Busoni was devoted to his parents and became their primary support from the moment when public interest in him as a child prodigy provided sporadic income until their deaths in 1909, which called forth some of his most deeply felt music—the orchestral Berceuse élégiaque (in which he "succeeded for the first time in hitting upon my own sound idiom and in dissolving the form into the feeling") for his mother and the Lisztian Fantasia nach J.S. Bach for his father. But it was equally vital for him to break the parental stranglehold and strike out on his own—he was 20 when he moved to Leipzig at the end of 1886. From there he undertook concert engagements while studying composition, on Brahms' advice, with Carl Reinecke. Brahms often declared that the only young composers who interested him were Dvorák and Busoni. But Reinecke was more difficult to please. In conversation with Bernard van Dieren before World War I, Busoni recalled, "...I had submitted some work to Reinecke. He diffidently stated that what he wanted of music was 'that it should give him pleasure'. But none was to be had from mine. He had the face of a good-hearted baboon, but not the mind: Herr Boosesoahneeh, tcha, you must think of your hearers, tcha." In later life Leipzig came to represent for Busoni the hidebound German music establishment—"Oh! These Germans, with their 'Our Bach', 'Our Beethoven'! blessing and cursing in the name of Our-Great-Men with High Priestly solemnity. At the same time speaking of them with offensive familiarity and quasi-parental pride. As if they had a share in the merits. But there are Reineckes everywhere...." It was not until Busoni became, through Hugo Riemann's good offices, professor of piano at the Helsinki Conservatory in 1888 that the positive aspects of Leipzig became apparent—"In the musical centers [where the finest things of our time have already been achieved] one has the rewarding task of striving still higher, bringing one's own empathy, creativity and intellect into play. Here one has to content oneself with reproducing or imitating a fragment of that which has been achieved elsewhere." Though there is little Sturm und Drang anywhere in Busoni's music, through 10 variations for cello and piano on the Finnish folk song Kultaselle, composed in May 1889, he strides as a wanderer against a stormy background suffused with the melancholy Reinecke deplored but lifted with the Mendelssohnian deftness and melting lyricism Brahms admired.

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