Ferruccio Busoni was an Italian composer, pianist, transcriber, editor, and writer on music who spent most of his career in Germany. A child prodigy who started composing at the age of seven and completed his formal music studies at fifteen, he became of one the most important pianists of his time, well known for his transcriptions of organ works by Bach, and a highly respected, if rather rarely played, composer. His writings on music, in some of which he longed for an extension of compositional means and resources, positioned him as a progressive thinker and a model for a young generation of composers, including Edgard Varèse and Kurt Weill.