# Bach Busoni -- What was done and your thoughts



## regenmusic (Oct 23, 2014)

Can someone explain what Busoni did with Bach's works? Any thoughts on it in general?


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## regenmusic (Oct 23, 2014)

Bach/Busoni - Prelude & Fugue in E-flat major ("St. Anne"), BWV 552 - John Ogdon


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## Mandryka (Feb 22, 2013)

regenmusic said:


> Can someone explain what Busoni did with Bach's works? Any thoughts on it in general?


It's a long time since I studied this. You need to get hold of his Sketch of a New Aesthetic of Music, and maybe also the prefaces to one of his transcriptions - I can't remember possibly the Goldbergs or WTC.

I think his early idea is that in a transcription he's presenting an idea of Bach's in a new way. He talked about the "re-poeticisation" of Bach's archetypes. In transcribing an organ piece, for example, he would try to capture some of the grandeur of organ sounds that Bach had in mind, that sort of thing. What's important is getting at the effects the composer meant.

But then in later work the borders between transcription and composition become completely blurred, in the Fantasia Contrappuntastica for example.


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## Headphone Hermit (Jan 8, 2014)

I like Busoni's transcriptions of Bach's works. I very much enjoy Nikolai Demidenko's two discs of Bach-Busoni on the Hyperion label.

I'm not an expert on what he did (Mandryka explains it more elegantly than I can), but it seems that in some places he transposed the work (for example, from organ to modern piano) without much alteration of the piece but at other times he used the Bach work as an inspiration for a much more radical re-interpretation of it (almost a 'variations on a theme from Bach'). In some pieces, it is Bach arranged by Busoni but in other places it is Busoni informed by Bach - and probably the balance shifts even in one piece of music


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## regenmusic (Oct 23, 2014)

Bach (Busoni) - Ich ruf zu dir, Herr Jesu Christ - Horowitz





Johann Sebastian Bach, Maria Tipo plays the Ferruccio Busoni Transcriptions

Anyone know the total amount of Bach works Busoni lent his hand to?


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## Pugg (Aug 8, 2014)

http://www.bach-cantatas.com/NVD/PT-Busoni-Rec5.htm

Perhaps this will help you a little bit further.


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