Ferruccio Busoni published six Elegies in 1907, shortly after publication of his groundbreaking book, Toward a New Aesthetic of Music, an avant-garde manifesto in which he outlined the directions he believed music should take in the twentieth century, including expanded tonalities, atonality, and electronic music. Far from exemplifying such futuristic ideas, the Elegies actually occupy a middle ground between the late-Romantic tendencies of Busoni's first decades as a composer and the modernistic sound-world of his mature compositions. Although each piece can stand on its own, the Elegies make a satisfying cycle, with a profoundly moving conclusion in the seventh elegy, Berceuse.

The first elegy, "Nach der Wendlung. Recuillement" (After the Turning Point. Self-Communion), is thematically entirely new. A thoughtful and harmonically ambiguous meditation, it effectively introduces the subsequent elegies, which treat their recycled themes in new and similarly ambiguous ways. The second elegy, "All'Italia," employs two themes from Busoni's hyper-Romantic piano concerto: a moody barcarolle from its central third movement and a Neapolitan tarantella from its wild fourth movement. The dark and thoughtful atmosphere is heightened in the third elegy, "Meine Seele bangt und hofft zu Dir" (My soul is afraid and hopes in Thee), which is a freely developed chorale prelude based on Bach's "Allein Gott in der Hoh' sei Ehr." It builds to a fine climax of dissonant chordal intensity before subsiding to a brooding conclusion. Busoni later used this powerful music as the springboard for his massive Fantasia Contrappuntistica of 1910. The fourth and fifth elegies take their themes from Busoni's Turandot Suite, a concert hall work inspired by Gozzi's well-known play. The fourth, "Turandots Frauengemach" (Turandot in the Women's Quarters), is based on the Elizabethan song "Greensleeves," which had been mistakenly included in the book of Chinese melodies that Busoni used as the source for the suite. Busoni's first opera, Die Brautwahl (The Spectre-Bride), was the source for the sixth elegy, "Erscheinung. Notturno" (Apparition. Nocturne), an appropriately ghostly bit of mood-painting. In 1909, Busoni added a seventh elegy, Berceuse, which was a transcription for piano of his Berceuse élégiaque for orchestra, written as a memorial to his mother, who had died in May of that year. Each of the elegies was dedicated to a pianist that Busoni admired. The first was dedicated to Austrian pianist Gottfried Galston, the second to Busoni's greatest pupil, Egon Petri, the third to Russian pianist Gregor Beklemischev, the fourth to Polish-American pianist Michael von Zadora (also a Busoni pupil). The fifth elegy was dedicated to Busoni's English pupil, O'Neill Phillips, who died young, the sixth to Hungarian pianist Leo Kestenberg (yet another Busoni protégé), and the seventh to Dutch pianist and composer Johan Wijsman.

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