"Would it, in your opinion, be promising to re-shape the Variations on Bach's chorale-song into a concert piece for 2 pianos?" Busoni writes to his "disciple," Egon Petri, from Zürich, December 2, 1915, noting, "Some things would have to be added and all the passages related to the two previous movements would have to be removed." The reference is to the final movement of his Second Violin Sonata, completed in 1900, which follows the highly unusual procedure of introducing Bach's chorale, Wie wohl ist mir, o Freund der Seele, and following with a series of variations upon it through which his assimilation of Bach, Liszt and late Beethoven issues in the ripest late Romantic utterance. His chronicler, Antony Beaumont, remarks, "That Busoni could transcend these influences to produce a fully cohesive composition is a first indication of his having matured as an artist." It is the beginning of a transformation which would unfold most intensively in his next dozen years and which occupied him until the end of his life. Despite the enormous productivity of his youth, he could write, "my existence as a composer really begins with the [second] Violin Sonata." Busoni's letters and obiter dicta refer often to a "new beginning" and similar statements were made regarding later works through which his unique manner deepens. "My entire personal vision I put down at last for the first time in the Elegies…" for piano (1907). Of the orchestral Berceuse élégiaque (1909)—"I succeeded for the first time in hitting upon my own sound idiom and in dissolving the form into the feeling." By the time he turned his attention again to the Violin Sonata he had already composed a number of works marking his last manner—e.g., the Sonatina seconda (1912), the orchestral Nocturne symphonique (1913) and Gesang vom Reigen der Geister (1915). During a stay with Marchese Silvio delle Valle de Casanova at his villa on Lago Maggiore in May 1916, Busoni copied a number of Liszt manuscripts owned by the marchese, sat for the famous portrait by the Futurist painter Umberto Boccioni, and recomposed the Second Violin Sonata's final movement as the Improvisation on "Wie wohl ist mir…" for two pianos. The upshot of this expansive, effusive work reconceived from the vantage of the compact, laconic, visionary Modernism of his last decade is curious, unsettling, and interesting rather than persuasive. As van Dieren remarked, "He would have a first edition of Chateaubriand bound with aggressively modern end-papers."

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