Berceuse élégiaque Op. 42 K 252a

The year 1909 was a doubly tragic one for Ferruccio Busoni. After his father’s death in May, Busoni musically sublimated his sorrow in the stoical and formally rigorous “Fantasy after J. S. Bach”. The death of his beloved mother, which he learned of in London in October, affected him much more profoundly. He wrote the “Berceuse élégiaque” within a few days, specifying its signification with the sub-title “A Man's Cradle Song at His Mother’s Coffin”. He prefaced the composition with a short poem of his own pen: “When the child’s cradle rocks, / the scales of his fate vacillate; I the path of life disappears, / disappears into the eternal distance.”

Certain aspects of these lines which link birth and death together are directly transposed into the music: the rocking motion at the beginning, the harmonic relationships that are occasionally blurred into indistinctness (“the scales vacillate”), the close that fades away in the rising lines of the multiply divided strings. The original scoring specification “Poem [!] for muted six-fold string quartet [Busoni actually means the unusual f ormation of violin, viola, violoncello and double hass with 6 players to apart], three flutes, one oboe, three clarinets, four horns, gong, harp and celesta” sheds some light on the differentiated use of the instrumental colors. While the key of F major seems to establish a solid harmonic basis, it is only superficial, since the harmony repeatedly wanders into atonality.

The “Berceuse élégiaque” thus ranks among the more progressive works Busoni composed around 1910, at a time when Schoenberg and Webern were also proceeding along their own path to atonality. Understandably enough, Busoni wanted to check the nuances of his orchestral palette in a rehearsal before giving his approval for publication. The score was printed by Breitkopf & Härtel in 1910. Since the Berlin Philharmonie Orchestra clearly showed its distaste for the work, the “Berceuse élégiaque” had to wait until 21 February 1911 for its world premiere, when Gustav Mahler presented a program of contemporary orchestral music by Italian [!] composers in New York’s Carnegie Hall.

Retrospectively, Busoni acknowledged the special importance of his dirge: “In this work … I succeeded for the first time in finding my own sound and in dissolving form into feeling.” Busoni’s “Berceuse élégiaque” achieved greater popularity in an arrangement for nine Instruments than in its original version. This arrangement was discovered in the estate of Arnold Schoenberg in 1957 and published by Breitkopf & Härtel in 1965.

Wiesbaden, Spring 1990
(Frank Reinisc)