The essence of Busoni’s music lies in its synthesis of his Italian and German ancestry: emotion and intellect, the imaginative and the systematic. Neither inherently conservative nor aggressively radical, his harmonic and tonal innovations were part of an essentially re-creative approach to the musical past, which has only gained wider currency more recently. His Turandot Suite was composed as a response to reading the play of the same name by the eighteenth-century Venetian dramatist Carlo Gozzi. Although Busoni’s music is restricted to scene changes and those places where it is dramatically relevant, the comic and fantastic essence of Gozzi’s play is readily conveyed. The Sarabande and Cortège were intended as preliminary studies for several of the most important scenes in Busoni’s unfinished opera, Doktor Faust. The Sarabande evokes the mystery and magic that pervades the opera. The Cortège, by contrast, is music of devilish swiftness and energy. The Berceuse élégiaque is Busoni’s most perfectly realised musical vision. So powerful is the orchestration that even such a master of the orchestra as Richard Strauss found the result spellbinding.