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The Italian composer and pianist Ferruccio Busoni was extremely productive and tried various styles from neoclassicism to the avant-garde, but today his arrangements of Johann Sebastian Bach’s keyboard works are among his most frequently performed pieces.
Bach’s music interested Busoni throughout his entire life – as a composer writing in the polyphonic technique, as a historian and, of course, as a concert pianist. Busoni said that “Performing a work is already a transcription of it.” Whosesoever music he was performing (Bach, Mozart, Liszt or Mendelssohn) his interpretation was always extremely individualistic. Many of these spontaneously improvised transcriptions were never recorded and were lost to history, although there are rather a few transcriptions of Bach that survive. Among them are the chorale Nun komm der Heiden Heiland (Now Come, Saviour of the Gentiles) . Bach turned to the text by Martin Luther on numerous occasions, using it in three church cantatas and five different organ preludes. Busoni’s piano transcription is probably one of his ten arrangements of choral preludes completed between 1907 and 1909.
The Six English Suites appeared no later than 1720, among a tremendous number of instrumental works that Bach composed while he was serving in Keten. From that time on, Bach used them as didactic material – to instruct his pupils in keyboard playing and particularly in composition. Unlike the French Suites and Partitas he subsequently wrote, in the English Suites the demonstration of genius is somewhat intentional in character. In the Suite in A Minor, the performer must overcome numerous technical difficulties, while the listener must evaluate the polyphonic fanciful constructions in the suite of dances.
Frédéric Chopin composed almost two dozen nocturnes, starting in 1829 as a young man and continuing until his death. By that time, the genre already had a long history. Initially, the nocturnes were called Catholic Church evening services, and in the 18th century they began to be known as orchestral suites that were performed at night time – a kind of serenade. This is what Mozart’s orchestral nocturnes are like.
The genre was rediscovered in 1812 by the Irish musician John Field. He succeeded in transforming the nocturne into drawing room music for the piano – it was at this time that “night scenes” began to gain in popularity in theatres, lit by the moonlight, sometimes idyllic, sometimes gloomy or “gothic”. In turn, Chopin transformed the nocturne into something akin to “songs without words”. In his nocturnes, starting with his very first opuses, he imitates various vocal genres – arias, romances and even chorales. The performer has to be able to sing on the piano. And as the bel canto style was in fashion and Chopin was a fanatical admirer of opera, the melodies of the nocturnes are typically “lit up” with extremely virtuoso ornamental passages.
An étude is a piece based on strictly defined academic techniques (this may be scale-like passages, triads, arrangements of octaves or double terzettos). In the 19th century many éttudes were composed, written to develop performance technique on all sorts of instruments and which had no independent artistic value. These pieces were written by such pianists as Muzio Clementi, Carl Czerny and the violinist Rodolphe Kreutzer. Chopin’s éttudes are not mere exercises, rather they are stunning concert pieces in which the technical complexities are not self-important. Although they do allow the performer’s mastery to dazzle – after all, the composer himself was an unsurpassed virtuoso! Chopin wrote two series of études (opuses 10 and 25); he started work on the first when still in Warsaw and completed it in Paris, which came to be his second homeland.
Robert Schumann’s Kreisleriana, Op. 16, appeared in 1838. The composer himself stated that it took him just four days to compose, though completing and perfecting the work took from late April to September. The piano cycle consists of eight fantaisies. Its title is a reference to Hoffmann’s first novella from Fantasiestücke in Callots Manier – Johannes Kreislers, des Kapellmeisters, musikalische Leiden.
Johannes Kreisler was a mask for Hoffmann himself to hide behind when he wished to speak of music or to compose. He appears in several of Hoffmann’s works – always as an eccentric who is fanatically devoted to music, an admirer of Bach and Corelli and an enemy of philistines. He was not noted for his gravity and Hoffmann’s texts which are devoted to him are filled with fantasy and are highly fragmentary.
Schumann was sensitive to the tiniest details of Hoffmann’s prose. He himself had, after all, no mean literary talent and in his youth he even considered becoming a writer. In Kreisleriana he created a musical analogue of Hoffmann’s romantic fantasies – eight pieces in which the mood changes sharply and unpredictably and in which themes that have already been heard return when they are least expected.
Anna Bulycheva
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