Ferruccio Busoni
(1866-1924)
Allegro misurato – Andante sostenuto – Tempo I, più stretto (alla breve)
Ferruccio Busoni is remembered above all as a mighty pianist, perhaps the greatest of the years following the death of Liszt. He would have wanted to be remembered as a composer, but appears most often in our musical life as a kind of two-headed monster called Bach-Busoni, for his transcriptions of music by Johann Sebastian Bach, and above all of the Chaconne for solo violin.
We do not identify Busoni with Mozart, but that merely shows our very partial knowledge of him. The Sydney writer about music and chocolate manufacturer Walter Dullo remembered, as a young man in Berlin in the early 1920s, attending a series of concerts in which Busoni played and directed a good share of Mozart’s piano concertos. He wrote cadenzas for several of them, and transcribed for two pianos a movement of the F major Concerto K459, as well as other works by Mozart. It was hardly surprising, really, that Busoni should be drawn to another composer poised, as he was, between Italian and German idioms.
In this, as in other respects, Busoni anticipated one of the strongest aesthetic trends of the first half of the 20th century. A noted aesthetician and writer on the philosophy of music, he called the attitude which especially marks his later music ‘Junge Klassizität’: young, new, or fresh classicality. This work is in many ways a tribute to Mozart. You will hear the connection with Mozart from the very first bars
Busoni composed the Divertimento in the wake of a big concert tour in the 1919-1920 concert season, during which he appeared as soloist with the Paris Conservatoire Orchestra, in a series of concerts conducted by Philippe Gaubert. Gaubert was also one of the leading flautists of the day, and it seems that the Paris concerts were followed by a recital in which Busoni accompanied Gaubert’s flute playing. No surprise, then, to find the Divertimento is dedicated to Gaubert.
Busoni claimed he composed the Divertimento ‘as easily as writing a letter’. On the day he finished the score, 24 May 1920, Busoni wrote to a friend ‘it is a pendant to my Clarinet Concertino [1919]; more fantastic, perhaps, and perhaps more virile, too’. The work begins in an unmistakably classical, even Mozartian style, especially in its rhythm, though with Busoni’s characteristic ‘floating’ tonality, so that we know straight away this is no pastiche, but a new-old language. The soloist’s entry is wittily prepared by a fanfare passed down the line from first trumpet, to second trumpet (muted), then to solo flute, entering disguised as a third trumpet. The flute immediately shows its range and virtuosity by taking the fanfare material all over the range of the instrument. A second, more plaintive theme appears. The single-movement Divertimento is very concise, however. A commentator has observed that the speed of thought ‘makes the listener’s task dizzy but stimulating…the classical landscape of the piece is sufficiently familiar to prevent him losing his bearings’.
The Andante sostenuto which follows without a break is a rearrangement of Busoni’s Elegy for Clarinet and Piano (1920), scored for pizzicato strings and occasionally giving the orchestral clarinet the lead in ear-tricking substitution for the flute. A transition leads to what seems likely to be a literal recapitulation of the opening Allegro, but the main theme is soon thrown away in favour of a fleeting tarantella. The syncopated figure which accompanies the flute’s long final runs was used in Busoni’s opera Doktor Faustus, to depict laughter. He was probably influenced by the Act I finale of Mozart’s Così fan tutte, an opera which he had only recently got to know. In this too, Busoni was a Mozartian ahead of his time. Nevertheless it is Mendelssohn he salutes before the witty sign-off.
First published for 2002
The soloist in the first performance of the Divertimento, in Berlin on 13 January, 1921, was H.W. de Vries, who had played in the 1912 world premiere of Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire. [In 1923, at Busoni’s request, his pupil Kurt Weill made and published a flute and piano transcription of the Divertimento.]