Ferruccio Busoni

Born in Empoli to two working musicians and performing in public as a child, Ferruccio Busoni trained in Vienna, Graz and Leipzig and made Berlin his base, where he mounted a concert series for new music. His own writing moved out of late Romanticism towards a personal, loosened tonality: the Piano Concerto that ends with a male chorus, the Fantasia contrappuntistica, the one-act Arlecchino and the two-act Turandot, and Doktor Faust, unfinished at his death and staged in Dresden the year after it. His work also included transcriptions and editions of Bach. In the Sketch of a New Esthetic of Music he set out the case that notation and the inherited scale are conveniences rather than limits, and pointed towards microtones and electrically generated sound. Born in 1866, the only child of a pianist and a clarinettist, he grew up largely in Trieste, played in public at seven, and in Vienna heard Liszt and met Brahms and Anton Rubinstein. He taught from 1888 in Helsinki, where he met Gerda Sjöstrand, spent the years from 1891 to 1894 working in the United States, and later gave masterclasses in Weimar, Vienna and Basel to pupils including Claudio Arrau and Egon Petri. He became director of the conservatory in Bologna in 1913 and moved to Zurich in 1915, and kidney disease killed him in Berlin in 1924, at fifty-eight.