Fantasia contrappuntistica
The Fantasia contrappuntistica BV 256 is a Resulting in June 1910 and in the same year at Breitkopf & Hartel published piano works of Ferruccio Busoni , which is one of his most important compositions for the instrument. The focus is on his attempt to complete the last and fragmentary fugue Contrapunctus XIV ( BWV 1080, 19) from Johann Sebastian Bach's late cycle The Art of Fugue .
The technically very demanding and extensive work has a rather long history and is available in different versions. Busoni dedicated it to the German-American composer Wilhelm Middelschulte , from whom important impulses had come and who made an arrangement for the organ .
Emergence
The inspiration for the work goes back to the beginning of 1910 and is thanks to Wilhelm Middelschulte and Bernhard Ziehn , whom Busoni referred to as the "Gothiker von Chicago, III" and whose studies of the unfinished fugue he got to know at the time. Middelschulte was a major organist and theorist who emigrated to the United States in 1891 . He worked as a university professor, advocated the work of Johann Sebastian Bach and thus shaped American musical life. In Chicago he worked in the Jacobikirche, where he met the important music theorist Bernhard Ziehn, who influenced him with his concept of an expanded tonality.
Since Busoni revised the Fantasia several times, in 1910 and in the following years, in addition to a fragmentary version for orchestra, other versions were created.
At first he wanted to put an extensive fantasy in front of the joints, a plan from which he moved a little later in order to present “everything that is fantasy-like in the joint itself”. Here he had a combination of César Franck and Ludwig van Beethoven's hammer piano sonata in mind . After he finished the fugue ( BV 255) on March 1, 1910 in the United States and called it Middelschulte under the title “Große Fuge. Counterpoint fantasy about Joh. Seb. Bach's last unfinished work ”, he decided in April to write an orchestral version, which he wanted to precede the third piece from the Elegienammlung BV 249, which was also orchestrated. If these attempts did not go beyond a fragment, however, he was able to complete the expanded and final piano version Edizione definitiva (BV 256) in June . In 1912 he wrote a shorter chorale prelude and fugue on a Bach fragment. The Fantasia Contrappuntistica small edition, BV 256a and nine years later the Fantasia Contrappuntistica for two pianos, BV 256b .
To the music
The Edizione Definiva consists of the twelve parts Preludio corale ( Moderato un po´ maestoso ), Fuga I, Fuga II, Fuga III (on the tone sequence BACH ), Intermezzo, Variazione I, Variazione II, Variazione III, Cadenza, Fuga IV, Corale and Stretta.
For the massive Preludio , Busoni resorted to his third elegy, dedicated to Gregor Beklemischeff (“My soul fears and hopes for you”) from the Neue (n) Piano Pieces BV 249 from 1908, which he edited and shortened slightly. The elegy can be understood as a free chorale prelude to the Lutheran hymn alone God in the Heights , which was also arranged by Bach and can be found in the collection of 18 chorale arrangements for organ with two manuals and pedal.
In Fuga I ( Con molta importanza e sostenutissimo ), Busoni has the dux inserted in the octaved bass fortissimo and leads it diminuendo to the pianissimo in bar six, where the Comes answers tonally according to the pattern of the unfinished fugue . The six-bar theme corresponds to Bach's specifications, as does the counterpoint in bar eight, while the upper parts already added by Busoni in the fourth bar deviate from it.
Before Stretta Busoni quoted as reminiscent again the chorale prelude, the ostinato darkly about, heard from the BACH motif bass figures formed and leads to the triumphant conclusion of terzlos ends and so the question leaves open whether the work in major or minor fades .
Background and details
Busoni's early work shows the romantic background of composers such as Schumann , Chopin and Mendelssohn , and later also Johannes Brahms , whom he initially met with respectful distance and whose F minor sonata he played in Vienna in 1884 in the presence of the critic Eduard Hanslick . The influence of the intricate Handel Variations can be demonstrated in the early Chopin Variations op. 22 (BV 213), and Brahms is also present in his concert piece op. 31 a (BV 236) from 1890, which Max Reger praised .
But like no other composer, Johann Sebastian Bach determined the pianistic and compositional-artistic development of Busoni, who later supervised the complete edition of his piano works at Breitkopf & Härtel and provided notes. The importance of Bach, who also worked on his own and other works, is evident in the contrapuntal structure of many of Busoni's works as well as in numerous transcriptions . The difficulty of some of the Bach arrangements is due to the high demands and sound ideas of Busoni, who wanted to raise the templates to the level of a virtuoso . The Fantasia was seen as an attempt to “think through” Bach's work, which was probably conceived as a quadruple fugue, and to “forget” the piano in the process.
Bach's Contrapunctus 14 breaks off after introducing the three themes, without introducing the basic theme of the cycle. The musicologist Philipp Spitta believed that the unfinished work was not part of the cycle, an opinion that other experts also followed. On the other hand, the theme in Contrapunctus 8 does not sound until very late, which is why the doubt expressed by Spitta does not appear inevitable, as it is possible that Bach wanted to let it sound only at the end of the fugue.
Martin Gustav Nottebohm was the first musicologist to state in an edition of the Musik-Welt on March 5, 1881 that the basic theme could be easily combined with the three previously introduced themes. In this case the four fugue themes would begin and end differently, which Donald Francis Tovey believes is characteristic of Bach's compositional handwriting.
Busoni also addressed questions of transcription in his draft of a new aesthetics of musical art dedicated to Rainer Maria Rilke , a music-theoretical work that was received controversially and to which the conservative Wagner admirer Hans Pfitzner responded with his polemic: the danger of futurism. Instead of always playing a work in the same way through slavish fixation on the characters, the interpreter should design it according to the respective circumstances. Starting from the problem of notation, Busoni also addresses his own transcriptions, which have met resistance and which he justifies by stating that every notation is already a transcription. While Beethoven's piano works had the effect of piano transcriptions emanating from the orchestra, Schumann's orchestral works had the opposite effect as orchestrated piano works.
The Elegien BV 249 , written between 1907 and 1909, mark a new beginning in Busoni's development, which he himself interpreted when he stated that he had put on his "very personal face" in them. With their expanded tonality and the bitonal approaches in places , they go beyond the usual functional harmonics of the time, just like the sonatinas , in which bitonal structures can also be found.
In 1954, the young Alfred Brendel recorded the work and later performed it to a small audience in Vienna. For him the fantasia is a unity of “thesis and antithesis, counterpoint and fantasy, Bach and Busoni”. The piano sound is infinitely refined and shows a "new sphere of instrumental art". It is significant that Bach and Liszt - “the basis and summit of piano playing” - were the pillars of his enormous repertoire, since Busoni moves between the contemplation of one and the ecstatic sound magic of the other.
Individual evidence
- ↑ Middelschulte, Wilhelm. In: The music in history and present , Volume 16, Bärenreiter-Verlag 1986, pp. 1276–1277
- ↑ Christoph Flamm: Fantasia contrappuntistica. In: Harenberg piano music guide, 600 works from the baroque to the present , Meyers, Mannheim 2004, p. 236
- ↑ Quoted from: Christoph Flamm: Fantasia contrappuntistica. In: Harenberg piano music guide, 600 works from the baroque to the present , Meyers, Mannheim 2004, 236
- ↑ Reinhard Ermen: Ferruccio Busoni , Rowohlt, Reinbek bei Hamburg 1996. S. 144
- ↑ Christoph Flamm: Elegies. 7 new piano pieces. In: Harenberg piano music guide, 600 works from the baroque to the present, Meyers, Mannheim 2004, p. 231
- ↑ Christoph Flamm: Fantasia contrappuntistica. In: Harenberg piano music guide, 600 works from the baroque to the present , Meyers, Mannheim 2004, p. 237
- ↑ Busoni, Ferruccio Benvenuto. In: The music in past and present, Volume 2, Bärenreiter-Verlag 1986, pp. 525-526
- ^ So Reinhard Ermen: Ferruccio Busoni , Rowohlt, Reinbek bei Hamburg 1996. p. 40
- ↑ Critical report in: Johann Sebastian Bach, The Art of Fugue. Harpsichord (piano), BWV 1080. Edited from the sources by Davitt Moroney, G. Henle Verlag Munich, p. 107
- ↑ Critical report in: Johann Sebastian Bach, The Art of Fugue. Harpsichord (piano), BWV 1080. Edited from the sources by Davitt Moroney, G. Henle Verlag Munich, p. 108
- ↑ Quoted from: Busoni, Ferruccio Benvenuto. In: The music in past and present, Volume 2, Bärenreiter-Verlag 1986, pp. 525-526
- ^ Hermann Grabner : Allgemeine Musiklehre, Bärenreiter-Verlag, Kassel 2001, p. 141
- ↑ Quoted from: Alfred Brendel : Thinking about music. Piper, Munich 1982, page 150