Bach-Busoni Edition

The Bach-Busoni Editions are a series of publications by the Italian pianist-composer Ferruccio Busoni (1866–1924) containing primarily piano transcriptions of keyboard music by Johann Sebastian Bach. They also include performance suggestions, practice exercises, musical analysis, an essay on the art of transcribing Bach's organ music for piano, an analysis of the fugue from Beethoven's 'Hammerklavier' sonata, and other related material. The later editions also include free adaptations and original compositions by Busoni which are based on the music of Bach.

Busoni issued his Bach editions over a nearly 30-year span in two collections: the 25-volume Busoni Ausgabe (Joh. Seb. Bach Klavierwerke) and the Bach-Busoni Collected Edition (Bach-Busoni Gesammelte Ausgabe), which was first issued in 6 volumes in 1916, and subsequently in 7 volumes in 1920. A small collection of selected excerpts with transcriptions of organ and violin music was also published separately in 1916 as Sechs Tonstücke (Six Tone Pieces).

In 1870 Busoni began learning to play the piano while the family was living in Paris, shortly before his fourth birthday. His mother, Anna Weiß-Busoni, a well-regarded professional pianist, was his teacher. Not long afterward, the family returned to Trieste, and his father, Ferdinando, a professional clarinetist, went on tour. Early in 1873, upon returning to Trieste, his father took charge of Ferruccio's musical education, including instruction in composition as well as piano. "I have to thank my father for the good fortune that he kept me strictly to the study of Bach in my childhood," Busoni wrote in the epilogue to the Collected Edition,

and that in a country in which the master was rated little higher than a Carl Czerny. My father was a simple virtuoso on the clarinet, who liked to play fantasias on Il Trovatore and the Carnival of Venice; he was a man of incomplete musical education, an Italian and a cultivator of the bel canto. How did such a man in his ambition for his son's career come to hit upon the very thing that was right? I can only compare it to a mysterious revelation. In this way he educated me to be a "German" musician and showed me the path that I never entirely deserted, though at the same time I never cast off the Latin qualities given me by nature.

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