), the most renowned virtuoso pianist of his time. Illustrated with photos & musical examples.

Busoni

Arts & Photography

Antony Beaumont

Music

Faber and Faber

<p>The Italian composer Ferrucio Busoni (1866-1924) was one of the finest and most copious letter writers of his time, as much a virtuoso of the pen as of the pianoforte. Although best remembered as a great pianist, he also applied his penetrating intellect to composition, aesthetics, teaching and conducting. A profound understanding of Bach, Mozart and Liszt neither hindered his interest in the revolutionary new music of his contemporaries, nor barred his way to a prophetic understanding of the future of music.<br />
Antony Beaumont follows ‘Busoni the Composer’, the first major study of Busoni’s music, with this collection of some four hundred letters. Most of them have never before been published in any language. Busoni was an acute observer, and the letters offer vivid insights into persons and events in one of the most turbulent periods of Western cultural history.<br />
The letters follow Busoni’s career from his beginnings in Trieste and Vienna, through years spent in Leipzig, Helsinki, Moscow and Boston, to his establishment in Berlin as one of the city’s musical ‘demi-gods’. Busoni flees to America, only to find circumstances even more desolate than in Europe. He returns tot he seemingly safe haven of Switzerland, where he begins to compose his masterwork, ‘Doktor Faust’. In 1920 he returns to spend the final period of his life in Berlin, where his circle includes Ernst Krenek, Kurt Will, Alois Hába and Hermann Scherchen.</p>

Selected Letters

Literature & Fiction

Antony Beaumont has written a penetrating study of the composer and conductor Alexander Zemlinsky (1871-1942). 'Zemlinsky - all hail to you!', wrote the young Alma Mahler-Werfel, 'All hail to you and your art.' When she first met him, Zemlinsky was regarded as the most promising Viennese composer of his generation. Only long after his death, however, did his music begin to receive the attention it deserves. Founded on years of research in Europe and the USA, this is the first full-length biography of a key figure in the history of twentieth-century music. Apart from analyses of every major work - almost all of which are now available on CD - the author gives a detailed account of the composer's early years as a protege of Brahms and Mahler, of his complex friendship with Schoenberg, his kindly and helpful attitude towards the hypersensitive Webern and his heartfelt friendship with Berg. He also outlines Zemlinsky's career as a conductor, whom both Schoenberg and Stravinsky considered the finest they ever heard.

Zemlinsky

Biographies & Memoirs

Faber&Faber

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Books by Antony Beaumont