Toccata k287 (1921)

Ciaconna: ellegro risoluto

When Busoni wrote that his Toccata was “very severe and not too congenial” he was being far too hard on it. His opinion was no doubt coloured by the memory of the “anguish and unstable emotions” from which it had arisen but which are not, in fact, its most obvious characteristics. While it is true that some of its themes derive from material associated with evil in his operas Die Brautwahl and Doktor Faust, few of his listeners could ever have recognised them for what they are and what they represent. It is essentially a 20th-century tribute, highly subjective though it is, to the Bach toccata.

Busoni would obviously have been aware that, after Schumann’s early masterpiece in C major Op.7, if not before, toccata no longer meant what it had meant to Bach. He might even have known Prokofiev’s Op.11 – another virtuso display of digital energy driven by the same kind of rhythms and the same breathless tempo throughout – which so sensationally followed Schumann’s nearly 80 years later. But for a Bach devotee like Busoni, who had made editions of three of Bach’s harpsichord toccatas, it could still mean a construction in three or four movements, including a central Adagio. Interestingly, however, in his own Toccata he begins not with a prelude in the manner of Bach but wirh a short example of the modern toccata – which, although it is piously headed Preludio, is the only way to describe this A-flat-minor study in stacatissimo quavers driven at a relentlessly quasi presto tempo.

The second movement, the centre piece of the work, not only boasts a Bachian title and Bachian figuration but also takes advantage of the freedom traditionally associated with the fantasia to register abrupt changes of subject, mood and tempo. The main theme, a legato line rising in the right hand over a rumbling ostinato low in the left, makes its first entry in the initial Sostenuto, quasi adagio tempo. That gives way to a short Allegretto un poco vivace, which introduces a motif of little apparent relevance at this stage. In the next section, however – an Andante tranquillo beginning, after a pause, with a melody in sotto voce octaves – that motif reappears as part of a very quiet and comparatively extended contrapuntal episode. A final Più tranquillo section recalls the legato main theme, now in the left hand under semiquaver arpeggios, before accelerating into the transition to the third movement.

Whereas Bach preferred to end his toccatas with a fugue, Busoni presents a chaconne – a tough and uncompromising Allegro risoluto based on the four-bar theme in sarabande rhythm (beginning with an octave leap and then rising and falling in semitonal steps) which is heard in the left hand alone at the outset. No effort is made to charm or ingratiate as, with steely virtuosity, the theme goes through its cycle towards two accelerations and a final affirmation of the implacable sarabande rhythm in A flat minor. Whatever the truth of the composer’s assessment of the congeniality of the work, the quotation he put at the top, Non è senza difficultà che si arriva al fine – “It is not without difficulty that one gets to the end” – is a fair warning.