The name of Ferruccio Busoni is familiar to most pianists and music lovers, but in my experience few seem to know much about him besides the popular Bach transcriptions. This is precisely how it was for me when I was a piano student studying at the middle school affiliated to the Central Conservatory in Beijing at the beginning of the century. I still recall the awe-inspiring experience of listening to the Bach-Busoni Chaconne for the first time, but this was perhaps the sole element of Busoni’s genius that was widely known.

Some seeds were planted when I read Heinrich Neuhaus’s writings, which were translated from Russian to Chinese. He credited Busoni as a major influence in his musical and pianistic development. His approach to piano technique, which addressed distinctive technical topics systematically (legato, staccato, scales, arpeggios, thirds, sixths, octaves, etc), was clearly modelled after Busoni’s concepts in the commentaries to his editions of The Well-Tempered Clavier and Clavierübung. Since these primary sources were inaccessible to me at the time, my association with Busoni would resume only when I moved to the United States a few years later to study at the Juilliard School.

At Juilliard, I started to hear the Chaconne much more frequently from the practice rooms; I also got to know more about Busoni from the enlightening discussions with professors such as Matti Raekallio, who possesses a profound understanding of Busoni’s philosophies and pianism. These discussions sparked my interest in knowing as much as I could about Busoni’s life, reading his writings and letters, studying his editions and listening to the recordings by him and his pupils. Just as Liszt became Busoni’s ‘master and friend’ when he rediscovered the older pianist-composer’s work around 1893 and set about revamping his own pianistic approach, Busoni became my model as a musician and pianist, with his unique combination of being an intellectual and a virtuoso, his identity as a cosmopolitan with deep cultural roots, and his boundless curiosity and visionary thinking.

As a doctoral student at Juilliard, I organised and performed a recital in tribute to Busoni’s birth sesquicentennial in 2016. In addition to showcasing Busoni’s compositional prowess, I chose pieces to manifest his multifaceted genius as an editor, a theorist and a musical thinker. Shortly after this recital, I started to teach at Smith College in Massachusetts. As my role shifted from student to teacher, Busoni’s pedagogical approaches and experience teaching at the conservatories in Helsinki, Moscow and Boston resonated with my own development as a teacher. With the centenary of Busoni’s death in 2024, it seemed only natural to me that I would expand the Juilliard recital ideas to a two-day festival and symposium at Smith College, with two concerts in addition to lectures and panel discussions, and my debut solo album in tribute to his life and legacy, ‘Ferruccio Busoni and his Muses’.

‘Bach is the foundation of piano playing, Liszt the summit,’ Busoni wrote, and this album aims to explore the roots of his musical identity and illustrate how he was inspired by the great masters. Bach’s Chromatic Fantasia and Fugue is well known for its incredible breadth and harmonic language. As a pianist and harpsichordist, I have been puzzled by the execution of the arpeggiation section for years. I was fascinated by the rendition by Edwin Fischer, only to realise later that he was borrowing from Busoni! Busoni’s interpretation, with chords (‘quasi Organo’) followed by soft arpeggios (‘quasi Arpa’), creates a mesmerising effect. The significance of this piece was additionally manifested when Busoni used it as an example to illustrate his new notational system, in which the staff lines become the black keys of the keyboard (with notes written in black noteheads), whereas the notes between the lines (written with white noteheads) become white-key notes.

Following the Bach-Busoni Chromatic Fantasia and Fugue is Busoni’s Toccata: Preludio-Fantasia-Ciaconna, written in 1920. In a piece ‘very severe and not too pleasant’ (Busoni’s description to its dedicatee Isidor Philipp), the Baroque ideas are transformed with audacious concepts and elusive effects that have mesmerised pianists including Alfred Brendel.

Busoni’s parents, both musicians, naturally played significant roles in his life. Originally written for piano solo, the gentle, lilting Berceuse became a premonition of his mother’s death, which followed shortly after, and he subsequently orchestrated it as Berceuse élégiaque. Fantasia nach Bach, written in memory of his father, is a much more tumultuous piece. It is a collage of multiple excerpts from Bach’s organ works that are transcribed and morphed into a dramatic contemplation of life and the world.

Busoni was fascinated by folk traditions, from Finnish folk songs to the use of ‘Greensleeves’ in his Elegy Turandots Frauengemach. Inspired by the research of his pupil Natalie Curtis Burlin, Busoni was drawn to Native American music and explored the possibilities of incorporating its tunes and stylistic characteristics using Western classical instruments. In contrast to the large-scale piano concertante piece Indian Fantasy, the four miniature studies of the Indian Diary appropriately convey the atmosphere of the open land and the sense of exoticism.

The art of fantasies on operatic melodies, popular during much of the 19th century, fell into oblivion in the first decades of the 20th century. More than any other of Liszt’s pupils, Busoni resurrected many of Liszt’s operatic fantasies on the concert stage. In addition to the extravagant pianistic devices that Liszt employed in these works, Busoni valued their artistic quality, with ‘the ennoblement, the elevation and aggrandisement of the musical content’. Once a warhorse for the concertising Liszt, the Fantasy on Themes from Mozart’s Figaro and Don Giovanni was not published during the composer’s lifetime. Following the leads likely provided by Liszt’s pupil Moriz Rosenthal, Busoni found the autograph manuscript in Liszt’s estate and performed it in the legendary six-concert Liszt cycle in Berlin in 1911, nearly 70 years after Liszt composed the piece. Likely owing to the fact that no other Liszt fantasies combine themes from two different operas, Busoni decided to eliminate the dance scene from Don Giovanni and focused on the two themes from The Marriage of Figaro. He furnished Liszt’s spare notation with an ample quantity of dynamics and performance markings. He also made suggestions to simplify the texture, as he would have done a few years later in the Great Critical Instructive Edition of Liszt’s Don Juan Fantasy. As he mentioned in the preface to the edition, the technical difficulties ‘must be surmounted with grace’, and the final aim of the interpretation is for the performer to ‘keep the transparency and economy of Mozart’s Don Juan continually before his eyes’. As Busoni entered the final stage of his creative life, he reached his pianistic ideal by ‘keeping an eye on the task mentally’ instead of ‘attacking the difficulty repeatedly’, creating a synthesis between the worlds of Mozart’s eternal elegance and Liszt’s demonic virtuosity.

In the same preface, Busoni illustrated Liszt’s formal principles in constructing operatic fantasies and created a compositional plan using Bizet’s Carmen. A couple of years later, Busoni materialised this plan in his Sonatina No 6, Chamber-Fantasy on Bizet’s Carmen. In addition to the brilliant variations on the Habanera and the flamboyant bullring music, the exquisite ‘Flower Song’ and the heart-wrenching Carmen theme at the end are moments to die for. Busoni ingeniously condensed a three-hour opera into an eight-minute, emotionally charged showpiece. For those who want to delve into the world of Busoni, the Carmen Fantasy is perhaps the best entry point. Through the familiar melodies, Busoni’s dramatic understanding, inventive harmonic language and fanciful piano-writing come into focus. For kindred spirits, he welcomes us to appreciate him as our ‘master and friend’. IP

Jiayan Sun’s album ‘Ferruccio Busoni and his Muses’ is available on Bridge and can be heard below via Apple Music.

This feature originally appeared in the SPRING 2025 issue of International Piano