Ferruccio Dante Michelangiolo Benvenuto Busoni was born in Empoli, in Tuscany, on 1 April 1866, the only child of two professional musicians — his father Ferdinando a clarinettist, his mother Anna a pianist — and the family moved to Trieste shortly afterwards. He was taught largely by his father and made his public debut with his parents at the Schiller-Verein in Trieste on 24 November 1873, aged seven, playing Mozart, Schumann and Clementi. Of the concert tours his parents then arranged he said later, “I never had a childhood.”

From the ages of nine to eleven he studied at the Vienna Conservatory, where the critic Eduard Hanslick received him warmly; in 1877 he heard Liszt play and was introduced to him. A short period of study with Wilhelm Mayer followed in Graz, and then, on Brahms’s recommendation, study in Leipzig with Carl Reinecke. In 1888 Hugo Riemann recommended him to Helsingfors — Helsinki — for a post teaching advanced piano, his first permanent job; there he became a friend of Sibelius and met Gerda Sjöstrand, whom he married. He won the first Anton Rubinstein Competition in 1890 with his Konzertstück, taught at the Moscow Conservatoire, and in 1891 moved to the New England Conservatory in Boston, resigning after a year to tour the eastern United States. From 1894 Berlin was his base, and he lived by exhausting tours as a virtuoso; he spent much of the First World War in Switzerland. He died in Berlin on 27 July 1924, aged 58, leaving the opera Doktor Faust unfinished.

Almost none of that playing survives as sound. Busoni recorded for Columbia in London twice — on 18–19 November 1919 and again on 27 February 1922 — and only the 1922 takes were published, four double-sided 78s running to some twenty-six minutes in all: Bach’s Prelude and Fugue in C, the Bach-Busoni chorale prelude “Nun freut euch, lieben Christen gmein”, the Beethoven-Busoni Ecossaises, Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsody No. 13 and four Chopin pieces. The rest was destroyed in a fire at the Columbia factory. He recorded none of his own works. Set against those few sides is a much larger body of reproducing-piano rolls — Welte-Mignon from 1905 to 1907, some Hupfeld, and a Duo-Art series cut for the Aeolian company in London around 1920 that runs to the complete Chopin Preludes, Op. 28. Every recording listed here is one or the other, and each roll transfer says so.

Busoni’s standing as a pianist rests mostly on people who heard him, because he barely recorded. Nimbus, who transfer his Duo-Art rolls, put it plainly: many great pianists of the period never made gramophone records at all, “or in the case of Busoni made very few and hated doing so”. The whole issued Columbia legacy is about twenty-six minutes of music. On it he plays Bach, Chopin and Liszt and nothing of his own, and he treats a printed text as something to be worked on: the Prelude Op. 28 No. 7 runs into the “Black Keys” study across a bridge passage he improvised himself.

The rolls are the larger half of the legacy and the contested half. Wikipedia records that their “value … in ascertaining Busoni’s performance style is a matter of some dispute”. Egon Petri, his closest pupil, said they were a travesty of his teacher’s playing; Gunnar Johansen, who had heard Busoni in the hall, allowed only Liszt’s Feux follets to be “really something unique” and called the Chopin “a plain misalliance”. They are also the only place a listener can hear him at length — the Bach-Busoni Chaconne, the twenty-four Chopin Preludes, Liszt’s Rigoletto and Don Juan paraphrases, the Réminiscences de Norma — none of which reached a disc.

His teaching line ran through Egon Petri, Dmitri Mitropoulos, Michael von Zadora and Edward Steuermann, and his composition pupils included Kurt Weill, Edgard Varèse, Otto Luening and Stefan Wolpe. Most pianists still meet him as an editor and transcriber, through the Bach-Busoni Editions. What these recordings preserve is the other half of that figure: the player, disputed evidence and all.

Sources:

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferruccio_Busoni
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferruccio_Busoni
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferruccio_Busoni
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferruccio_Busoni
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferruccio_Busoni
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferruccio_Busoni
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferruccio_Busoni
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferruccio_Busoni
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferruccio_Busoni
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferruccio_Busoni
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferruccio_Busoni
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferruccio_Busoni
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferruccio_Busoni
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferruccio_Busoni
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferruccio_Busoni
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferruccio_Busoni_discography_(as_pianist)
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferruccio_Busoni_discography_(as_pianist)
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferruccio_Busoni_discography_(as_pianist)
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferruccio_Busoni_discography_(as_pianist)
• https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q219551
• https://www.naxos.com/CatalogueDetail/?id=8.110777
• https://www.wyastone.co.uk/grand-piano-essays
• https://www.wyastone.co.uk/grand-piano-essays
• https://www.forte-piano-pianissimo.com/Ferruccio-Busoni.html
• https://www.forte-piano-pianissimo.com/Ferruccio-Busoni.html
• https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:FilePath/FerruccioBusoni1913.jpg
• https://www.youtube.com/oembed?format=json&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DloqQKhqlZCg
• https://exploremusic.eu/wp-json/wp/v2/posts?slug=busoni-performer