Sonatina seconda (BV 259) Ferruccio Busoni (1866 – 1924)
The pre-eminence Busoni enjoyed as a pianist had until recent times almost completely overshadowed his original creative efforts. Indeed it was ruefully observed by Busoni himself to the composer Bernard van Dieren that ‘publishers used to accept my works because of my fame as a pianist, but that fame stands in my way with the public’. (Van Dieren; Down Among the Dead Men, p.99 Oxford, 1935, nla). Furthermore, as Scottish composer Alistair Hinton has told me in recollecting a conversation with Kaikhosru Sorabji, Busoni was dogged by the resentment that it was possible to be outstandingly gifted in many musical disciplines at the same time.
Even though such issues have at times obscured the appreciation of his music it is clear that Busoni stood in the gap between the traditions of Late-Romanticism and Modernism.
Sonatina seconda, composed in 1912, comes from the most overtly experimental period of Busoni’s creative life and coincidental obsession with the Occult. Indeed, he was later to confirm that the Sonatina was conceived as a preparatory study for his masterpiece, Doktor Faust and it would not be unreasonable to assert that the shorter piano work is a distillation of the opera’s essence. The designation Sonatina is undoubtedly ironic given the scope and novelty of Busoni’s radical musical language.
An ascending parlando theme implores our attention drawing us into a turbulent hallucinatory intensity where bravura and atonality vehemently drive the disquieting discourse. Thematic fragments flash across the piano, unrestrained and urgent and as Busoni authority Anthony Beaumont has written ‘violent, chaotic, and unstable’ (Busoni the Composer, p.183 Faber, 1985). Mysterious, searching chords tolling from the depths of the piano usher in the Lento Occulto, as a more overtly contrapuntal but no less disturbing sound world is evoked. It is in this section we glimpse Busoni’s most purely experimental textures. It was pointed out to me by Beaumont that the composer was very much interested in the developments then occurring in contemporary scientific endeavours inspired by Faraday’s earlier observations of natural phenomena, most notably the effects of magnetism and sound waves in various media. Together with Busoni’s awareness of the Occult the existence of a world beyond our physical perceptions lent his music a truly ethereal and transcendent quality setting it apart from both the formally rigorous atonality of the Schoenberg School and the earthly exoticism of the French impressionists. There is also surprisingly little common ground with the music of Scriabin whose occultism was couched in more obviously Hyper-romantic and harmonically consistent terms. The Lento section is characterized by an unprecedented but inherently logical flow of motifs leading to a bold restatement of the opening parlando theme marked quasi Violoncello. This moment forms the only authentic sense of recapitulation of familiar material from earlier giving at least partial relief from the relentless flow of ideas. The irony of a calmissimo transition is felt as we are engulfed in deeply sinister marziale music ascribed in the opera to the mysterious trio of Students from Krakow who announce Faust’s ultimate doom. The work descends into the darkest sonorities of the instrument to a final estinto in sarabande rhythm. Some horrible finality is attained where silence is just the beginning of the inexpressible. As Busoni’s contemporary the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein was to write; ‘Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent’, (Wittgenstein; Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus 7, 1918).
It was perhaps this combination of forces in the music that led to the uproar attending Busoni’s first performance of Sonatina seconda at Milan’s Verdi Conservatory on May 12th 1913. Della Couling tells us in her book ‘Busoni - ‘A Musical Ishmael’ (Scarecrow Press, 2005)’ that blows ensued as Marinetti, founder of the literary wing of the ‘futurist’ movement took on protesters prior to a presumably convivial dinner attended by among others the legendary Arturo Toscanini. Thus we see illustrated the central dichotomy of Busoni’s art; the incomparable piano genius, lauded worldwide for his illuminatory performances of the classics forced into uneasy symbiosis with the visionary composer reaching prophetically out for unimaginable potentialities. The very FaustianSonatina seconda has lost none of its uniqueness nearly a century later.
Frederick Scott
(I would like to acknowledge my grateful thanks for the many valuable insights shared with me by the following in my researches into Busoni;
Anthony Beaumont, Justin Connolly, Dr.Paul Fleet, Alistair Hinton, Geoffrey Douglas Madge, Murray McLachlan, Ronald Stevenson)
