Federico Celestini: Ferruccio Busonis „Sezession“. Zum Klavierkonzert mit Männerchor op. 39

Ferruccio Busoni’s Piano Concerto with Male Chorus op. 39 (1904) does not conform to the traditional outlines of the genre. When the work was premiered in Berlin, the composer explicitly distanced himself in the program notes from both the virtuosic and symphonic traditions of the genre. In 1916 Hugo Leichtentritt referred to the unusual style of piano writing as “ornamental” in nature. Further references to this aesthetic category, of particular significance at the turn of the nineteenth to the twentieth century, are provided by the evocation of the orient in Adam Oehlenschläger’s drama Aladdin and the Magic Lamp, several lines of which Busoni set in the concerto’s last movement, as well as by various plant metaphors Busoni used to describe the motivic process in his Sketch of a New Esthetic of Music (1907). Busoni’s lifelong compositional preoccupation with the mysteries of music in nature, such as that heard in Aladdin’s magic cave, is reminiscent of the ambitions of the composer Fritz, the main character in Franz Schreker’s first opera, Der ferne Klang (1912). A comparison of the two composers’ handling of this “distant sound” highlights Busoni’s idiosyncratic realization of the concept as depicted in his piano conarto.

> zurück zur homepage

> zurück zum Gesamtinhaltsverzeichnis