Ferruccio Busoni

Ferruccio Busoni was the only child of a clarinetist father and a pianist mother. He became not only a pianist himself but a conductor and composer. His compositions include a musical setting for a poem by Heinrich Heine, “Du bist wie eine Blume” (“You are like a Flower”) and one for a poem by Lord Byron, “An Babylons Wasserns” (“By the Rivers of Babylon.”) In his 40s Busoni wrote Sketch of a New Esthetic of Music (1907), an important statement of his conviction that a composer is not a lawgiver, that performers must have or take a good deal of interpretive freedom. Musical notation, he wrote, “is primarily an ingenious expedient for catching an inspiration, with the purpose of exploiting it later….It is for the interpreter to resolve the rigidity of the signs [emphasis in original] into the primitive emotion.” Busoni died in Berlin, and is commemorated by a plaque on the spot of his final residence there.