2 Elegies (1907)

The title attached to the first of Busoni’s seven Elegies, Nach der Wendung (After the turning-point), could well be applied to the whole set. In fact, it was the working title for the series before he settled on “Elegies” when the pieces were published in 1908. It was not only Busoni’s first solo piano music for more than ten years but also his first score of any kind after the appearance of his Entwurf einer neuen Ästhetik der Tonkunst (Outline of a New Aesthetic of Music) - a remarkably forward-looking theoretical work which marked a decisive turning point in his development. If the Elegies are less progressive than some of the ideas in the Entwurf, which derived to some extent from late Liszt and surpassed even Schoenberg’s thinking in some ways, they are still represent, as he said, “the very essence” of himself at the time.

Few of the Elegies are actually elegiac. “Are Goethe’s Roman Elegies songs of lament?” he asked. “Practically the opposite,” he affirmed. Nach der Wendung is a harmonically liberated, highly poetic contemplation of the wide-ranging melody introduced in a tonality veering from C to F sharp major at the beginning of the piece. Rarely raising its voice, it reappears in a variety of harmonies and textures - low in the left hand under a delicate carillon in the right, in double octaves ingeniously sustained against a regular triplet pulse of four-note chords in each hand, and low in the right hand over a rumbling or murmuring at the very bottom of the keyboard. The underlying equivocation between C and F sharp major is quietly resolved in favour of the latter in the closing bars.

The third and longest Elegy in the set, Meine Seele bangt und hofft zu Dir, is based on a minor-key version of the Lutheran chorale known to Bach as “Allein Gott in der Höh’ sei Ehr.” The title Busoni gives it, “My Soul Fears and Hopes in Thee,” seems to reflect the conflicting emotions of a composer boldlu but nervously committed to the music of the future and is certainly an apt summary of the events in the piece itself. No sooner is the chorale introduced in the opening bars than rhythmic and harmonic certainty slithers away, to be gently restored with the chorale melody harmonised in triads in the right hand over an ostinato in the left and then dissolved again. And so the chorale prelude goes on, fluctuating between hope and fear, passing through a particularly expressive middle section to a clangourous panic-stricken climax. Fears are calmed, however, into a gently sonorous but hitherto unsuspected area of D major security - which is where, after a gentle barcarolle carried on rocking arpeggios, the Elegy comes to find its tranquil ending.

Three years later Meine Seele bangt und hofft zu Dir was adopted virtually unchanged as the prelude to what Busoni regarded as “one of the most significant works of modern piano literature,” the Fantasia Contrappuntistica.

Gerald Larner ©2004