About this Piece

Ferruccio Busoni’s Piano Concerto is one of the great outliers of classical music—a piece musicians speak of in awed tones but most audiences have never had the chance to experience in live performance. Its sheer scale and eccentric construction have kept it far from the mainstream repertory, even as those who know it regard it as one of the most audacious creations of its era.

The concerto seems almost to have been smuggled in from an alternative musical universe. The composer himself half-jokingly referred to it as his “Skyscraper Concerto,” a name that captures not only its sheer size and ambition but also the dizzying sense of height and symbolic architecture it aspires to. The piece is too large, too contradictory, too symbolically charged to behave like a “concerto” in any normal sense. Yet Busoni did not dream it up as an act of provocation.

He left a remarkable clue to his intentions in a 1903 letter to his wife, Gerda, in which he enclosed a fantastical diagram of the concerto’s architecture. In Busoni’s sketch, the first, third, and fifth movements rise as massive buildings, while the second and fourth unfold in symbolic landscapes—the scherzo as a miraculous flower visited by exotic birds (“freaks of nature”) and the tarantella as a volcanic scene of Vesuvius and cypress trees. The entire imaginary edifice has a single entrance marked by a rising sun—a symbol of revelation—its doorway sealed as if requiring initiation into the work’s inner world. At the far end stands a winged figure borrowed from the choral text he sets by the Danish writer Adam Oehlenschläger—Busoni’s emblem of what he called “mysticism in nature.”

An Artist Between Worlds

This blend of myth, architecture, and inward symbolism reveals just how profoundly Busoni lived between worlds—two different kinds of “between,” each shaping the Piano Concerto in its own way.

He was, from the outset, shaped by two cultural heritages. Born in 1866 to touring virtuoso parents, Busoni emerged early as one of the great piano prodigies of his age—an astonishing natural technician whose career as a legendary virtuoso was already in motion. His father, Ferdinando Busoni, was a celebrated clarinetist whose fiery temperament and improvisatory instincts represented one side of Italian musical life. His mother, Anna Weiss Busoni, an Austrian-born pianist trained in the German classical tradition, gave young Ferruccio his first lessons and instilled in him a reverence for discipline, structure, and the canon.

From these two lineages—his father’s operatic flair and spontaneity, his mother’s rigor and depth—Busoni absorbed two different musical worlds before he was old enough to choose between them. Yet from childhood—he began composing at 7—he also felt an independent pull toward the German tradition: Bach became a kind of religion, Beethoven a metaphysical ideal, and counterpoint a way of ordering the universe. When he settled in Berlin in the 1890s, he embraced its intellectual clarity and became, in time, a revered teacher and thinker. 

This split between Italian warmth on one side and German abstraction on the other was formative and became the central tension shaping his artistic identity. But Busoni was also working at his peak in a moment of profound artistic upheaval, a time when the certainties of the 19th century were giving way to the radical experiments of the 20th.

He came of age in the fin de siècle, when the great Romantic inheritance still commanded devotion even as the early tremors of modernism were cracking the foundation. He revered the Baroque and Classical past yet kept imagining a future on the horizon. Tradition mattered to Busoni, but so did the freedom to question it. He kept his ears open to a musical language just beyond the edge of what anyone was writing, unbound by formal constraint.

The Piano Concerto became the place where these forces converged in a vast symbolic construction capable of holding contradiction, exuberance, discipline, fantasy, and spiritual longing under one roof. 

A Concerto Built to Hold a Universe

The “Skyscraper” also reflects a conviction Busoni shared, in a different way, with Gustav Mahler. Mahler was famously reported to have said that a symphony must “embrace the world.” Busoni arrived at a parallel idea: that even the concerto, a form long tied to showmanship, could become a vessel to convey the full reach of a composer’s imaginative universe. A few years later, in his Sketch of a New Aesthetic of Music (1907), he would put the principle into words: “Music was born free; and to win freedom is its destiny.” The Piano Concerto feels like the moment when he tried to embody that freedom on a monumental scale.

But if Mahler spread this aspiration across the orchestra, Busoni condenses it into the orbit of a single pianist. The result is a kind of super-concerto—clearly built for a virtuoso but stretched so far that it starts to feel philosophical. Busoni gathers the grand rhetoric of the German symphonic lineage, the restless playfulness of his Italian heritage, and the inward gravity of a thinker for whom Faust was a lifelong companion—a fixation so deep that he eventually composed his own opera, Doktor Faust, inspired by Goethe, which he left unfinished at his death in 1924. As with Mahler, the question is not what to include but how much such a structure can bear.

How the Music Moves

Across the first four movements, Busoni keeps reshaping the scale of the world he is building, and the piano—never a gladiator battling the orchestra but a restless guide—pulls the music through each new terrain. The opening movement lays out the grand facade with a sense of ceremony and weight, introduced by a bold orchestral proclamation to which the piano responds with granite-like chords. Busoni shapes his themes in broad, architectural spans steeped in the German symphonic tradition. The scherzo flickers, quick in its turns and touched with a fantastical lightness. 

At the center sits the extraordinary slow movement—the vast Pezzo serioso, the longest span in the entire concerto, where time seems to stretch and soften. Bare, almost hesitant motifs—first in the low strings, then in the woodwinds—accumulate a calm, steady force as they return, each repetition expanding the movement’s spacious outline. Busoni unfolds a long inward arc whose steady, architectural buildup recalls Bruckner, yet its suspended glow and emotional stillness belong to the same world as Mahler’s great adagios.

And then the spell breaks. The fourth-movement tarantella erupts with volcanic force—Busoni’s vision of Vesuvius rendered as dance—driven by the whirling 6/8 rhythm familiar from Mendelssohn’s “Italian” Symphony, but blown up to operatic, almost hallucinatory proportions. This is the concerto’s wildest terrain, the moment when the piano seems to drag the entire orchestra into a Southern fever-dream of motion.

After all that volcanic brilliance, the tarantella thins almost imperceptibly; its fevered pulse drains away, and the music slips—without a break—into the strange, moonlit opening of the finale. For a moment, it’s as if the concerto has forgotten its own momentum. The piano grows inward, the orchestra settles into a hush, and the air changes temperature.

After more than an hour of music anchored by the piano, Busoni introduces a male chorus that sings for only a few minutes. The scale recalls Mahler’s cosmic finales—especially the sudden emergence of voices at the end of the “Resurrection” Symphony—but the effect here is entirely his own. 

The text comes from an unexpected place: a short chorus, “Hymn to Allah,” from Adam Oehlenschläger’s 1805 Danish play Aladdin, or the Wonderful Lamp, which Busoni set in its German translation. It invokes the divine not in a doctrinal sense but as an elemental force animating the universe. The winged figure in Busoni’s sketch is finally given breath:

Raise up your hearts to the eternal force; 
sense the closeness of Allah, behold his deeds! 
Joy and grief alternate in earthly light, 
while the pillars of the world stand in repose. 
(trans. by Noam Cook)

In its soft beginning, this choral invocation feels like the revelation the concerto has been circling for more than an hour. The male voices enter with an otherworldly calm, yet Busoni lets their presence grow steadily, gathering warmth and authority until the music swells into a radiant C-major proclamation. It is not triumph in the usual symphonic sense but a kind of alignment—the symbolic architecture he sketched for Gerda finally brought into balance—myth, nature, and human striving resonating in a single, blazing chord.

A work like this reveals its full stature only in live performance. Recordings can sketch its outlines, but they can’t convey its physicality—the way the piano seems to torque the orchestra into motion, the way the slow movement’s great arches accumulate weight, or the way the final chorus rises through the texture like a presence entering the space. Only under these conditions does the “Skyscraper Concerto” become the visionary edifice Busoni imagined.

—Thomas May