Father and Son

Svetlana Belsky’s translation of Grigory Kogan’s classic study, Busoni as Pianist, has already been featured on this blog. However, to fill the two week gap as we ply our trade at the Frankfurt Book Fair (hall 8, stand C930 for anyone planning a visit), we thought you might enjoy the following excerpt from the book which describes Busoni père’s attempts to make a little Mozart out of his son. Anyone interested in musical and cultural history should read Belsky’s Preface to the book (see Google Book Search for example), which includes a chilling and evocative account of artistic life - and death - under Stalin.

In the north of Italy, in Tuscany, near Florence lies a little town called Empoli. There, on April 1, 1866, the future great pianist was born. He was the only son of the Italian clarinetist Ferdinando Busoni and the pianist Anna Weiss, who was Italian on her mother’s side and German on her father’s. The boy’s parents concertized and led a wandering life, which the child, too, was obliged to share.

Eleven months after birth he was taken away from his native town, and, travelling from place to place, in 1869, found himself in Paris where the family planned to settle. However, the Franco-Prussian War that began in 1870 forced Busoni’s parents to abandon this intention. The boy’s father set off on an extended concert tour of Italy, while Ferruccio and his mother settled in Trieste in the home of his grandfather, Giuseppe Weiss.

In Trieste—an Italian city, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire— Busoni’s musical education began. His abilities, as is usual among great musicians, manifested themselves early. By four years of age he already played the piano by ear. The first lessons of piano and musicianship were given by his mother, and soon the pupil could perform small four-hand pieces of Diabelli with his teacher.

Busoni’s mother was a good pianist, quite successful on the stage (eight days before her son’s birth she performed in Rome in the presence of Liszt); her son remembered in her playing a faultless technique, great facility, and a certain “salon” approach “in the spirit of Thalberg’s art.” In 1872, after an absence of two years, suddenly his father came back, and the boy’s life underwent great changes.

Busoni’s father was a colorful, original personality. Far from lacking in talent, but deficient in general education and professionalism, he continually nurtured grand plans, which usually greatly exceeded his rather modest real gifts. He did not wish to play in an orchestra, considering that beneath him, and, quite possibly, could not, for, according to his son, he could not manage rhythm or sight-reading any too well. But solo concerts, which had brought him “small fame,” could not entirely satisfy his ambition, either. In search of the road to success he tried many and various ventures: now attempting to write and publish poetry, then “making” his son’s career, and so on. Ardent and outspoken, unceremonious and despotic, always “temporarily” without a penny to his name, but nevertheless full of unwavering faith in the future, he often evoked ironic smiles in those around him and materially complicated the lives of his family members.

His father’s fantasies left their mark on Busoni’s life from the very start. By his wish, the newborn was given four names: Ferruccio-Dante-Michelangelo-Benvenuto—in the naive belief that the “patronage” of the three great Tuscan artists (Dante Alighieri, Michelangelo Buonarroti, and Benvenuto Cellini) would guarantee the child’s glorious future. Naturally, having reached the age of awareness, Busoni hurriedly discarded the “heavy responsibility” tactlessly laid upon him by his father, rejected the two middle names, and, eventually, also the fourth, leaving himself only the name Ferruccio.

Back with the family, his father immediately commenced furious activity. Having insisted on moving the family away from the home of his father-in-law to a separate apartment, he dismissed his wife from further instruction of the child, and, thoroughly unembarrassed by his incompetence in questions of pianism, undertook the boy’s education himself. These lessons are colorfully described in Busoni’s “autobiographical fragments”:

My father knew little about piano playing, and, in addition, did not have very good rhythm, but he compensated for these faults with absolutely indescribable energy, severity, and pedantry. He could sit by my side for four hours a day, controlling every note and every finger. There could be no indulgence, rest, or slightest inattention on his part. The only pauses were precipitated by explosions of his unusually irascible temperament, which were followed by reproaches, dark prophecies, threats, an occasional box on the ear, and ample tears. Finally, there was repentance, father’s consolation, and assurance that he wishes only the best—and the next day it all began again.

Having put it into his head at all costs to make another Mozart out of his son, Busoni’s father decided that the boy was most likely to reach this goal by following, step by step, the artistic path of the author of Don Giovanni. The latter, of course, studied music from the age of four and performed at six. Busoni’s lessons began at the “correct” time. It only remained to prepare him successfully for a public debut, which took place—alas, with a certain delay in “the plan”—in Trieste, on November 24, 1873: the seven-year-old Busoni took part in his parents’ concert, playing the first movement of Mozart’s C-Major Sonata, the F-Major Sonatina of Clementi, and two pieces from Schumann’s Album for the Young: “Armes Waisenkind” and “Soldatenmarsch.” The little pianist appeared under the dual name Weiss-Busoni—the father’s new idea, in the belief that the combination of two “big names” would create good publicity for the young prodigy.

Readers of this blog may buy this book at 35% discount during the month of October (shipping extra: US $5.95 UK £3.00 Europe £6.50). Simply visit the book’s page on our website and follow the order instructions, quoting reference number $10296 in the US and Canada and 10249 elsewhere. Do hurry, this offer can only run for the month of October 2010.

Svetlana Belsky's Busoni

The time came, as it inevitably must, in any DMA program, when the Director of Doctoral Studies looks sternly at the class and asks if all are ready to submit their dissertation proposals. The program in question was a performance doctorate; and we had just recently found out exactly how many degree recitals were required for graduation! So the answer all around was a pained “no”. I searched my brain for ideas, none came, but, undaunted (or not much), I appealed to the fount of all wisdom, pianistic and otherwise, my dear teacher, Nina Svetlanova.

The gleam in her eye was more frightening than the Director’s frown. It appeared that she had been waiting for the question – and had the answer. Shortly, I found myself with a well-thumbed tome in my hands, a masterpiece written by her own teacher that badly needed translating into English and I was just the person to do it (having command of Russian and English, a love for the piano and an inability to say no). The book was Busoni by Grigory Kogan (GK’s original one-word title, standing like a marble statue), putting it down once I started reading was impossible, and practicing suffered greatly for the space of those few days. (Little did I know how much future practicing time would suffer, along with teaching, housekeeping and motherhood, in the course of the writing itself!).

That first reading was somewhat of an interactive experience. I was frequently heard muttering to myself about the fabulousness of this idea or another, and occasionally bursting out with an “aha, so this is where that genius fingering from my last lesson came from!” The wheel of time turns inexorably, and, since the publication of the book in January, my own students, presented with some pearl of wisdom, have been known to exclaim – “this is right out of Chapter 11!”

Like most young pianists, I had only a passing acquaintance with the name Ferruccio Busoni. I knew him as a fabled pianist of the Golden Age, and the composer of impossibly difficult works. The name of Grigory Kogan, on the other hand, was very familiar to me. To any pianist, and, indeed, musician, brought up in the Russian-speaking world, he was a legend and a giant. The great Russian and Soviet pianistic tradition would not have existed without Kogan’s teaching, playing and writing. Other great pedagogues wrote works about the “hows” of piano playing, Kogan discussed the “whys”, those psychological aspects of listening, imagining, practicing and performance, without which any pianist, no matter how technically proficient, can never become an artist. Many of Kogan’s iconic works on piano playing unfortunately remain un-translated and unpublished, but I may quote them in my lessons with impunity!

Kogan’s Busoni as Pianist (the translation’s new and more precise title) s the first and only work of its kind – dedicated to painstaking study and discussion of Busoni’s place in the pianistic Pantheon. It is Kogan’s fascinating thesis that, unlike many great pianists whose careers shine bright but change nothing in the prevailing zeitgeist, Busoni’s contribution to the history of piano playing is as revolutionary and game-changing as that of Liszt, Chopin or Anton Rubinstein. Busoni’s esthetic was radically opposite that of the decadent style of Hofman and Leschetizky, in all aspects of technique, sound production, repertoire and even general approach, and served as a sort of counterweight. My very favorite chapter of the book contrasts the recordings of the Liszt-Verdi Rigoletto Paraphrase by Busoni himself and Anna Essipova, Leschetizky’s favorite student and wife; the revelation here is that Essipova’s playing is much more immediately attractive and pleasant, Busoni’s takes time and effort to understand and appreciate, and then becomes irresistible. The school of piano playing that emerged in the years after WWII, especially the Russian, is a wonderful amalgam of the two great movements of the decades before, and was indelibly influenced by Busoni’s art.

Outside of Busoni’s importance as a study of both theory and history of piano playing, the book is fascinating as a product of its time and place. Written (or, at least published) in 1964, during that brief period of relaxation of Soviet government’s iron censorship of every aspect of creative and literary life, the book was still required to include the prescribed amount of genuflection towards the powers that be and the usual socialist-realist cant which any Soviet reader would simply ignore. Because I cannot imagine that any reader not schooled in the art of instinctively skipping, on even the first reading, any paragraphs which include the word “bourgeois” and “Lenin”, will be able to discard those passages written clearly and exclusively for the censor, I felt it was imperative to provide an in-depth explanation of the “life and times” of the book. Lovers of history, or those not well acquainted with the history of the Soviet Union, might enjoy both the products of my own labors, and the little vignette of the time now passed unlamented.

Svetlana Belsky's translation of Grigory Kogan's classic study, Busoni as Pianist, is now available, published by the University of Rochester Press. An excerpt from this beautifully translated work will be published in a later post.

‘Camerado, I give you my hand!’

In 1957 the Australian-American pianist and composer Percy Grainger was 75 years old and in failing health when he received a letter from a young Scottish composer named Ronald Stevenson. Stevenson requested Grainger’s reminiscences of his former piano-teacher Ferruccio Busoni, to be included in a book Stevenson was writing on Busoni. Grainger’s reply, dated 2 August 1957, would lead to 32 letters exchanged between the two men over the four years leading up to Grainger’s death in February 1961. Stevenson was 29 years old at the time, living in West Linton just south of Edinburgh, with his wife Marjorie and their two small children and teaching in various Edinburgh schools and in the Extra-Mural Department of Edinburgh University. He recalled that Grainger ‘gave me companionship through correspondence at a time when I needed it because there wasn’t a great deal of stimulation, cultural stimulation, in my life’.

Stevenson had performed and admired Grainger’s folk-music settings as a young piano student and learned of Grainger’s involvement with Busoni when researching the composer in 1955 while in Rome on an Italian government scholarship. The two men soon found that despite their 46-year age-difference, they had affinities in many areas. Both were pianists of staggering abilities and composers who combined a love for folk-music and demotic, working-class art with an aesthetic that proposed a ‘world music’ which would include the farthest reaches of humanity. Both made an art of piano transcription of a wide variety of works and were champions of little-known music and composers. Both were authors, striving to share their knowledge of musics of many times and places in the printed word and in lecture recitals. And both revered the work of Walt Whitman, that great poet of inclusivity, the pioneering spirit and the open road [quoted in the title of this post].

As the correspondence of the two men grew, their mutual admiration deepened. So impressed was Grainger with Stevenson’s writing that in 1959 he requested that all of Stevenson’s articles be sent to the Grainger Museum: ‘You are a magnificent worder. Your complete articles (now or in a near future) ought to make an impressive collection’. Stevenson soon realised that he wanted to write at length on Grainger and in his last letter to him, dated 7 February 1961, wrote: ‘My work on your music is growing out of hand and can now only assume the form of a book’. It is a correspondence which sheds light on the thoughts of one man coming to the end of his creative life and the other just entering into his most fertile period of productivity. They were like messengers crossing in the night, passing a torch.

These are the opening paragraphs of Teresa Balough’s introduction to Comrades in Art: The Correspondence of Ronald Stevenson and Percy Grainger 1957-61, recently published by Toccata Press and distributed by Boydell & Brewer. As well as the correspondence between the two composers, the book includes Stevenson’s many articles and lectures on Grainger and his music along with a CD of a lecture-recital by Stevenson, presented in Grainger’s home in White Plains, NY, in 1976.

We continue with one of Grainger’s letters to Stevenson (here without footnotes):

Dear Ronald Stevenson,

I found your article on Busoni very stimulating. It brought clarity into my thoughts about Busoni. When I first met him, in 1903, when he offered to give me piano lessons without payment, it was the originality of my sketches for Scotch Strathspey & Reel that attracted him.

By 1907 he had soured on me, but when we played thru the 2-piano version of Hill-Song No. 2 his hostility melted & he said, quite wistfully: ‘Das ist ein hübsches stück – das ist ein hübsches stück!’

And of course I talked to him of the various innovations I had already tried-out (irregular rhythms, unresolved discords, large chamber-music, etc.) or intended to try-out in the future (close intervals, gliding tones, etc.). And while I am not denying that he may have got his ‘music of the future’ from all sorts of sources I do suggest that he got enough from me to account for his ideas of music to-come.

It was the same with Stravinsky & Schoenberg. Neither of these superb geniuses developed their iconoclastic innovations until my innovations, as incorporated in the Cyril Scott Piano Sonata Op. 66 (incorporated by C. Scott with full written permission by me) had been freely played & heard in Central Europe around 1908 – my ‘unresolved discords’ of 1898 leading to atonalism, my irregular rhythms of 1899 leading to irregular rhythms of ‘Sacre du P.’ And when the 1st German War cut off compositional contact between Britain & Central Europe, what happens: These 2 geniuses dropped their British-rooted innovations & went back to less progressive stimulations. (Neither Cyril Scott or I have ever dropped our innovations.) Almost everything that European man does had an English-speaking origin: 5 o’clock tea, train, tram, steamer, flirt, bus, strike, lock-out, club, sandwich, lunch, golf, sport, skyscraper, chewing-gum, maxim-gun, revolver, etc. So why should it be otherwise in music? Is it not a fact that most musical innovations are English-speaking (according to the musicologists): Foweles in the Frith, Worcester Medieval harmony, Dunstable, William Lawes, Jazz? So if an English-speaking composer happens to invent, or revise (for of course Claude Le Jeune also had his irregular rhythms), or transform some aspects of music, why should it seem so unthinkable that it cannot be mentioned?

I do not expect my ‘serious’ music to be liked or respected. But I do think I am a natural innovationist & I would like to see some day an acknowledgment of the changes that have come over music thru me. I think it is only fair to Australia.

I think I did send you some remarks & statements by me about my music, did I not? Do you have Hill-Songs I & II (arranged for 2 pianos)? If not, would you like to have them? Hill-Song II (for 21 single winds) has just been recorded by a superb wind ensemble. When the disc appears, would you like a copy of it? Do you have Frederick Fennell’s flawless recording of my Lincolnshire Posy for band? If not, would you like me to send it?

I am getting stronger, I think. All the same, just writing a letter ‘shivers my timbers’.

Yours heartily
Percy Grainger