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CHOICE Review

He has been the subject of a dozen biographies; his music has been discussed and analyzed in important scholarly journals; he and his music have been the topic of university dissertations; music periodicals have devoted special issues to him; his writings about music have been published, as has much of his correspondence; a number of recordings are listed in the current Schwann catalog; and yet Ferruccio Busoni (1866-1924) remains a composer whose music is not well known and not often performed. Perhaps he spread his considerable talents among too many interests: he was a truly virtuoso pianist hailed as the successor to Franz Liszt; a conductor; an essayist; editor of the multivolume editions of the keyboard works of Bach and Liszt published by Breitkopf & Hartel; arranger and transcriber of compositions by Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann, and other major composers; and a composer whose own works number more than 300. Beaumont's biography goes beyond the very informative work by Edward Dent, Ferruccio Busoni; A Biography (1933). Not only is Beaumont able to utilize more current information, but unlike Dent he also offers some technical analyses of the music and pinpoints his observations through many brief musical examples. Pictorial illustrations, a select bibliography, a chronological catalog of Busoni's works, and a catalog of the composer's transcriptions and cadenzas add to the extreme usefulness of the volume. Both public and academic libraries, upper-division undergraduate and up.-A.G. Spiro, Youngstown State University