Busoni - String Quartets Opp.19 and 26

Ferruccio BUSONI (1866-1929)

String Quartets Op. 19, (1880-82) and Op. 26, (1887)

Webern Quartet

At the time of the first quartet, Busoni was a young composer still concerned with his own training, which alternated between fecund creativity as a composer and his activity as a concert pianist. A few years later he found himself in Vienna, independent of his family and living the life of a “typical twenty-year-old artist’, happy about his newly-won freedom, aware of his own responsibilities, and full of seriousness and resolve. This was a difficult period for him, due both to financial difficulties and to a creative crisis which accompanied a deeply felt sense of renewal. “The period of the Secondo Quartetto was terrible. The first movement remained incomplete for more than a year and I had neither the courage nor the inspiration to continue. […] The task was beyond me; it was not until a year later that I had matured a bit and was able to complete it…”