Busoni-Chopin-Liszt. A rather daring introduction, but one truly earned by the greatest master of the art of piano playing now living. Audiences assembled in greater or lesser numbers to hear favorite exponents of different instruments. Some (or at least those who know what each great artist stands for) come to be thrilled, others to be cajoled, others to be sentimentally lulled to sleep if need be - all legitimate, of course, and no fault to be found. But, how few of the thousands who yearly attend recitals stop to think that in art as in life we only bring to each experience that which is within ourselves, no more no less. If art is, as it should be, the well rounded expression of ourselves, plus the subtle invisible something called intuition, why look for sentiment and "feeling" only, to play the chief role in the exposition of the musical story, any more than it does in the occurrences of our daily lives? Some few there are who express their innermost, strongest feeling by an all pervading human largeness which leaves no room for the display of any one particular attribute; and among these, Ferruccio Busoni looms colossal by reason of his superhuman technical mastery, and the greatness of a nature so busily employed by the insistent call of mankind in giving of the largeness of its own limitless endowment, that it cannot even pause to consider whether or not that same world "understands." This, by way of digression, since the subject of Mr. Busoni's art cannot be quickly dismissed in the form of a musical review and left at that. In talking over the peculiar form his programs take, Mr. Busoni said: "I cannot play the things that the public seems to crave - that is, if I am to judge from the programs of other recitalists; I must play pieces that I am happiest in the doing." Following his bent, therefore, he played at his Boston recital in Jordan Hall February 29, four ballades of Chopin, op. 23, 38, 47 and 52; four etudes of Liszt, the "Mazeppa," "Feux Follets," "Appasionata," and "La Campanella"; the two legends, "St. Francis of Assisi" and "St. Francis of Paula," and closed with the colossal "Don Juan Fantasie," all by the same master. An almost hair raising program that would seem impossible for anyone else to perform, but which Ferruccio Busoni carried out in a manner that held the absorbed and breathless attention of the large audience that packed the hall, and which made no move to leave until, after recalling the artist many times, he at length responded with the Schubert-Liszt "Erl King," for encore. As a bare outline pure and simple, this account would suffice, but in order to satisfy the demands of that part of the absent public, a few remarks as to how he played would seem to be in order. Mr. Busoni lifts his Chopin into a rarefied atmosphere of beauty that has none of the hysterical neuroticism usually associated with the playing of that composer. The introduction to the opus 38 was given with an ethereal loveliness of effect that made the contrast tenfold greater as against the stormy passages following. The opening of the opus 47 sounded for all the world like a mystic soft footed marshalling of the shadows of some dim long forgotten past, and again the dazzling clarity of the great bravura following made an almost breathless contrast, so swiftly and smoothly did one mood follow the other. The Liszt playing was technically tremendous, as without giving his hearers the least impression of the greatness of his task, Mr. Busoni played all with a convincing mastery that held the "deeps" of each composition (and there are depths in Liszt's works, when played by a master hand) to the view of the most unthinking among his hearers. To say that the runs and trills were like cascades of rippling silver, and the chord passages like those of a titan commanding supreme keyboard mastery, would seem almost unnecessary, since the same has been said many times and in many languages, but, the fault of repetition, if fault it be, lies wholly with the astonishing revelation of Ferruccio Busoni the master craftsman himself who thus explains his attitude toward life and art in the closing paragraph of his booklet: "A New Esthetic of Music." "I felt that the book I shall write will be neither in English nor in Latin, and this for the one reason, namely, that the language in which it may be given me not only to write but also to think, will not be Latin, or English, or Italian, or Spanish, but a language not even one of whose words I know, a language in which dumb things speak to me, and in which it may be I shall at last have to respond in my grave to an 'Unknown Judge.'"
