Piano Concerto
by Ferruccio Busoni
The composer in 1905, soon after completing the concerto
Key	C major
Catalogue	BV 247
Opus	39
Based on	Aladdin by Adam Oehlenschläger
Composed	1901 (1901)–04
Performed	November 10, 1904 (1904-11-10): Berlin
Published	1906 by Breitkopf & Härtel
Duration	70 min
Movements	5
Scoring	piano orchestra men's chorus

The Piano Concerto in C major, Op. 39 (BV 247), by Ferruccio Busoni, is one of the largest works ever written in this genre. Completed and premiered in 1904, it is about 70 minutes long and laid out in five movements played without a break; in the final movement an invisible men's chorus sings words from the verse-drama Aladdin by Adam Oehlenschläger.

Busoni intended to dedicate the concerto to his friend William Dayas, but he died in 1903.^[1] His daughter Karin, a pianist, would in 1932 play the work's American premiere.

The first performance took place in the Beethoven-Saal, Berlin, Germany, on November 10, 1904, at one of Busoni's own concerts of modern music. Busoni was the soloist, with Karl Muck conducting the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra and the choir of the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church.^[2] The reviews were mixed, some expressing hostility or derision.^[3] A year later, the work was played in Amsterdam by the Concertgebouw Orchestra, conducted by Busoni, with Egon Petri as soloist. The century following has seen relatively few performances, owing to the large orchestration, complex texture, need for a male chorus, and the staggeringly demanding solo part.

Although the five movements are laid out separately in the score, Busoni stated that the concerto should be played as a continuous whole without breaks.^[4]

Introductio. Andante sostenuto

Prima pars. Andante quasi adagio

Altera pars. Sommessamente

Ultima pars. A tempo

Prologo e introito

The opening movement is a little over fifteen minutes long and is a broad Allegro with a clangorous piano part.

Pezzo giocoso

This movement is a kind of Scherzo, mostly a light-fingered affair for the piano, using Italianate rhythms and melodic material, even if the melodies evoke Italian popular music more than they quote Italian folk music.

Pezzo serioso

The twenty-minute middle movement in D-flat major is in labelled sections. A massive meditation and exploration, its central climax is pianistically challenging and brilliantly scored for both piano and orchestra.

All' italiana

This movement is perhaps the most variegated in its use of the orchestra, with a terrifically virtuosic piano part, arguably more difficult than anything that has come before it in the work. There are two cadenzas, one included in the printed score, the other an insert in the two-piano score that amplifies the one printed in the two-piano edition.

Cantico

The slow final movement with male chorus brings full circle themes heard earlier in the concerto. Its words sung by the men are from the final scene of Oehlenschläger's verse-drama Aladdin.

It seems to have been Beethoven who first included a chorus in a concerted work with piano and orchestra, in his Choral Fantasy, Op. 80, of 1808;^{[n 1]} since then only a handful of works have been scored for similar forces, including Daniel Steibelt's Piano Concerto No. 8 (first performed March 16, 1820, in Saint Petersburg)^[5][6] and the Piano Concerto No. 6, Op. 192 (1858) by Henri Herz^[7] which also have a choral finale.

Apart from the immense demands required of the soloist and the large forces needed, there is a further difficulty that can affect performances of this work: the role of the soloist.

As Busoni himself wrote, piano concertos tended to be modelled after either Mozart or Beethoven.^[8] In Mozart's case, the concerto centres around the spotlit virtuoso composer-performer, who appears to spontaneously create the work before us, on-stage. The orchestra mostly provides a background accompaniment. But with Beethoven, the work is often conceived in symphonic terms; the piano takes the secondary role, reflecting on or responding to ideas that have already been introduced by the orchestra (excepting the fourth piano concerto).^[9]

Busoni combined both these precedents in the Piano Concerto, Op. 39, creating a huge work of symphonic proportions which was originally accused of having only a piano obbligato.^[8] The work presents exceptional challenges for the soloist, who is often nevertheless required to incorporate a glittering cascade of notes into the overall orchestral sound. This self-abasement of the familiar 19th-century heroic soloist's role thus requires careful consideration of balance in performance. But as Edward Dent comments:

Despite the incredible difficulty of the solo part, Busoni's concerto at no point offers a display of virtuosity. Even its cadenzas are subsidiary episodes. At the same time the pianoforte hardly ever presents a single theme in its most immediate and commanding shape. It is nearly always the orchestra which seems to be possessed of the composer's most prophetic inspiration. Busoni sits at the pianoforte, listens, comments, decorates, and dreams.^[10]

Marc-André Hamelin offered the following perspective on the work:

I find that a lot of people are sort of disoriented when they first hear it because they expect the traditional piano concerto, which it is not. [...] If you are expecting something much more symphonic, then you have a better chance of appreciating it for the first time.^[11]

Adam Oehlenschläger's verse drama Aladdin, or the Magic Lamp was first published in Danish in 1805.^[12] The play has a number of parallels with the works and ideas of Goethe, such as the Faust-figure of the wicked magician Noureddin who takes advantage of Aladdin's youth and inexperience to get hold of the wonderful lamp;^[13] Goethe was also much preoccupied with Plato's philosophy, including his theory of Forms and the allegory of the Cave.^[14]

During his travels in Germany in 1805–6, Oehlenschläger spent several months in Weimar in the company of Goethe and his closest circle of friends. He used the opportunity of his daily visits to read out Aladdin to Goethe, freely translating from the Danish.^[15] At the time, Goethe was in the process of completing the final version of Faust, Part 1.

Subsequently, Oehlenschläger prepared a German edition of Aladdin, translating and revising the work himself and adding an explanatory introduction for his intended German readers. This edition was published in 1808 in Amsterdam.^[16] The new version included a special dedicatory poem To Goethe and was split into two parts, intended to be given on two successive evenings. More especially, this version had a new finale differing considerably from the original Danish edition by having various magical scenic transformations.^[17]

As Oehlenschläger stated in his introduction to the 1808 version of Aladdin, he was not a native speaker of German; he admitted to incorporating various Danish modes of expression (Danismen) into his translation.^[18] His "unidiomatic and erroneous" use of German had hindered the play's success.^[17] In preparing a later German edition (1820 at the latest), he made a large number of changes and minor improvements, also correcting his imperfect German: but he dropped the magical 1808 ending, reverting to the original Danish 1805 finale.^[19] The first complete English translation, by Theodore Martin, published in 1863,^[20] is also based on a later edition, thus the first editions in German are the only ones to incorporate the words which Busoni uses.

Busoni was quite taken with this early German version of Aladdin and planned to adapt it as a one-evening work. In a letter to his wife, dated London, February 10, 1902, Busoni wrote:

I have thought it out and decided not to use Oehlenschläger's Aladdin for an opera, but to write a composition in which drama music, dancing and magic are combined – cut down for one evening's performance if possible. It is my old idea of a play with music where it is necessary, without hampering the dialogue. As a spectacle and as a deep symbolic work it might be something similar to the Magic Flute; at the same time it would have a better meaning and an indestructible subject [mit besserem Sinn und einem nicht tot zu machenden Sujet]. Besides this, I have planned 6 works for the summer, the principal one being the pianoforte Concerto. How beautiful!^[21]

However, Busoni never completed his adaptation of Aladdin,^[22] although he did compose music for the final chorus in the magic cave; this soon made its way into the Piano Concerto. As Busoni's biographer Edward J. Dent remarks:

One may indeed wonder why an essentially Italian work should end with verses in praise of Allah. The plain fact was that Busoni at the moment happened to be interested in Aladdin and had set the final chorus to music. When he planned the Concerto he saw that this chorus, which has something of the mystical character of the concluding stanzas of Goethe's Faust, was exactly the music to give the general sense of serenity that he required for his own finale. It was from the original Aladdin chorus that he took the theme which occurs in the first movement; when he came to write out the last movement he felt that he missed the words, and therefore directed that a chorus of men's voices should sing them.^[23]

In the finale of the play, the grown-up Aladdin replaces the lamp with its genie (or spirit) back in the magic cave where he first found it. The somewhat obscure (if exalted) words that Busoni sets are voiced by the rock pillars themselves: Oehlenschläger's stage direction "Deep and quiet, the pillars of rock begin to sound:" is printed above the score where the chorus enters. Busoni follows the text exactly, only omitting a few verses which were not appropriate.^[24] According to Dent:

"The actual meaning of the words hardly matters. The chorus is directed to be invisible; it sings in plain chords, like a body of soft trombones added to the orchestra. The effect which Busoni desired was stated by him once in a letter to a friend who had mistakenly suggested to him that it might be better to re-write the chorus for mixed voices; he replied that he had no desire to convert his Concerto into an oratorio; he insisted that the chorus should be invisible, and said that its function was 'to add a new register to the sonorities which precede it'."^[25]

Goethe's Urphänomen

Nevertheless, in these mysterious lines added for the 1808 German edition of Aladdin after several months of daily contact with Goethe, Oehlenschläger seems to be drawing on Goethe's holistic, non-Newtonian concept of the Urphänomen (German: primordial phenomenon) which Goethe used in his scientific works, especially the Theory of Colours; at the same time, Hegel was also developing this idea in his own philosophy, involving the concept of the Gestalt (Ger: Form), sometimes translated as "formation" or "configuration of consciousness".^{[n 2]}

In his study of Danish poets and their encounters with German artistic movements, Viktor Schmitz (Schmitz 1974) considers the Urphänomen – or genesis of the creative mindset – as expressed by Goethe, Oehlenschläger and Schiller, who had been close friends with Goethe for many years and died in May 1805. In a poem^[26] in which he pays homage to Goethe, Schiller praised happiness or luck (Glück) as a gift of the gods, a present without merit or benefit. This praise applied to what Schiller admired in Goethe, but did not possess himself.^[27] But for Oehlenschläger – since Aladdin – happiness remained a sign of election (ein Zeichen der Erwählung) and of itself, of 'having been chosen'; almost a primordial phenomenon (Urphänomen) of poetry, as the struggle (or war) was for Schiller, or the demonic for Goethe.^[28]

One alternative to this holistic approach was the dualism espoused by another Danish poet Jens Baggesen (a slightly older and overshadowed contemporary of Oehlenschläger), whose works were based on a consistently maintained pantheistic outlook, resulting in a strongly emphasized antithesis between the earthly and the heavenly. Baggesen, who wrote in accordance with a strictly defined poetics, deeply desired to overcome this tension; but since he realized that his own dualist climb toward lofty heights (a recurring motif) would scarcely be successful, he praised Oehlenschlager and Goethe, whose poetry seemed to promise a synthesis, a new world void of such restriction.^[29]

Hegel expressed the idea of the Urphänomen in a letter to Goethe in February 1821 as the concept of "a spiritual breath: ... To ferret out the Urphänomen, to free it from those further environs which are accidental to it, to apprehend as we say abstractly – I take this to be a matter of spiritual intelligence for nature".^{[30][n 3]}

Busoni did not set the subsequent closing speech of Oehlenschläger's fortunate hero as he looks around the magic cave for the last time: but Dent's assertion that "The actual meaning of the words hardly matters" can be balanced against Aladdin's final lines:

Although concerted works with voices are relatively rare, there are a number of choral and symphonic works for male voice choir. These include Luigi Cherubini's D-minor Requiem for men's chorus (1836);^[34] Le Desert, 'ode-symphonie' for orchestra, tenor solo and male chorus by Félicien David (1844);^[35] Liszt added a male chorus (setting words from Faust, Part Two) to the revised finale of his Faust Symphony of 1857–1860. Brahms' Alto Rhapsody in c minor for contralto solo, male chorus and orchestra, was written in 1869. And in 1962, Dmitri Shostakovich composed his 13th symphony in b-flat minor for bass solo, male chorus and orchestra.

There are two works including a male chorus with a more direct connection with Busoni's Piano Concerto: Aino by Robert Kajanus and Kullervo by Jean Sibelius, in which all three composers seem to evoke a similar, distinct and unusual sound-world at the first entry for the men's voices.^{[citation needed]} Kajanus, the director of the Helsinki Conservatory and conductor of the fledgling Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra, composed Aino, a symphonic poem for male chorus and orchestra in 1885. Kajanus also taught Jean Sibelius at the Conservatory, where Busoni, aged 22, was also on the teaching staff in 1888; during that year he wrote the Concert-Fantasie for piano and orchestra (BV230, Op. 29).^[36] According to Erik Tawaststjerna, "The time Sibelius spent with Busoni and the interchange of ideas contributed in no small measure to his development and in all probability to his artistic breakthrough in spring 1889.".^[37] Sibelius's Kullervo for orchestra, men's chorus, and baritone and mezzo-soprano soloists was first performed in Helsinki in 1892.^[38][39]

Henri Herz's Piano Concerto no. 6 in A major Op. 192 (1858) has a part-choral final movement ('Rondo oriental avec choeur') which features a hymn (in French) to 'the sons of the prophet' and 'O Mahomet divin': curiously, it ends with the words 'Gloire au prophète Allah', exactly the same sentiment expressed in the finale of the Busoni concerto.^[40]

The concerto is scored for a large orchestra.^{[41][42][43][2]} (For the instrumentation in Italian see below.)

Manuscripts

• Busoni Archive No. 231 (sketch)^[46]

Title: Concerto per un Pianoforte obligato principale e diversi strumenti, ad arco a fiato ed a percussione; aggiuntovi un Coro finale per voci d'uomini a 4 parti. Le parole alemanne del poeta Oehlenschlaeger, danese. la Musica di Ferruccio Busoni, da Empoli.

[Concerto for obbligato principal piano and diverse bowed, wind, and percussion instruments; additional final chorus for men's voices in 4 parts. The German words by the poet Oehlenschläger, Dane. Music by Ferruccio Busoni, from Empoli.]

Description: 48 loose sheets, partly written on one side, and partly on two; partly folio, partly not.

Note: Also contains material relating to the ending without chorus (BV 247a).^[47]

• Busoni Archive No. 232 (sketch)^[46]

Title 1: Busoni Concerto

Title 2: Concerto per un Pianoforte principale e diversi Strumenti, ad arco, a fiato ed a percussione; aggiuntovi un Coro finale per voci d'uomini a quattro parti. Le parole alemanne del poeta Oehlenschlaeger, danese; la Musica di Ferruccio Busoni, da Empoli. (Secondo abbozzo, in esteso.)

[Concerto for principal piano and diverse bowed, wind, and percussion instruments; additional final Chorus for men's voices in four parts. The German words by the poet Oehlenschläger, Dane; Music by Ferruccio Busoni, from Empoli. (Second full sketch.)]

Date: 18. Agosto 1903. (at the end of the composition)

Description: 2 title sheets; 81 leaves, written on both sides, numbered by Busoni from 1 to 41, on every second leaf (recto), corresponding to the number of quires.

Note: The sketches comprise partly piano extracts, partly short score (particell).

• Busoni Archive No. 233 (score)^[48]

Title: Conzert für Klavier u. Orch. Op. 39

On the edge: Partyt. Ms. Autogr. Busoni-Nachlaß Nr 233

Note: Lost in 1945. Now at the Jagiellonian University in Cracow.

Publications^[42]

• Score (Partitur)

Title: Concerto per un Pianoforte principale e diversi strumenti ad arco a fiato ed a percussione. Aggiuntovi un Coro finale per voci d'uomini a sei parti. Le parole alemanne del poeta Oehlenschlaeger danese. La Musica di Ferruccio Busoni da Empoli Anno MCMIV. opera XXXIX

[Concerto for principal piano and diverse bowed, wind, and percussion instruments. Additional final Chorus for men's voices in six parts. The German words by the Danish poet Oehlenschläger. Music by Ferruccio Busoni from Empoli in the year 1904. opus XXXIX.]

Date: Finis. il 3.d'Agosto 1904. (at the end of the composition)

Instrumentation: Un pianoforte principale, 2 Flauti piccoli, 3 Flauti, 3 Oboi, 1 Corno inglese, 3 Clarinetti, 1 Clarinetto basso, 3 Fagotti, 4 Corni, 3 Trombe, 3 Tromboni, 1 Tuba, 3 Timpani, Tamburo militare, Gran Cassa, Tamburino, Triangolo, Piatti, un giuoco di Campanelli a tastiera (Glockenspiel), un Gong Chinese (Tamtam), 12 Violini primi, 10 Violini secondo, 8 Viole, 8 Violoncelli, 6 Contrabassi a 4 Corde, 2 Contrabassi che discendono al Do di 16 piedi, un Coro di voci d'uomini composto di 48 cantori.

Published: Breitkopf & Härtel, 1906, cat. no. Part B. 1949; (328 pages); cat. no. Ch. B. 1844; (men's chorus)

• Arrangement for 2 pianos; revised extended cadenza

Published: Breitkopf & Härtel, 1909. EB 2861, ed. Egon Petri; score (178 pages); extended cadenza rev. by Busoni, 1909 (5 pages).

Recordings

Other concert performances

In addition to the above list of recordings, the concerto has also received concert performances in recent years by (among others, in alphabetical order): Giovanni Bellucci;^[50] Karin Dayas, Christopher Falzone; Carlo Grante; Benjamin Grosvenor; Marc-André Hamelin; Randall Hodgkinson; Martin Jones; Piers Lane; Igor Levit; Vincenzo Maltempo; Janos Solyom.

Videos YouTube links (in alphabetical order):

• Volker Banfield;
• Christopher Falzone (with OSO and transcription for solo piano_complete);
• Marc-André Hamelin; (originally telecast on March 31, 2001 on the Finnish commercial television station MTV3; 4th movement only appears on It's All About the Music Hyperion DVDA68000);
• Noel Mewton-Wood;
• John Ogdon;
• Garrick Ohlsson;
• Kun Woo Paik;
• Egon Petri (4th movement);
• Pietro Scarpini.

Noncommercial recordings A performance of the concerto by Pietro Scarpini with George Szell and the Cleveland Orchestra and Chorus was broadcast on New York's WQXR on July 10, 1966.^[51] They had previously performed the concerto in Carnegie Hall, New York, on February 7, 1966.^[52]

The amateur pianist, industrialist, and philanthropist Sir Ernest Hall (a contemporary of John Ogdon at the Royal Manchester College of Music) performed the concerto in 2000 with the Sheffield Symphony Orchestra and the Halifax Choral Society conducted by John Longstaff. A recording is available through the SSO website.^[53]

Notes

Citations

Sources

• Piano Concerto, Op. 39: Scores at the International Music Score Library Project
• Roberge, Marc-André (1981). "Le Concerto pour piano, orchestre et chœur d'hommes, op. 39 (1904), de Ferruccio Busoni: étude historique et analytique" (M.A. thesis, McGill University, 1981), ix, 254 pp.; Microcard copy available at the National Library of Canada (in French). Accessed 3 November 2009.
• Thaddeus, Michael (February 24, 2019). "Busoni's Piano Leviathan". The New York Review of Books. Retrieved February 24, 2019.
• Busoni Piano Concerto discography
• Busoni at Carnegie Hall The occasion of this interview was the first New York performance of the Busoni Piano Concerto. Daniell Revenaugh, Busoni scholar and performer, is interviewed by John Whiting, with excerpts from interviews with Philipp Jarnach and Benvenuto Busoni. 8 December 1965. A KPFA program.
• Allen, David, "'It Has It All': Taking on a Strange, Immense Piano Concerto. The conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen and the pianist Igor Levit discuss Ferruccio Busoni’s Piano Concerto, a rarity they are performing in San Francisco", The New York Times, June 20, 2023
• Ross, Alex, "The Monster Concerto", The New Yorker, January 1, 2012