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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7.Berceuse

Busoni came to a recognition of Liszt's stature only in the early 1890s—his mid-twenties. Looking back in 1910, he noted, "It was at that time of my life when I had become conscious of such deficiencies and faults in my own playing that with energetic determination I began the study of the pianoforte again from the beginning on quite a new basis. Liszt's works were my guide and through them I acquired an intimate knowledge of his particular method. Out of his 'tenets' I constructed my 'technique.' Gratitude and admiration at that time made Liszt my master and my friend." But his preoccupation with Liszt struck far more deeply—Busoni wished Leonhard, the benign magician of Die Brautwahl, to look like Liszt at 50. Nietzsche occasionally pokes sardonic fun at Liszt, but during the brief period when he was part of Wagner's intimate circle he observed Liszt at close range and acknowledged that Liszt's example had deeply colored his concept of the Dionysian personality. At a distance, a similar fascination led Busoni to become an indefatigable collector of Liszt's music, including many works that have yet to achieve a popular following, such as the oratorio Christus, and the spate of late, brief, haunted piano works that open doors on an eerie, threatening country of the soul. "May one write or listen to such a thing?" Liszt himself jotted on the manuscript of his Czárdás macabre, as he made good on his intention to "hurl my lance into the boundless realms of the future." Busoni may be said to have caught that lance, to have gone through the doors Liszt's late pieces opened, for his own works "after the turning point"—marked by the first of the piano Elegies (1907)—explore a strange, spiritual, occult prehension that deepened until the end of his life. The Elegies present this demesne meditatively, or with crackling vivacity (as in the eerie "Nächtlichen waltz"), or ecstatically (as in "Erscheinung"), and only with "Meine Seele bangt und hofft zu Dir" is there a note of anxiety. But with the Berceuse, which followed in June 1909 and was included as the seventh and last of the Elegies, comes a hypnotic transport hovering between fascination and angst, deceptively simple in means—open octaves pulsing slowly up and down the keyboard, outlining unsettling harmonic shifts with caressing suaveness—and spellbinding in detail. Pithy yet too brief, the Berceuse proved a sketch for the expanded orchestral Berceuse élégiaque.

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