Busoni died at 58 from chronic nephritis complicated by chronic inflammation of the muscles of the heart, but in a letter to novelist Jakob Wassermann two months before his passing, he pronounced his consummatum est—"I have not consulted a doctor for the last 30 years. My abilities have steadily increased...only bad art could throw me off balance, only a sterile period was capable of upsetting and depressing me...Even during the war my state of mind remained unchanged. But at the end of the war I became aware of the devastation, and I was no longer strong enough to face up to this new situation, nor young enough to endure it. It suddenly became apparent, without any transitional phase, and was like a black line through my life, for which I was not personally responsible, as I had usually been in the past. That is more or less the history of my illness...." Composed in Zürich in the spring of 1918, as the war was grinding to its close with Busoni refusing to perform in any of the belligerent nations, the Lied des Unmuts marks the moment of recognition. Surveying the ruins, it was natural that he should turn to Goethe, not only as a great poet but as a revered sage. The Lied des Unmuts follows settings of the Lied des Brander (left unfinished) and the Lied des Mephistopheles (which reappears in Doktor Faust). Drawn from the Westöstlicher Divan, published exactly a century before, which places love songs side-by-side with prophetic and gnomic utterances—already raided by Hugo Wolf and Othmar Schoeck (who set the same poem in 1915)—Busoni projects the verse's sarcasm in declamatory fashion with the simplest of means. "There's no rhymester but thinks he's best, no fiddler who doesn't prefer his own tunes" Goethe says, "And I can't blame them...does one live when others live?" Meanwhile, the dilettantish public "cannot distinguish mouse-droppings from coriander. And when nations break away in mutual contempt, neither side will admit that they share a common goal." Writing on the centenary of Goethe's death in 1932, Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset, in one of the most provocative and revealing views of Goethe ever penned, noted, "In the hour of danger, life throws off all inessentials, all excrescences, all its adipose tissue, and tries to strip itself, to reduce itself to pure nerve, pure muscle." In the Lied des Unmuts, Busoni achieves this with uncomfortable directness.

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