The substantial body of work that Ferruccio Busoni (1866–1924) devoted to arranging and transcribing the music of Johann Sebastian Bach (1685–1750) sets him apart among the countless musicians — from Mozart to Kurtág and from Brahms to Stokowski — who have endlessly adapted the works of the tutelary cantor. He followed in the footsteps of Franz Liszt (1811-1886), who published six of the Preludes and Fugues for Organ in 1851, almost half a century before him, with a view to increasing their circulation. Busoni's project, however, stands apart from Liszt's, not only by the scale of the approach, particularly editorial, but also by its commitment to a process of re-creation and adaptation to a new medium, a new era, in short, to its modernity.
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