The Faustian World of Ferruccio Busoni.

Ferruccio Busoni had it all. The dashingly handsome Italian was one of the great pianists of his age; he enjoyed international renown as a conductor, teacher and editor; his visionary essays on music were published widely and debated fiercely; as a composer, he established a voice as individual as it was provocative. He was a man of enormous learning, fluent in several languages, a cosmopolitan at home in the capitals of Europe, a bon vivant of refined tastes, an intellectual of rational disposition with a fascination for the occult. But he wanted more -- not unlike Johannes Faust.

Even before his death, around 1540, the German astronomer and necromancer Dr. Johannes Faust was rumored to have sold his soul to the devil in exchange for knowledge and magical powers. Rumor begets legend, and from Christopher Marlowe to Thomas Mann, playwrights and novelists have used the Faust myth to explore themes of pride and human ambition, of temptation by and compromise with the forces of darkness, of the limits of good and evil. In his monumental two-part drama Faust (1808; 1832), Johann Wolfgang von Goethe recast the Faust legend as a battle between Mephistophelian nihilism and the search for enduring meaning and goodness. This broader interpretation of the legend served as a foundation for Busoni's approach to the subject in his last, unfinished opera, Doktor Faust, a masterpiece at once autobiographical in import and universal in significance.

Busoni's obsession with the Faust legend sprang from the web of contradictions that made up his personality. His Italian father was a flamboyant touring clarinet virtuoso; his mother, a pianist and composer of a more introspective nature, was of German stock. Genetics alone might suffice to account for the mixture of Latin serenita and Teutonic earnestness in Busoni's musical and psychological temperament, but the circumstances of his nurture served to reinforce the predispositions of his nature.

Busoni was born on April 1 (Easter Sunday), 1866, in Empoli, near Florence. He spent his youth and early adolescence largely in Trieste, then part of the Austro-Hungarian empire but an open port of multicultural intersections. His path as a touring prodigy drew him inexorably northward, and studies in Graz and Leipzig reinforced his penchant for speculative depths. Busoni straddled the north/south divide in a way unthinkable among such near contemporaries as Puccini, Mahler, Debussy, Strauss and Sibelius, for whom music was a national, or at least regional, idiom. In this regard, Busoni was far closer to the urbane eclecticism of his distinguished predecessor Franz Liszt.

Busoni's admiration for Liszt points up another central polarity of his being. In the popular imagination, the virtuoso is a creature of expansive Romanticism, but in Liszt, Busoni recognized that point at which virtuosity becomes a play with form, a mastery over material that transforms demonic brilliance into sublime poise. It is this "classical" Liszt whom Busoni admired: the cultured man-of-the-world drawn to literature and learning, the Liszt of Weimar and Rome, heir to Goethe and Schiller, and the composer of program symphonies on Dante and Faust. In Liszt, the Classical-Romantic polarity is in fact confounded, as it was in Busoni himself, whose own intellectualized keyboard virtuosity served the ends of textural and structural clarity.

In many ways, Busoni assumed a role in the musical life of his time very much like that of Liszt in his day, and as with Liszt, his influence extended far beyond the concert podium. Busoni was a catalyst for musical rejuvenation. His repertory was broad (historical recital programs regularly included music from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries), and he is particularly remembered for his advocacy of the works of J. S. Bach, whose music he edited (heavily) and transcribed (freely). He was a gifted pedagogue; from Helsinki (where he met his wife-to-be, Gerda Sjostand) to Moscow, Weimar to Vienna, Boston to Basel and Bologna, he held teaching and administrative posts, conducted master classes and collected a devoted circle of keyboard students that included Egon Petri, Louis Closson, Leo Kestenberg, Michael yon Zadora, Theodor Szanto and Louis Gruenberg.

In 1894, Busoni settled in Berlin. With the exception of four years in Switzerland (1915-20) during World War I, it would remain his home for the rest of his life. From 1902 to 1909, he organized a series of orchestral concerts there with the Berlin Philharmonic in which he presented new works by Strauss, d'Indy, Debussy, Reger, Sibelius, Elgar, Delius and Bartok, among many others. His own musical interests ranged from plainchant to pan-tonality; he was among the first to embrace Arnold Schoenberg's music and even prepared a concert transcription of the second of that composer's Op. 11 piano pieces. Busoni was a dedicated letter-writer, and his correspondents included an international array of figures in the arts and letters.