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10 A Stroll with Ferruccio Busoni Unpublished M. R. The letter from Count Seilern-Aspang concluded with the following words: “Tomorrow evening Busoni will be dining with us, and will perhaps play a few miniatures afterward. It would be delightful if you could come. I have just heard that you are in London; please do join us.” The evening approached. The count’s head chef in London did the noble family credit, even more so the “butler” who, with a sanctifying hand, poured red and blond alcoholic drinks into the glittering glasses. The conversation soon moved on from the initial mezzopiano to disembogue into a sonorous fortissimo. The red and violet ®ecks on the faces of the highly digni¤ed guests, along with their numbed, somewhat glazed gazes, were quite remarkable. And now to our friend Ferruccio Busoni, who approached the piano with a light step and enticed Beethoven’s solemn, ethereal Sonata op. 109 out of the instrument. Naturally he repeated all of the ¤nal movement’s variations. Whoever believed that his honorable obligations had been ful¤lled and that one now had to conjure rather more approachable gentilities out of the piano was sorely mistaken, for Busoni mercilessly let rip with Schumann’s Etudes symphoniques, performed six lesser known Lisztiana, and rounded off the gastronomically and musically festive evening with three longish pieces from Chopin’s musical treasure trove. It goes without saying that Busoni performed everything with technical perfection and wit, and that the audience, accustomed to lighter fare, were not in a position to keep up with him. We stepped out into the spring night and, captivated by its magic, decided to make our way home on foot. We had been silent for a long while, when Busoni¤nally decided that the time had come to subject the somewhat cool behavior of the aristocratic company at Count Seilern-Aspang’s to indirect criticism by pitting his own greatness against the illusory splendor of society. He began with an inspired gesture: “Oh, my dear friend, there is something so magni¤cent when one is neither restrained by any technical ties, nor inhibited by any dif¤culty, and is completely given over to the deepest feelings when proclaiming the word, the spirit, of the composer as a gospel to the lumpish world at large!” I appeared shaken to my core. There followed an uneasy pause. Then, with a determined step, I approached my school friend, shook him warmly by his limply hanging right hand, and said to him in a trembling voice: “I thank you from the bottom of my heart: you will get there one day too.” Our laughter rang out in the spring night. Busoni’s essay Sketch of a New Aesthetic of Music1 contains a passage about transcendental interpretation akin to the one he shared with Rosenthal after they left Count Seilern-Aspang’s, making one wonder if Busoni had published the essay at the time of this afterdinner conversation or was still formulating his ideas for it—and trying them out on his colleagues: If Nirvana be the realm ’beyond the Good and the Bad,’ one way leading thither is here pointed out. A way to the very portal. To the bars that divide Man from Eternity—or that open to admit that which was temporal . Beyond that portal sounds music. Not the strains of ‘musical art.’— It may be, that we must leave Earth to ¤nd that music. But only to the pilgrim who has succeeded on the way in freeing himself from earthly shackles, shall the bars open. A Stroll with Ferruccio Busoni 57 ...

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