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• Personalities
• Classical
• Composer
• Modern Era

(Fer-rooch’-yo Boo-zo’-ne) 1866–1924 Italian-German composer Busoni was a child prodigy, giving concerts from the age of seven and starting to compose soon after. His music was formed from the fruitful tensions between his Latin and Teutonic ancestries and between his reverence for the past – J. S. Bach and Ludwig van Beethoven (1770–1827) above all – and his openness to ...

• Instruments
• Keyboards

sent to all parts of the world. After almost a century of neglect, the harpsichord was taken up by composers as well as performers – most notably, Ferruccio Busoni (1866–1924), Manuel de Falla (1976–1946), Henry Cowell (1897–1965), Frederick Delius (1862–1934), Jean Françaix (b. 1912), Bohuslav Martino (1890–1959), Darius Milhaud (1892–1974), Carl Orff (1895–1982), Francis Poulenc (1899–1963), Igor Stravinsky (1882–1971), ...

• Personalities
• Classical
• Composer
• Modern Era

3 (1964, 1967, 1972) Five Canticles for solo voices and instruments, many folksong arrangements and transcriptions of Purcell Introduction | Modern Era | Classical Personalities | Ferruccio Busoni | Modern Era | Classical ...

• Personalities
• Classical
• Contemporary Classical
• Singer

b. 1944 English baritone Allen’s early career was spent with the Welsh National Opera, in works ranging from Mozart to Britten. He made his Covent Garden debut as Donald in Britten’s Billy Budd in 1971, and his Metropolitan Opera debut as Papageno (The Magic Flute) in 1981. He appeared at English National Opera as Busoni’s Faust in 1986 and ...

• Personalities
• Modern Era
• Opera

with the musical scores of Stravinsky, Honegger, Poulenc and Milhaud. On his return in 1942 he decided to study traditional composition with Jarnach, a former pupil of Busoni, but by 1950 he was using Schoenberg’s 12-tone techniques. Throughout the 1950s, he searched for a unique style. However, unlike Stockhausen and Boulez, who wanted to ...

• Personalities
• Modern Era
• Opera

1925–2012, German In great demand as an opera singer and recitalist, Fischer-Dieskau was the most recorded baritone of the twentieth century. His opera work is remembered for roles such as Berg’s Wozzeck, Busoni’s Faust and Reimann’s Lear, for which he gave the first performance. He was not well suited to the Romantic Italian repertoire, but had ...

• Personalities
• Classical
• Composer
• Late Romantic

in 1886 at the Music Institute of Martin Wegelius, the pioneer of Finnish music education. His strongest impressions there came from a young teacher, the German-Italian composer-pianist Ferruccio Busoni (1866–1924), and in 1889 he went abroad to study in Germany and then Vienna. The Finnish Hero On his return in 1891 to a Finland seething under mounting Russian repression ...

• Personalities
• Classical
• Composer
• Late Baroque

him. In the final unfinished movement of his Art of Fugue (1742–49) Bach quotes the four notes. Many composers since, including Robert Schumann (1810–56), Franz Liszt (1811–86) and Ferrucio Busoni (1866–1924) have consciously used the figure as inspiration. Bach’s works are the apotheosis of contrapuntal and harmonic style. Teachers, composers and musicians of every taste have used his compositions ...

• Personalities
• Classical
• Composer
• Modern Era

(Koort Vil) 1900–50 German/American composer Weill was influenced by his teacher Busoni, by Stravinsky and by the ideal of Zeitoper (opera on contemporary subjects and themes). In his early, successful stage pieces, including Der Protagonist (‘The Protagonist’, 1926) and Royal Palace (1927), he soon moved towards a style, related to jazz and cabaret, that made him ...

• Styles & Forms
• Classical
• Modern Era

post-war development of the prepared piano. Microtonal Music Other composers sought finer differentiation of pitch. As early as 1907, in his Sketch of a New Aesthetic of Music, Busoni had outlined a system of sixth-tones. But it was the Czech composer Alois Hába (1893–1973) who produced the first substantial body of so-called ‘microtonal’ (mainly quarter-tone) music, including a ...

• Performance
• Classical
• Early Romantic

piano technique was unique. The works of the Russian Romantics Modest Mussorgsky (1839–82) and Anton Rubinstein (1829–94), the French Impressionists Debussy and Maurice Ravel (1875–1937), and the great pianist-composers Ferruccio Busoni (1866–1924) and Rachmaninov are all unthinkable without the realization by both Liszt and Paganini that virtuosity can be elevated to the status of great art. As Camille Saint-Saëns (1835–1921) later ...

• Arts & Culture
• Classical
• Modern Era

such as the motor car, it is not surprising that the movement’s members would experiment with electronic music. One of the greatest living Italian composers of the time, Busoni, who had already declared an interest in microtonal music and had prophesied that the future of music would lie with the electric, would have been an obvious leader; ...