Program Notes: Bach, Busoni & Brahms

JOHANN SEBASTIAN BACH  
Ricercar No. 2 from The Musical Offering, BWV 1079 (arr. by Anton von Webern) 
BORN: March 31, 1685, in Eisenach, Germany 
DIED: July 28, 1750, in Leipzig, Germany 
WORK COMPOSED: 1747  (Webern’s arrangement: 1935) 
WORLD PREMIERE: Composed as a presentation to King Frederick the Great — likely it was a private premiere held between 1747 and 1749. (Webern conducted the first performance of his arrangement in London in 1935.) 

The story of Johann Sebastian Bach’s The Musical Offering is a well-known, trivia-approved tale: in 1747, Bach encountered Frederick the Great, King of Prussia, who challenged the composer to complete a simple task — improvise a six-voice fugue on a theme of the king’s own creation. Bach, in return, not only fulfilled the given task but also crafted a collection of intricate compositions and musical riddles for the king’s pleasure, all based on the king’s theme.  

The collection included two Ricercars. A popular musical genre of the time, the name derives from the Italian language and equates to ‘researching’ or ‘seeking out’ the potentials of a musical idea. The second is one of the most famous from the collection for including the king’s requested six-voice fugue. The Ricercar a 6 is rich with the complex fugal counterpoint that was Bach’s defining expertise, appealing to composers through generations who seek to dissect and reconstruct Bach’s work.  

Among them was Anton von Webern, an Austrian composer born nearly 200 years after Bach who arranged and orchestrated The Musical Offering in 1934–1935. A product of the early 20th century modernist movement, the Webernized piece places an emphasis on space by stripping the orchestration back to give clarity to the theme and highlight the motivic lines, revealing the relationship between all of the voices within the counterpoint. Further, Webern brings modern interpretive sensibilities to the page with additional details indicating phrasing, dynamics, articulation and rubato, which add dimension while also giving color to the piece’s structural elements. 

From century to century, Bach’s royal offering continues to enamor, amuse and inspire, representing the innovative and experimental spirit of the classical world that continues through the present day. 

FERRUCCIO BUSONI 
Violin Concerto in D major, Op. 35a, K. 24 
BORN: April 1, 1866, in Empoli, Tuscany 
DIED: July 27, 1924, in Berlin, Germany 
WORK COMPOSED: 1897  
WORLD PREMIERE: October 8, 1897, in Berlin, featuring Dutch violinist Henri Petri as the soloist, with Busoni conducting the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra. 

The son of two professional musicians, Ferruccio Busoni’s future career came as no surprise. A composer and concert pianist by age 8, his development through his studies was swift. From rigorous performance tours arranged by his demanding father to his own devoted study and analysis of the compositions of predecessors Bach, Mozart and Liszt, Busoni traded his childhood for a future in the world of his idols. This trade proved worth it by age 15, when he was elected to the Accademia Filarmonica di Bologna — the youngest to do so since Mozart himself. 

Born in Tuscany and raised in Germany, Busoni’s early life was spent searching for his identity as an artist and person within the shadow of his famous contemporaries, Johannes Brahms and Richard Strauss. In the years between matriculation and the premiere of his violin concerto, Busoni’s life was that of a traveling, gigging musician — playing virtuosic recitals from Leipzig to Boston to support himself, teaching piano, transcribing works of other composers and composing his own works when he could. Coming back to his home base of Berlin in the 1890s marked his transition from vagabond, foreign-born musician to local mainstay of the city’s vibrant musical community.  

In 1897, Busoni’s Violin Concerto was born. An early sample of his developing compositional style, the short, three-movement work is a tasting menu of the flavors of Busoni’s many stylistic and cultural influences: the virtuosic flair of an accomplished soloist, a classical sense of form and compositional logic, a Romantic approach to full-bodied orchestration and lush melodies (inspired greatly by Verdi’s Falstaff), and a modernist’s desire for freedom and experimentation. The piece premiered in Berlin with Busoni leading the Berlin Philharmonic and the Dutch violin virtuoso and family friend, Henri Petri, as the soloist for whom the piece was dedicated. 

As is the trademark of young composers, Busoni’s Violin Concerto is representative of the cumulative result of the influence of early compositional models, the application of academic theory and the explorative energy of youth. The impact has sustained Busoni’s name in the classical canon since. 

This will be the Seattle Symphony’s debut of the concerto and the concerts this weekend also mark two other debuts: that of conductor Daniele Rustioni and violinist Francesca Dego, who are partners both musically and in life.
 
JOHANNES BRAHMS  
Piano Quartet No. 1 in G minor, Op. 25 (orch. by Arnold Schoenberg) 
BORN: May 7, 1833, in Hamburg, Germany 
DIED: April 3, 1897, in Vienna, Austria 
WORK COMPOSED: 1861; orch. 1937  
WORLD PREMIERE: 1861 in Hamburg, Germany, with Clara Schumann at the piano. 

Despite his reputation as a sardonic and rough-hewn man, Johannes Brahms was a well of bubbling emotional complexity struggling with the common ills of living: anxiety and self-doubt surrounding his relationship with his work, grief over the mental disintegration and death of a long-revered mentor in Robert Schumann, and complicated feelings for the pianist, composer and Schumann’s widow, Clara Schumann. The year following Robert’s death, Brahms began work on his First Piano Quartet, but it would be another four years before his efforts would bear fruit.  

Throughout the piece, premiered in 1861, Brahms’ internal conflicts surface. The theme of the second movement, the Intermezzo: Allegro ma non troppo, goes so far as to “spell out” Clara’s name in a musical code. Cast on a broad scale, the quartet combines dramatic intensity with lyrical reflection, moving between densely worked passages and moments of intimate expression.  

Nearly a century later, in 1937, a freshly stateside Arnold Schoenberg would encounter and dissect the piece through an orchestration of the quartet. Schoenberg, a major player in the serialist and Modernist movements, was motivated not by a desire to modernize Brahms’ language but to amplify what he viewed as its inherent clarity and strength. Though best known for his role in the development of atonal and 12-tone composition, Schoenberg held Brahms in particularly high esteem. In his writings, he argued that Brahms’ methods of developing musical ideas — through variation, transformation and structural coherence — were quietly progressive and foundational to modern composition. 

Schoenberg’s orchestration reflects this admiration in a meeting of two great minds. Rather than dramatically altering the character of the work, he preserves and honors Brahms’ formal balance and instrumental logic, distributing the original chamber parts across the orchestra with care. Sensitive to the music’s emotional center from his own struggles with identity and sense of place, Schoenberg leans heavily into the early movements’ intensity and adds color and dynamism to the Intermezzo with a deeply melancholic use of the oboe and cor anglais for the opening “Clara” theme. 

A meeting of masters through time and music, the Piano Quartet exemplifies the spirit of this program in its entirety: reinterpretation and experimentation as a means to honor the influences of the past while looking fearlessly toward the future. 

All notes by Myah Rose Paden © 2026