HORENSTEIN Busoni: Doktor Faust - Fischer-Dieskau, Shirley (US Première, 1964) - PACO188

The still enigmatic and underappreciated figure of Ferruccio Busoni (1866-1924) features quite prominently in Jascha Horenstein’s life during the Weimar era. Shortly after moving to Berlin in 1920 he attended a series of rehearsals and concerts of music conducted by Busoni and at the same time became close to several members of the composer’s circle. These included Wladimir Vogel and Kurt Weill, who suggested that he accompany them to the open house that Busoni held every afternoon at his residence in Berlin:

From two to three in the afternoon at his home, Busoni hosted musicians, students and sometimes also painters, writers, poets, architects and scientists from all over the world, and we had the enormous pleasure of being in his company for an hour every day. I attended these gatherings many times but we did not have any conversations, it was he who spoke and we who listened. We studied every word he uttered, it was like being at a sermon in church and we were all too shy to say anything to him. He was very highly organized and worked extremely long hours so that exactly at three o’clock he would leave the room, even if we were in the middle of a discussion, to go back to his composing. I saw this happen several times. He always used to say that inspiration is not a gift that appears by itself but comes only as a result of hard work.

Horenstein’s early experiences of Busoni included witnessing his artistry as a pianist (“he went to the stratosphere”), and continued after the composer’s death when he attended a gala memorial performance of Doktor Faust in Frankfurt conducted by Clemens Krauss in 1927. The following year he included the Indian Fantasy with Busoni’s disciple Egon Petri as soloist at one of his Philharmonic concerts in Berlin but thereafter did not return to Busoni’s music until 1962 when he conducted the premiere in Milan of the Piano Concerto. This concert renewed his interest in the Italian composer, whose music he subsequently featured in his programs with some regularity. He considered Doktor Faust “by far” Busoni’s greatest and most representative composition, a work that “has moments of very great inspiration, the culmination of everything he strived for”, and was delighted by the opportunity to conduct its American premiere. Given in concert form at Carnegie Hall, the occasion marked Horenstein’s first appearance on a New York stage for over twenty years as well as the operatic debut in America of baritone Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau. For the New York Times the event “made an immense impression... a wonderful, exciting, provocative evening, one of the most distinguished of the past few seasons.” The in-house recording, made possibly on Horenstein's instructions and published here for the first time, preserves a masterfully shaped performance of beauty, concentrated power and impact that can stand on an equal footing with some of his most successful concerts.

Curiously, the performance of Doktor Faust did not result in any further engagements for Horenstein in New York until five years later, but was followed almost immediately in the UK by the start of a comprehensive BBC project for which he recorded fourteen of Busoni’s orchestral works to commemorate the composer’s centenary in 1966. If Doktor Faust is included, this collection constitutes the most complete traversal of any composer’s music conducted by Horenstein but the recordings, although preserved in the BBC’s archive, still await their first publication.

Misha Horenstein

You can download an annotated libretto in German and English by clicking here.

You can find a 1968 radio interview with Jascha Horenstein on the subject of Busoni (in French) on YouTube here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OUZWzTYslzE