Evening Song Op. 85 No. 12

Schumann’s Abendlied for three-hand (!) piano (No. 12 from the "Piano Pieces for Four Hands” Op. 85) was tremendously popular in the 19th cen-tury, as we can see from the impressive number of arrangements made of it, including those by Camille Saint-Saëns and Joachim Raff. This is the back-ground against which this version must be seen. The 14-year-old Ferruccio Busoni transposed Schumann’s "warhorse” to C major and arranged it for clarinet and string quartet, presumably as appendix to his Suite in G minor (KM 2267) for the concerts given by his father Ferdinando, a clarinetist. Like many of Busoni’s other early works, this little score also remained unpublished to our first edition.