Selected Letters

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.
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.
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.