A tiny figure in tails came toddling to the center of the stage at Manhattan's Carnegie Hall, made a nervous little bow, and sat down almost unobserved at a Steinway the size of Florida. "Give me the Cleveland every time," a critic murmured contentedly to his companion. "Never a lapse in taste, never a bar without breeding!" Even as he spoke the Cleveland Symphony rumbled like a drain in difficulty and belched forth a stentorian blat of brass. Whereupon the tiny man, exploding chords like cannoncrackers, hurled himself upon the piano, and for the next 72 minutes, while the orchestra bawled like a herd of lovesick hippos, blasted away with a display of percussive pianistics that rattled the hall so hard nobody noticed the sound of a subway train thundering within 40 feet of the stage.
After the last horrendous arrabbiato, in which pianist and orchestra were joined by a chorus of 72 men, the audience sat stupefied for several seconds and then released a roar of approval that persisted through eleven curtain calls. Soloist Pietro Scarpini and the Cleveland had safely and on the whole admirably negotiated the longest and, in the opinion of many pianists, the most difficult piano concerto ever composed. It was, in fact, a monstrosity, as some critics limply acknowledged. But they had to concede, along with Cleveland's crusty old George Szell, that it was "a monstrosity full of genius," and that the man who wrote it was a genius full of monstrosity, one of the most spectacular figures in the history of Western music.
Moneymaking Prodigy. He is a figure largely forgotten. On the 100th anniversary of his birth-now being celebrated through the efforts of the vigorous new Busoni Society-Italy's Ferruccio Dante Michelangelo Benvenuto Busoni is remembered by the music public as a mere arranger: the man who transcribed Bach's organ music for the pianoforte. In fact, says Pianist Artur Rubinstein, Busoni was "the greatest pianist of his time." Many musicians consider him a titanic technician and volcanically creative interpreter; all agree that his radical re-examination of the instrument and its literature struck a body blow at the romantic style and inspired the modern approach to the piano. Yet in the long view, Busoni was most significant where he most significantly failed: as a composer who longed to be great but was merely grand, as a pioneer who built a bridge to the future but could not pass over it himself.
Busoni was born in Tuscany in 1866.
His father Ferdinando was a village Vivaldi who blew a mean clarinet— and all the cash he could get his hands on. He had improvidently wed a gifted but relatively impecunious pianist who promptly presented him with a son. At three, Ferruccio was playing scales. At six, he was forced to practice four hours at a stretch by a father determined to produce a moneymaking prodigy. At seven, he made his debut in Trieste, and for the rest of his life, with brief intermissions, he was chained to the concert circuit like a monkey to a street organ. Father had expensive tastes, and Ferruccio, seeking frantic compensations for the frantic life he lived, soon developed a few of his own.