After sitting out the war in Zürich, Busoni returned to Berlin in September 1920, finding the famous penthouse on the Viktoria Luise Platz -- housing his extensive library, two grand pianos, and an atelier dominated by Boccioni's massive painting, The Rising City -- undisturbed. Even so, one does not step twice into the same stream and Berlin's changed condition affected him profoundly. To his "famulus," Philipp Jarnarch, Busoni writes on October 2, 1920, "Today, an hour ago, I finished a 'Tanzwalzer' for orchestra (43 pages of score) and the Toccata [for piano], too, arising as it did from anguish and unstable emotions, has been brought to its conclusion here." In the following glorious autumnal Sunday morning, Busoni had second thoughts. "Yesterday's letter was not posted so I opened it and read it through. Meanwhile I have added six pages of 'introduction' to the 'Tanzwalzer' and this has become the best part of the piece. That cheers me up...." The introduction wears the air of a grand seigneur opening a door with a flourish at once oracular and teasingly jocular, capped by a brief but commanding fanfare. The first, flirtatious, waltz gives way to a short Più vivo episode relieved by a second extended number, this time gesturing seductively, both rippled by beguiling polyphonic detail prodigally strewn by a cunning master hand. In the extensive animated winding up -- as if the enticements of the foregoing had been subsumed in an exhilarating whirl -- the tendency to obstreperous riot is held in check, first, by exquisite graciousness, then by fleeting melancholy (as the sound fabric flickers between minor and major), and at last by sheer lordliness. The Tanzwalzer is less a suite of waltzes than a sardonic conspectus of the waltz itself, similar in outlook to Ravel's La Valse, composed, coincidentally, over 1919-1920. Chez Busoni, despite the giddy animation and visceral appeal which have made the Tanzwalzer one of his most popular works, there is about it an ineffable Nietzschean "pathos of distance" which had become second nature in his final, old-masterly, phase, though his program note for its first performance -- Busoni conducting the Berlin Philharmonic on January 13, 1921 -- avers "the work is dedicated to the memory of Johann Strauss, whom the composer sincerely admires." As Antony Beaumont noted, "The composer stands as an outsider, observing the hollow merriment of others, sometimes scornfully, sometimes wittily." Several sections of the Tanzwalzer were incorporated in the scene of festivities at the Court of Parma in Doktor Faust. ~ Adrian Corleonis, All Music Guide
