Busoni: Turandot Suite / 2 Studies For Doktor Faust

Description

Ferruccio Busoni (1866-1924)Dante Michelangeli Benvenuto Ferruccio Busoni was born at Empoli, near Florence, in 1866, the only child of an Italian clarinettist father and a pianist mother of German paternal ancestry. He made his debut as a pianist in Trieste in 1874, going to Vienna for study and performance the following year. On the advice of Brahms he moved to Berlin in 1886, studying with Carl Reinecke, before teaching spells at the conservatories in Helsinki and Moscow.Performance occupied much of his attention until the turn of the new century, when composition began to assume a new importance, though never dominance, in his career. Apart from a period in Zurich during the First World War, he lived in Berlin from 1894 until his death.The essence of Busoni's music lies in its synthesis of his Italian and German ancestry: emotion and intellect; the imaginative and the systematic. Despite acclaim from composer and performer colleagues, his music remained the preserve of an informed few. Neither inherently conservative nor aggressively radical, his harmonic and tonal innovations were bound up with an essentially re-creative approach to the musical past which has only gained wider currency in recent decades.Turandot SuiteComposed in the summer of 1905, Busoni's Turandot Suite was written purely as a response to reading the play by Carlo Gozzi, whose centenary it was the following year. A production using Busoni's music did not take place until Max Reinhardt's staging in Berlin in 1911. Although the music is restricted to scene changes and places where it is dramatically relevant, the comic-fantastic essence of Gozzi's play is readily conveyed. There are nine movements:Scene 1: The Execution, the City Gate and the DepartureAn ominous opening in wind and percussion, depicts the spiked heads, over the city gates of Beijing, of the suitors who have failed to answer Princess Turandot's three riddles. Excitement mounts as Prince Calaf approaches, with the bold intention to win the Princess's hand or die.Scene 2: Truffaldino's MarchA bustling introduction on strings introduces us to Truffaldino, chief eunuch to the royal establishment. The Marcia grotesca for wind which follows is witty and amusing.Scene 3: Altoum's MarchA fanfare, derived from an ancient Persian melody, leads into dignified music for the old Emperor. The climax of the procession is one of noble splendour, offset by the return of the fanfare.Scene 4: Turandot's MarchTurandot's March is the longest movement and a representation of the Princess in all her cold, ruthless beauty. The music comes gradually and forbiddingly into focus, then the orchestra, playing an original Chinese melody, the Turandot theme, quietly portrays her veiled beauty. The lifting of her veil ends the movement with a passionate outburst.Scene 5: Turandot's ChamberTurandot's Chamber provides a brief interlude, scored mainly for flutes and harps, as Turandot is dressed and ornamented for her meeting with Calaf. The i