Le 30 juin 2017
de 16h00 à 16h30
Le Patio (université de Strasbourg)
22 rue René Descartes, 67000 Strasbourg
salle 3206
Séance précomposée - Liszt after Liszt - Liszt après Liszt
Pré-acte / Acte
Auteur : Mariateresa Storino
The Elegies for piano (1908-1909) fill a special place among the instrumental works by Ferruccio Busoni. The composer declared to have find his entire personality «at last and for the first time in the Elegies». Some of these pieces were built up from already extant materials; all they seem to be constructed on the basis of Busoni’s theory of 113 scales.
Busoni’s Elegies resemble some outputs of Liszt’s final decade. As Liszt, Busoni guides the public into his experimental music by well-known dances (Tarantella), folk songs (Fenesta che lucive), citations of his works (Turandot and Die Brautwahl).
Aim of this paper is to analyse Busoni’s Elegies in order to show the Lisztian inheritance in Busoni’s experimental language. The analysis will focus on Elegies n. 1, 5 and 6 and on a comparison of these pieces with Nuages gris, Unstern, Csárdás macabre, En rêve, Recuillement, La lugubre gondola by Liszt. A discussion of the pieces on the basis of both Busoni’s harmonic theory and Liszt’s assertions about Fétis’s ‘ordre omnitonique’ will be followed by the application of a neo-riemannian approach.
The resemblances between Busoni’s Elegies and Liszt’s final piano works permit also to reflect about the implication of the term ‘elegy’. Both composers express ‘elegiac’ affects in works that call the listener to intense and inward concentration. By means of a research for new musical practices the two composers create musical autobiographical dramas in the stream-of-consciousness style of the twentieth century.
