Busoni's position as one of the most imaginative theoretical thinkers about music, as well as being a skilled and inspired composer, was long overlooked after his death in 1924. When he was thought of at all, it was as the second half of the hyphenated name "Bach-Busoni, " which is the way his many transcriptions of music by Johann Sebastian Bach were credited. And then the art of the transcription fell out of favor as the movement for more authentic performances of Baroque and earlier music grew stronger. But with the resurgence of interest in music of the late Romantic era, attention returned to music of composers who, like Busoni, were not on the main line of music evolution from Wagnerism to Schoenbergian twelve-tone practice. The general population of music lovers has begun to appreciate what musical scholars and some pianists have known for decades: that this is one of the great displays of contrapuntal and compositional mastery of this century.

Busoni's deep love of the music of Bach is evident in his seven volumes of transcriptions of Bach's music and other original pieces. In this case, Busoni derived his musical material from Bach's great masterwork "The Art of the Fugue." While he used contrapuntal techniques which Bach would have recognized and no doubt approved of, he also used such twentieth century musical elements as exotic "artificial" scales, seven-tone chords, vague tonality, and free dissonances. This it represents a marriage of twentieth and eighteenth century techniques. It is also one of the first major neo-Classical works.

The prelude is based on a Bach chorale. The subjects of the ensuing three-voice fugue are derived from the unfinished final fugue of Bach's great work. The succeeding five sections (Intemezzo, three Variations, and Cadenza) are based on the material of the previous fugues. The last section is a magnificent and broad final fugue, based on the motive "B flat, A, C, B, " which is Bach's musical monogram, spelling his surname in German notation. Busoni wrote four versions of this work. K 255 (the K stands for Jurgen Kindermann, who prepared the major thematic catalog of Busoni's work) was titled "Grosse Fugue, Kontrapunktische Fantasie uber die Kunst der Fuge von J.S. Bach" and can be considered a first version of the work. As was often Busoni's practice, he revised it. K 256 gave the music its final name and definitive form. The 1912 version (K 256 a) was called by Busoni a "minor editing." The 1922 version, K 256b, however, is a transcription for two pianos. Busoni's purpose in making it was not to make the sound more massive, but to allow for more clarity of the contrapuntal lines. The work requires close attention to its contrapuntal details, but repays this attention with a feeling of admiration for the mastery and logic it exhibits. The music carries a fascinating sense of alternation between the outlook of Bach and his time and that of Busoni and the early twentieth century.

© Joseph Stevenson, Rovi