Following his 22nd birthday, Busoni, through the offices of Professor Hugo Riemann, was offered the post of piano instructor at the Helsinki Conservatory. He was already a remarkable pianist, closely watched by critics. But beside the uncertain life of a traveling virtuoso the prospect of assured income proved attractive and he accepted with alacrity. Though he had dealt with loneliness often already, upon his arrival he felt for the first time almost total isolation--"My lack of knowledge of the ‘local' languages is giving rise to considerable difficulties. I can scarcely make myself understood to a waiter or a cab driver. Swedish, Russian, Finnish… are spoken here…." The city and its architecture pleased him, but Helsinki's narrow provincialism made another cramp in the spirit. "In the musical centers (where the finest things of our time have already been achieved) one has the rewarding task of striving still higher, bringing one's own empathy, creativity and intellect into play. Here one has to content oneself with reproducing or imitating a fragment of that which has been achieved elsewhere." In Leipzig, where he had taken up residence in 1886, he heard new music from across Europe as he became personally acquainted with Grieg, Sinding, Tchaikovsky, Mahler, and Delius, among others. But Helsinki was not a total loss--Martin Wegelius, who founded its Conservatory in 1882, exerted an inexorable influence, drawing Busoni's attention to Liszt, theretofore regarded as a facile crowd pleaser--a revelation which would bear fruit through the 1890s with Busoni emerging as the most divinatory interpreter of Liszt since Liszt. Busoni was already a prolific composer, with performances of several large works to his credit. As the Finnish winter deepened he summoned "the will and the effort not to neglect composition, the everything of my life, the ultimate object of my existence… I certainly mean to dedicate a great part of my life to laying the foundations… of a new epoch in the musical life of my country." But it was only with the dawn of the new century that the way to his goal would begin to open before him. Meanwhile, thorough grounding in conventional technique and preternatural facility enabled him to make an entertainingly workmanlike job of arranging and varying four folk melodies, selected from Wegelius' collection of 50 Finnish Folksongs, in two movements, for piano duet, through both of which high spirits and percolating jollity dispel melancholy. Composed in 1888, it was published by Peters the following year. ~ Adrian Corleonis, All Music Guide
