Ferrucio Busoni’s years in Switzerland were, arguably, among his most difficult. With World War I roaring around him, this born citizen of the world for the first time in his life felt adrift. Europe, scarred by razor wire and trench warfare, had become in his eyes a “monster madhouse”; its citizens hopelessly intoxicated by a lust for war which he feared would lead them and their civilization into oblivion. The United States, from where Busoni had recently returned, seemed to him in some ways worse. He was disillusioned by what he perceived as the country’s bankrupt intellectual life; its obsession with avarice and triviality disgusted him. Nevertheless, he eventually settled into his new surroundings in Zurich, and from his small apartment on Scheuchzerstraße began to create for himself a small oasis wherein the life of the mind would remain unsullied.
Just a little over a century later, pianist Steven Vanhauwaert looks in the mirror and finds shadows of Busoni looking back at him. The world in 2021 is a vastly different place from the one where the great composer-pianist lived in. Yet with the COVID-19 crisis still engulfing the world, the present historic moment has provided an unexpected moment for Vanhauwaert to contemplate the meaning of his role as musician, of the future of music itself.
“The reality of my profession is that most concerts have disappeared,” he explained to me during a recent phone interview. “There are people who are literally suffering. I’m already so fortunate, but I try to be careful. Now that concert life has stopped, I took the time to reassess my feelings about music, why I play.”
Part of that reassessment has been helped along by his lifelong fascination with Busoni, which had been sparked in his childhood.
“I had been very fascinated by the playing of pianists of the golden age,” Vanhauwaert recalled. “Their sound was imprinted with a big signature, a unique way of stating themselves. Of course, as a young pianist, I was aware of his incredible transcriptions. These are famous, putting him in the category of romantic superhero pianists.”
And then a brief pause on the line.
“But my father had an LP with Busoni playing his own works and arrangements on piano rolls. They gave a good sense of who he was as a performance artist. It was profoundly inspirational, my introduction to his playing. Very unique.”
In life Busoni was not only one of the great pianists, composers, and musical thinkers of his time. For many, he was also their beloved mentor; a teacher who understood as too few teachers do that teaching itself is an art, one which requires the greatest care, practice, and discipline. Instead of imposing himself upon his students, he developed each student’s unique abilities so they could fulfill their own artistic destinies. From him emanated countless rays which helped light the way for the manifold contradictory paths of 20th century music. Dimitri Mitropoulos and Otto Luening. Kurt Weill and Stefan Wolpe. Percy Grainger and Edgard Varèse. All were among his pupils.
“Busoni never formed his own school of thought, as it were. He was too original, too independent for that.”
Although born decades after Busoni’s death, Vanhauwaert, too, fell under the sway of his magnetism.
“I was really struck by his mastery of composition. He composed this music which seemed to be really not based on anything else.”
Among the works which Vanhauwaert fell in love with was “Nach der Wendung (Recueillement)” (or "After the Turn" in English), the first of Busoni’s seven Elegies for solo piano. Together with that set’s closing “Berceuse,” they bookend Vanhauwaert’s recent recording of Busoni for Editions Hortus.
“If you look at the score of ‘Nach der Wendung (Recueillement),’ you can hear what Busoni is trying to do, charting out an acoustic effect which is complex, enigmatic. That was really the piece he wrote to strike out a new path, his vision of where music could go. Busoni’s thinking became really influential for a lot of composers. He advocated for a lot of avant-garde techniques. He himself didn't pursue their ultimate extremes.”
On the same disc, Vanhauwaert gives equal say to the side of Busoni which he described as “full of flash and virtuosity”: his transcriptions.
“In these works Busoni demonstrates exactly how to create something in order to get a reaction from his audience.” Another quick pause. “But sometimes at the end,” and here Vanhauwaert’s tone changes in a slight, but perceptible way, as if to reflect that which he is about to describe, “he shies away from that surface brilliance, suddenly placing unexpected chord changes which take the listener into an entirely different direction.”
Vanhauwaert then told me that he felt a lot of recordings of Busoni’s music tend to emphasize the composer’s extroversion, but that he sought to highlight the introspective qualities of his music, his subtle handling of harmony.
“Busoni thinks like a colorist,” he tells me. “It’s very complicated music to wrap your head around. Hardly any of his music is straightforward in expression.”
More straightforward, perhaps, but emerging from another troubled time are the works which Vanhauwaert recorded together with his friend, violinist Ambroise Aubrun.
Fleeing Nazi persecution in Europe, composers Darius Milhaud and Erich Zeisl each found refuge in a California that was quickly transforming from rural backwater along the sea into the cosmopolitan cultural and technological center it would become in the postwar. It was the era of Hollywood, the first freeways, the completion of the Golden Gate Bridge, the early roots of what would decades later be called Silicon Valley.
“For a lot of composers here in Southern California who attempted to work in Hollywood, the reality they confronted was fraught with terrible complications, often resulting in them not getting credited or even paid.”
Milhaud landed a teaching position in Mills College in Oakland. A little later he was also one of the co-founders of the Music Academy of the West in Santa Barbara. Zeisl had a harder time at first, struggling to find his footing in his adopted home. With the help of his friend Milhaud, he eventually found work in the shadows of the film studios, before finally settling into teaching positions at Los Angeles City College and at the Brandeis-Bardin Institute (later known as the American Jewish University).
A miniature from this period, which Aubrun and Vanhauwaert found in the special collections of the UCLA Music Library and subsequently recorded, hardly indicates the tumultuous times from which it came. It opens a recital, also released by Editions Hortus last year, which includes music by Milhaud and Mozart.
“It stood out to us,” Vanhauwaert said of the "Zigeunerweise" movement from Zeisl's Suite for Violin and Piano, Op. 2. “It charmed us so much that we recorded it right then and there. It’s a very different work from the Brandeis Sonata on the same album. It speaks to the heart.”
Across the vastness of time, the worries of Zeisl, Milhaud, and Busoni parallel many of the concerns of our own transitional times; wherein old truths have suddenly crumbled into dust, and new ones emerge to take their place. Vanhauwaert, through it all, remains hopeful — for his own future, as well as that of music.
“I’m optimistic for the success of the vaccines and hopeful that concert life can slowly resume. The current situation is not sustainable. Concert life, social life are not just small details in our existences. Our lives need those connections with others. Now we have these Zoom meetings which may seem like the future. I’m grateful to do things like that, but being online is no substitute for actually being in the hall and listening to music live. I want that visceral energy of that moment back.”