What worlds Busoni opened up for me! Listening to him- sometimes four or five times in one week; talking to him: What a contrasting atmosphere after futile prima-donnas’ tantrums and tenors’ chalking up of the “count”: “Triple encore tonight as against double encore last night!” He was playing his transcription of the Bach 'Chaconne' at every concert, and never one of these many performances but that I stood in the wings, taking it all in, again and again, until he, with that unique blend of Olympian aloofness and intensely human generosity characteristic of him, one night, quite unexpectedly, asked me to play the Chaconne to him in his hotel room the following afternoon. How unforgettable that hour! I recall his elucidation of the large pattern that the grouping of several related variations into variation-clusters, one might say, brings into the vast structure, and his insistence on monochrome treatment of some of the variation instead of the violinistically traditional “glamorizing” of each and every one of them. A few bars on the piano to make his meaning clear, a juxtaposition of Bach’s original phrasing with the pernicious (as he called it) “traditional” phrasing (stemming from the redoubtable Prof. Riemann’s theories) – and scales seemed to fall away from my eyes; the edifice stood there in all its architectonic harmony. (…) The weeks, on this tour of the provinces, spent under the influence of Busoni, the man and the musician, were the ones that shook me once and for all out of my adolescent complacency. << less