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Prophetic Inspiration. As a young man he was everything northern women love about Italy: wild mane and burning eyes, sensuous lips and rich, soft voice. Wherever he played, and he played from St. Petersburg to San Francisco, Ferruccio was besieged by women who wanted to make beautiful music with him. It cannot be said that he was always faithful to his piano, but in the broad Italian construction of the term he was loyal to his wife, a placid Swedish girl who thought he was simply wonderful.
One way and another, he was. He was a formidable intellectual who could write almost as well as he could play.
He was a personality whose mere presence raised the hair on a spectator's scalp. Above all, he was a pianist of fantastic splendor, acknowledged today as the mightiest technician of all time.
His power was awesome, his speed be yond belief, his touch so delicately pre cise that he could transform the most complicated passages into washes of pure color. And yet technique was not an end in itself; Busoni invariably sub ordinated pianistic skill to musical mean ing. Passion and intelligence were reconciled in sensibility, and in the last years of his life, says Busoni's biographer Ed ward Dent, his performances reflected "the spirit of a seer and visionary" and achieved a "grandeur" amounting to "prophetic inspiration."
A Master, a Slave. He couldn't have cared less. By the time he was 40, Bu soni was sick of performing and wanted only to compose. During the summer, when the concert circuit closed down, he wrote music like a madman; and what he wrote, though not great music, is sometimes music of great fascination and historical importance. Busoni is an important moment of transition in mu sic. He falls between two styles, the romantic and the modern. In his struggle to reconcile the two, he helped to break up the romantic tradition and in his late compositions —the six Poly phonic Studies and the superb but rarely performed opera Doktor Faust —he struck out in the same general direction as Schoenberg and Stravinsky.
Busoni did not live to see direction become destination. Worn out by half a century of continual concertizing, he died in 1924 at the age of 58. He was, in his own words, "a weak man, yet a stout wrestler, whom doubts drive hither and thither; master of thought, slave of instinct, exhausting all things, finding no answer." A Faustian figure.