Busoni came to a recognition of Liszt's stature only in the early 1890s—his mid-twenties. Looking back in 1910, he noted, "It was at that time of my life when I had become conscious of such deficiencies and faults in my own playing that with energetic determination I began the study of the pianoforte again from the beginning on quite a new basis. Liszt's works were my guide and through them I acquired an intimate knowledge of his particular method. Out of his 'tenets' I constructed my 'technique.' Gratitude and admiration at that time made Liszt my master and my friend." But his preoccupation with Liszt struck far more deeply—Busoni wished Leonhard, the benign magician of Die Brautwahl, to look like Liszt at 50. Nietzsche occasionally pokes sardonic fun at Liszt, but during the brief period when he was part of Wagner's intimate circle he observed Liszt at close range and acknowledged that Liszt's example had deeply colored his concept of the Dionysian personality. At a distance, a similar fascination led Busoni to become an indefatigable collector of Liszt's music, including many works that have yet to achieve a popular following, such as the oratorio Christus, and the spate of late, brief, haunted piano works that open doors on an eerie, threatening country of the soul. "May one write or listen to such a thing?" Liszt himself jotted on the manuscript of his Czárdás macabre, as he made good on his intention to "hurl my lance into the boundless realms of the future." Busoni may be said to have caught that lance, to have gone through the doors Liszt's late pieces opened, for his own works "after the turning point"—marked by the first of the piano Elegies (1907)—explore a strange, spiritual, occult prehension that deepened until the end of his life. The Elegies present this demesne meditatively, or with crackling vivacity (as in the eerie "Nächtlichen waltz"), or ecstatically (as in "Erscheinung"), and only with "Meine Seele bangt und hofft zu Dir" is there a note of anxiety. But with the Berceuse, which followed in June 1909 and was included as the seventh and last of the Elegies, comes a hypnotic transport hovering between fascination and angst, deceptively simple in means—open octaves pulsing slowly up and down the keyboard, outlining unsettling harmonic shifts with caressing suaveness—and spellbinding in detail. Pithy yet too brief, the Berceuse proved a sketch for the expanded orchestral Berceuse élégiaque.

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