Ferruccio Busoni

Ferruccio Dante Michelangiolo Benvenuto Busoni was an Italian composer, pianist, conductor, editor, writer, and teacher. His international career and reputation led him to work closely with many of the leading musicians, artists and literary figures of his time, and he was a sought-after keyboard instructor and a teacher of composition.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article on Ferruccio Busoni.

From the period sources

Ferruccio Busoni, born near Florence, received his initial musical training from his parents, his father a clarinettist and his German mother an accomplished pianist. He made his debut as a pianist in Vienna at the age of eight, later studying there under Professor Hans Schmitt and in Graz under W. A. Remy, whose real name was Dr. Wilhelm Mayer, according to Grove’s Dictionary (1922). Remy, a lawyer by training who only took up music professionally in 1862, counted Busoni among his “most eminent pupils,” alongside Kienzl and Weingartner.

By seventeen, Busoni’s talent was recognized with election to the Reale Accademia Filarmonica in Bologna, and Florence honored him with a gold medal (A Biographical Dictionary of Musicians, 1900). He moved to Leipzig in 1886 to focus on composition, but financial considerations led him to accept teaching posts, first at the Helsingfors Conservatorium in 1888, then at the Imperial Conservatoire in Moscow in 1890, after winning the Rubinstein prize. A “piano-virtuoso of high rank” and a “composer of promise” (A Biographical Dictionary of Musicians, 1900), Busoni was noted for his “superb” technique and “great” power of poetical interpretation, playing in the “romantic school” (Grove’s Dictionary, 1904). Among his “very original” works (A Biographical Dictionary of Musicians, 1900) is an edition of Bach’s “Well-tempered Clavichord” with critical notes and etudes, and he was “almost unrivalled” in his arrangements of Bach’s organ works for piano (Grove’s Dictionary, 1904).