Busoni's fascination lies in his capacity for transformation. "Only those who change are kin to me," Nietzsche wrote, while another of his aphorisms proclaims "What does your conscience say?—'You shall become who you are.'" As novelist Jakob Wassermann recalled, "When I first met Busoni he was 38; an astonishingly good-looking man, very well-groomed, very spoilt, universally acclaimed, surrounded by an aura of adoring pupils, admirers and hangers-on, yet still unmistakably a virtuoso (even a typical virtuoso) with all the characteristics of hard-won skill; extremely energetic, nervous, intense, intellectually enthusiastic, but everything in embryo form still prior to the moment of self-awareness and the development of a specific personality." Beginning with the piano Elegies in 1907—the first of which is titled Nach der Wendung—Recueillement (after the turning—self-collection)—Busoni's compositions bear witness to what Wassermann described as "the most extraordinary inner growth...nothing short of a total transformation from which there emerged a valid and representative type personality; a composite character; the final product of an era, and the first to represent a new one." The Berceuse, appended to the Elegies in 1909, and its orchestral expansion as the Berceuse élégiaque, opens a novel sound world while entering upon an eerie spiritual prehension ramifying corrosively in the Sonatina seconda (1912) and the Nocturne symphonique (1913)—Busoni's most radical works. In this trajectory, the Indian Fantasy looms as a sport in which the composer—in reaction to the occult nature of the path opening before him—casts off the mantle of the alchemist in sound and most subtle of the makers of modernism to embrace the model of Liszt's Hungarian Fantasy for piano and orchestra, that is, a mélange of Nativist exotica and scene painting whipped up in broad strokes with virtuosic flair. On tour in New York in 1910 he ran across Natalie Curtis, a wealthy and talented former pupil, who presented him with a copy of her just published Indians' Book, a groundbreaking collection of "Redskin" melodies that fired Busoni's ambition to employ them. In three extensive continuous movements, the Indian Fantasy was composed between April 1913 and February 1914. Inescapably, the pentatonic character of the melodies produces Indianist cliché chiming risibly—but at moments with startling visionary eloquence—with oddments of Busoni's Modernist style. Busoni took the piano for its premiere with the Berlin Philharmonic on March 12, 1914. Only in the orchestral Gesang vom Reigen der Geister (1915) would Busoni's modernism meld persuasively with "Redskin" materials.

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