The feelings of a worshipper of form

Noel Malcolm

SELECTED LETTERS by Ferruccio Busoni, edited and translated by Antony Beaumont

Faber, £25

Aperiod of transition, as every histor- ian knows, is the period which comes between one period of transition and another. Some composers are like that too. Busoni is a notoriously amphibious speci- men — romantic / modernist, Germanic / Italian, composer / pianist — and his music is strangely hard to place. It reminds us partly of what happened in German music after Wagner, among composers who re- fused to be Wagnerian but had to shoulder the burden of being post-Wagnerian, and partly of what did not happen in Italian music after Verdi. (If Tristan led to Schoenberg, what might Falstaff have led to, if only someone had been there to write it?) Busoni stares at us out of the photo- graphs in this book with an expression which is half Buddha, half Wandering Jew: both serenely free of the world and at the same time troubled, haunted, by his own presence in it. (The photograph by Man Ray on p.370, taken not long before Busoni's death, is itself utterly haunting, with a haze of salon-style soft focus sud- denly frozen by a look in his eyes of remote and terrible despair.)

Busoni looks as if it ought to be impossi- ble to winkle him out of his shell. But the classic biography of him by Edward Dent (1933) does in fact give an unusually intimate portrait of his mind. Dent de- scribed his feelings as an ordinary writer might describe events — the only truly successful example I know of a biographer using the technique of a novelist. The secret of Dent's success v Ihat he had access to a vast quantity iLtters pre- served by Busoni's wife : :1,, ny of his

friends. He seldom quote !,, 7 directly,

preferring to weave their , tantali- singly, into his narrative ction of Busoni's letters to his wi iblished soon after Dent's book, rifirmed that he had been an urn ed and perceptive writer. But we to wait 50 years for this large utifully produced collection of ers to

friends, pupils and fellow s.

Antony Beaumont hl .) these

letters on grounds of biol . interest

in the widest sense, rej.., items of

merely biographical imp°, . concert-

schedules, etc) and retain] nose which illustrate Busoni's attitudes i lusic, peo- ple and places. The result is mixture, but one which may be un...opetising to readers who do not already know something about Busoni. Read Dent first. Some biographical puzzles remain unsolved: above all, it is impossible to pin down the transition from the young lion making his way in the world, proudly writing to his mother about his achievements, to the Olympian maestro of Busoni's later years. (My guess would be 1903, when the lion shaved off his beard.) But the peculiar alertness of his character comes through more sharply than ever. He is omnivorous- ly receptive to ideas, musical and non- musical, from all sources, and yet at the same time wryly critical in a way that suggests detachment rather than defensive- ness — and is often deliciously funny. Take this wicked description of Richard Strauss and his music, for example, which puns on the German word for an ostrich (Strauss- vogel): 'Partly in brilliant plumage, partly bald; the largest of his species, yet not aggressive in appearance; the only verte- brate bird that doesn't fly; exotic yet without humour; in a word: an ostrich, not an eagle.' Nothing is sacred, not because Busoni is an iconoclast but because he is prepared to look at everything freshly and ask what it expresses and why.

Wagnerians will be rattled by some of Busoni's remarks ('I cannot understand how a nation which is blessed with Goethe's Faust . . . can take Wagner seriously as a poet and subsequently read so much into him.') But sometimes he is just indisputably right, as in these com- ments, in an argument asserting the super- iority of Mozart and Verdi as setters of words to music:

Wagner laid too much emphasis on `declamation' (longer and shorter syl- lables, the longer ones generally higher) and used too much literary illustration. Let

us take the sentence which I have just written: the longer ones generally higher. You could bet that Wagner would have set the word 'longer' to a longer note, and 'higher' to a higher one. But in conversation the inflexion comes on 'generally'; the word 'higher' falls in pitch.

This is a point of major importance which I have never seen so neatly put.

The closest Busoni comes to stating his artistic creed is when he declares am a worshipper of form.' He explains: 'Our frequent profanation of form causes me distress — even in everyday things: in paying a call and taking one's leave . . But I reject traditional and unalterable forms and feel that every idea, every motif, every object demands its own form.' In the same letter he tells his correspondent about a piano piece by Schoenberg, which 'you will find hateful, particularly in the sound of its harmonies, but it has its own individual feeling and seems to be perfect in its form.' The weakness of the theory is immediately apparent. If form is disting- uishable from the feeling or 'idea' which it embodies, then judging the appropriate- ness of form to idea is not enough; we need some other test to show why some ideas are better than others. If form and idea are indistinguishable,then we are left with the same problem: why are some forms better than others?

That piece by Schoenberg fascinated Busoni so much that he rewrote it in an 'arrangement' of his own. He thought he was helping the form to express the feeling more perfectly; Schoenberg complained that in altering the form he was altering the feeling. Beaumont gives the entire corres- pondence between them, and it is the most fascinating part of the book. The two composers circle warily round each other, resenting their disagreements and mis- understandings precisely because they almost agree on so much. At one crucial point I feel that Beaumont has misrepre- sented Schoenberg's argument by translat- ing Was Architektonische' as 'formalism' (Schoenberg was arguing for the former, not the latter); but I should add that in general I was impressed by the faithfulness of Beaumont's translations when I checked them against the original typescripts among Dent's papers.

Critics of Busoni's music will say that it tries to put 19th-century feelings into 20th- century forms. This seems to fit very neatly with the picture of his character which emerges from this book: the idealism of the old century combined with the scepticism and detachment of the new. But not quite neatly enough. Characteristically, it was when Busoni considered the experiments of the 20th century that his critical detach- ment operated most strongly. An awkward position, one feels, for a creative artist to find himself in — especially in a period of transition.