Ferruccio Busoni

Busoni was a man with many faces. He was born in Tuscany from a German mother and Italian father, and settled down in Berlin, after visiting Leipzig, Helsinki and Moscow. There he established himself as a composer, but above all a phenomenal pianist. His music shows some discrepancies. On the one hand, he looks back on the Romantic period with his giant pianoconcerto with male choir as the absolute pinnacle. On the onder hand, he looks forward to the future and found that music had to be freed of the chains of outdated ideas. In his much-read manifest 'Entwurf einer neuen Ästhetik der Tonkunst’ (1907), Busoni sketches his ideal image of music, and in his Six Sonatinas for piano he presented these ideas musically. In his unfinished opera Doctor Faust, all discrepancies come together as the main character himself is a curious mix of seemingly incompatible elements, just like Busoni.