This epic work, lasting around 70 minutes, was brought from relative obscurity through the personal crusade in the 1960s of the great but maverick pianist John Ogdon. Arguably the first concerto of profound musical substance (for any instrument) written by an Italian composer, it is testament to Busoni's cosmopolitan upbringing: though he was born near Florence, his family moved to Vienna when he was nine years old, and when still a youth he moved to Leipzig, then Helsinki, Moscow, Boston (Massachusetts), New York, and finally Berlin. His musical milieu was therefore very much the German late 19th-century tradition, in which such colossal symphonic structures were inevitably in the shadow of Beethoven's Ninth, even if not always quite so explicitly as here, with (literally) the introduction of a chorus in the finale. Indeed, it could be argued that since the chorus is silent until the final eight minutes of the piece, a closer antecedent is Liszt's Faust and Dante symphonies (which Busoni knew intimately) of the 1850s. The first performance of the concerto was given in Berlin in November 1904 with the composer as soloist and the Berlin Philharmonic under Karl Muck, and publication by Breitkopf & Härtel followed already in 1906.

Textually the chief discrepancy concerns the cadenza towards the end of the fourth of the five movements; the original cadenza, as published in the Breitkopf score, is relatively short, and Busoni decided it was not flamboyant enough and the later, longer one, now usually played, was later published separately in 1909 as an adjunct to the two-piano version by Egon Petri.

sources

A  Autograph score, in the Biblioteka Jagiellońska, Krakow

E,P  Full score and parts, published by Breitkopf & Härtel in 1906