IN A LETTER dated May 12, 1919, from Zurich, Ferruccio Busoni
wrote:

I long lived in a world of music which was under the spiritual tyranny
of Beethoven and, for all practical purposes, Wagner. Other than these
two personalities, great in spirit and power, Chopin alone was still
tolerated. The rest (among them Brahms and Bruckner, who also
dreamed of writing a ninth symphony) were only composers who tagged
along in the footsteps of the two masters. Bach's place in music was
comparable to the place that the Catholic Church has in society. As
for Mozart, he was really relegated to the background. Every time he
was mentioned in the same breath as the masters, he was considered a
child at whom one smiles without really understanding him. The whole
development of music in the nineteenth century was distorted by this
error.

If we had been raised with Mozart's music, and if we had understood
Berlioz better, we would be more advanced and our paths would be
surer. But we turned away from Mozart's purity and neglected Berlioz's
innumerable suggestions. Unwittingly, we moved out of the domain
of music little by little to enter that of philosophy. We lost the sense
of pure expression. We were saturated with great thoughts. We made ef-
forts to accept the burden. We prolonged Wagner's very difficult victory
beyond its time; hence our present backwardness. Everyone had been
raised on Liszt (in France, César Franck and Saint-Saëns; in Russia, all
the composers of renown and, last but not least, Richard Wagner)--
and then were free to go on and (which costs little) to make fun of his
weaknesses, point a finger at his warts and slight the nobility of his
features.

Now the point is not to discredit, but to create constant values. We
must erect a new classic art. All the experiments at the beginning of
the twentieth century should be re-examined and incorporated into the
definitive style now being formed.

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