In some ways, music is for musicians—it can, and in Busoni's works often does, speak a language that innocent listeners will not comprehend. Far from being "paper" music, it teases the ear with gestures and allusions whose import will be readily apparent only to the literate musician—conversant not only with the canonical works of musical tradition but with their refraction in Busoni's unique idiom, which, as Bernard van Dieren noted, must be followed and learned "as a Pole might learn English to read Massinger and Ford." While this places his mature work at a hermetic remove from the ordinary music lover, it affords rare satisfactions to those who penetrate his charmed circle. The Sonatina brevis provides a concise illustration. From Zürich, where he had been domiciled since the beginning of the Great War, Busoni wrote to his wife on August 20, 1918, "Yesterday and the day before I composed a short sonatina on three bars of Bach, with which I am very satisfied." In fact, extensive swaths of a Little Fantasy and Fugue in D, BWV 905, attributed to Bach, have been appropriated and recomposed. Over an octave pedal on D, the work opens with a series of falling diminished sevenths, an interval associated with the devil Megaeros in Doktor Faust, whose composition was Busoni's preoccupation. Marked Andante, espressivo e Sostenuto, the material of the Fantasy is given a compact, chromatically wailing exposition establishing a somber mood rounded by the return of the falling sevenths. In his edition of the Fugue, Busoni noted, "The countersubject appears as a fragment of an obvious canonical leading which has not been developed." Poco più mosso, ma tranquillo, the fugue not only supplies what Busoni felt to be lacking but pursues the argument into delicately spiked Modern harmonic terrain—Bach in Modern dress, so to speak. The falling sevenths, sotto voce, intervene again and are caught in contrapuntal unfolding that builds to a muted climax. The coda, with sevenths now major, seems headed for a reassuringly benign major cadence when the falling intervals, again diminished, lead to an inconclusive, enigmatic ending. Pithily allusive in its play of old and new, light and darkness, Busoni's appropriation of past art to new and disconcerting uses has obvious affinities with James Joyce's use of Homer as a scaffolding for Ulysses. The work is dedicated to Busoni's "famulus," Catalan-French composer Philipp Jarnach, who shared a duplex with Joyce as Ulysses and the Sonatina brevis took shape.

© Adrian Corleonis, Rovi