Ferruccio Busoni marks his Toccata from 1920 with an ominous preface: "Non è senza difficoltá che si arriva al fine." (Not without difficulty does one reach the end.) While this certainly applies to the performer—the Toccata is one of the most substantial and challenging works, in any genre, of his last years—it seems to have described its own genesis as well. Biographer Antony Beaumont describes the work as "a mirror of the unsettling emotions underlying his return to Berlin." He had arduously struggled with the work earlier while living in Switzerland; shortly after arriving in Germany, he wrote to his assistant Philipp Jarnach that the Toccata was finally completed, "arising as it did from anguish and unstable emotions." As do many of Busoni's works, the Toccata assumes and adapts a traditional form, filling it in with a musical language that draws freely from Busoni's past and his present, and eschews, in the name of expressivity, any dogmatic commitment to either strict tonality or calculated harmonic opacity. The piece is cast in three movements: Preludio, Fantasia, and Ciaccona (omitting the fugal section one might expect). Reflecting not only the composer's emotional state but his introspective attitude as a composer as well, the work shares musical materials with other pieces in Busoni's oeuvre. The first movement, Preludio, takes as its seed material a melody from "The Ballad of Lippold the Jew-Coiner," a number from Busoni's comic opera from 1912, Die Brautwahl. At the same time, Beaumont associates the mysteriously sinister character of the opening ostinato with the music that introduces Mephistopheles in Busoni's later opera Doktor Faust (left unfinished at the composer's death in 1924). Throughout the Preludio, bold, leaping melodies exchange registral positions with continuous, turbulent undercurrents. This texture figures prominently in the second movement as well, a complex Fantasia built of thematically interrelated episodes. The final movement is a thoroughly conflicted Ciaccona in which the main theme, a rising chromatic line in sturdy octaves, withstands repeated and increasingly florid attempts at subversion through imitation. This conflicted character, associated so closely with Busoni's mental state, remains vivid even after the ensuing and fractious musical landscape of the twentieth century. As pianist Alfred Brendel wrote of the Toccata some 50 years after Busoni's death, "The erosion of time has not smoothed out the uncongenial contours. No patina of familiarity softens its sharpness."

© All Music Guide

Portions of Content Provided by All Music Guide.
© 2008 All Media Guide, LLC. All Music Guide is a registered trademark of All Media Guide, LLC.