Bach-Busoni Editions

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.

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).

[5] "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.

[9][10][11] He most often used the term Bearbeitung for transcriptions of music originally written for an instrument in which the tone is produced by plucking or striking a string, e.g., harpsichord, clavichord, or lute.

")[13] The organ, because of the full tone and sometimes massive sound, as in, for example, Toccata and Fugue in D minor, and, in addition, the use of the feet with the pedalboard, presents a particular challenge in piano transcription.

Busoni wrote a 36-page essay "On the Transcription of Bach's Organ Works for the Pianoforte" which appeared as the First Appendix to Volume I of the Klavierwerke, originally published in 1894.

A typical Busoni remark appears as a footnote: "Musical commoners still delight in decrying modern virtuosi as spoilers of the classics; and yet Liszt and his pupils (Bülow, Tausig) have done things for spreading a general understanding for Bach and Beethoven beside which all theoretico-practical pedantry seems bungling, and all brow-puckering cogitations of stiffly solemn professors unfruitful.

As the composer and musicologist Larry Sitsky says, "his whole method of doubling, registration (octave placement on the keyboard), pedal, and pianistic distribution is superior to Tausig's.

Although it is not concerned specifically with the music of Bach, the second collected edition of Busoni's Klavierübung was published by Breitkopf & Härtel posthumously (in 1925) as volume 8 of this series (cat.