Busoni's father, Ferdinando, was an itinerant clarinetist who, by sheer swashbuckling personality, commanded a small following in several Italian cities, using "his instrument in special ways as a soloist," his son recalled, "sometimes emanating from the violin, sometimes from Italian song. His whole life long he scorned a post in an orchestra, half from pride and half because he was a natural artist, who worked things out more by instinct than by knowledge, and to whom reading from music and the division of bars presented some difficulties. My mother, on the other hand, was correctly trained and her playing belonged to the line of pianists coming from the Thalberg school...." From instinct or caprice, Ferdinando hit upon the one thing needful for his son. Looking back at the end of his life, Busoni noted, "I have to thank my father for the good fortune that he kept me to the study of Bach in my childhood, and that in a time and in a country in which the master was rated little higher than a Carl Czerny. My father was a simple virtuoso on the clarinet, who liked to play fantasias on Il trovatore and The Carnival of Venice; he was a man of incomplete musical education, an Italian and a cultivator of bel canto." Among the nearly 250 works Busoni composed before the turn of the century, the earnest fugues, lieder, etudes, masses, and orchestral works are jostled by a number of light works for clarinet almost certainly inspired by his father. Approaching the end of his creative trajectory in Zürich, as the Great War ground to a halt, the fashioning of a Faustian "language of terror," expressing the prehension of a threatening occult demesne, awoke in Busoni the need for an antithesis, a cleansing, a "young classicality" of poised objectivity and serenity. "Neither Beethoven's wry smile nor Zarathustra's 'liberating laugh' but the smile of wisdom, of divinity and absolute music." The model was Mozart—not a slavish imitation but a pithily compact, rapid, allusive idiom from which repetition was all but banished. Preeminent among Busoni's works in this vein are Concertino for clarinet and small orchestra, composed over March/April 1918, and the Divertimento for flute and orchestra which followed in May 1920. The Concertino's four concise movements play without a break, mercurially mingling the merest hint of melancholy with volubly percolating bel canto brilliance over which the spirits of Mozart and Ferdinando Busoni seem to hover and dance.

© Adrian Corleonis, All Music Guide