Two nights on Busoni:
The Busoni Piano Concerto is literally the last word in piano concertos, it can't possibly get any bigger than this. After Busoni's Piano Concerto, it seems as though there's nowhere else to go with it. Rachmaninov and Prokofiev and Bartok were all considerably younger, but Busoni is the summit of the whole thing, everything after it is, at least in some sense, a retread. Ferruccio Busoni, the greatest pianist of his generation, injects the Liszt model with anabolic steroids and blows it up to twice the length, twice the demands on the soloist, and twice the size of the orchestra - and at the end, he even includes a male chorus.
If Mahler wrote a piano concerto, it would sound not unlike this, for Busoni does for the concerto precisely what Mahler did for the symphony, and would that we had ten more essays of this scope - but then, Busoni would not have been nearly so influential a performer.
Far more than Richard Strauss, Busoni is Mahler's closest spiritual kinsman. Mahler was the ultimate hillbilly in Vienna: a Jew from a small town in Austro-Hungarian boonies where all those poor German-speakers had to rub against Jews, Hungarians, Bohemians, Moravians, and Romanians, and yet he was thought the acme of Viennese sophistication. If Mahler was the center of musical activity in Vienna, Busoni was its center in Berlin, and he had to balanced his Berlin polish with his own hick background, a small town in Italy, that country whose music was seen as the ultimate pollutant to Holy German Art.
And if Mahler was an intellectual sophisticate, Busoni was a walking glossary whose library numbered tens of thousands of volumes. While Mahler spent his little free time composing, Busoni wrote plenty, but surely he must have spent most of his time reading, and consequently was probably a much better adjusted human than Meister Weltschmerz von Wien.
Busoni was nearly as self-hating of Italian heritage as Mahler was self-hating of his Jewish, yet just as Mahler's Jewish background always pops through in spite of Mahler's best efforts, the Italian in Busoni is everywhere - works based on Arlecchino from the Commedia dell'Arte, and Turandot; the Italian play on which Puccini based his last great opera. Even this piano concerto scandalized the German public with its supposed 'Italian street songs.' The tarantella fourth movement, called 'all'Italiana' and probably the best among its five movements (!!!), has all kinds of allusions to Mendelssohn's Italian Symphony. Just as in Mahler, all that sublimity is made digestible by a good helping of peasant vulgarity, and consequently the work feels as though all strains of humanity are embraced.
Busoni tried to leave his Italian background behind and thought to himself that Italy was a country producing Verdian vulgarity entirely unworthy of comparison to the noble strains of Wagner and Brahms; but then Busoni heard the German premiere of Falstaff, and long before anyone else realized what a masterpiece Falstaff was, Busoni did and realized just how wrong he'd been. He never sent the letter he wrote to Verdi in which he poured his heart out about how wrong he'd been about Verdi and Italy.
Like Mahler again, what Busoni represents is value pluralism. If he did not achieve as much as a composer as Mahler, perhaps the reason's the pellucid optimism with which he clearly viewed these cultural exchanges. The Busoni Piano Concerto searches long and wide for metaphysical answers, but it inevitably finds them. Busoni comes to us as an emissary from the forgotten 20th century, the 20th century of its first third, badly wounded by the first world war and finished off by the second, a century which looked at the future with a progressive eye, believing much as we do that no historical force could ever stop the great fusion of cultural dialogue, to which, somehow, the values of European liberalism would prevail unimpeded with the rest of the world agreeing to adapt them. The Piano Concerto inhales and exhales this worldview as though its oxygen will always be there, infinite and ungassed.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c1AgOvleAmY
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