Master’s course on Busoni’s correspondences with Max Reger and Frieda Kwast-Hodapp

In the summer term of 2025, Humboldt University in Berlin and the Karlsruhe University of Music will once again hold a joint hybrid seminar on digital correspondence editions. The focus will be on the 15 surviving letters from Max Reger to Ferruccio Busoni (the return letters are missing) and the 27 letters exchanged between Busoni and the pianist Frieda Kwast-Hodapp.

While most of Reger’s letters have long been available in print and have already been annotated in an excellent edition by Susanne Popp (which means that their transfer into digital form is carried out here as an introductory exercise), the correspondence with Frieda Kwast-Hodapp has remained virtually unnoticed until now (even Antony Beaumont’s selected edition does not contain any of Busoni’s 15 Kwast-Hodapp letters, which have only been preserved as transcripts in typescript). An internationally renowned pianist, Kwast-Hodapp was closely associated with Max Reger, notable as the dedicatee and premiere performer of his Piano Concerto. From 1905, she worked as a piano professor at the Stern Conservatory in Berlin, alongside her husband and former teacher James Kwast. Her correspondence with Busoni, which is more extensively documented for the last years of his life, focusses is on questions of compositional and pianistic creativity, preparation, and interpretation.

Christian Schaper, Monday, April 14, 2025