Let us now return to describing Busoni's activities after he moved from America to Europe and settled in Berlin. Piano playing, to which we have devoted so much attention on the preceding pages, was the Master's central occupation, but far from the only one during these years. He continued to devote a great deal of attention to the field of musical creation, to composition. The change that he had undergone in his artistic worldview made its mark here, too: his composing went down a new road. He ardently attempted to disavow everything he wrote earlier. “… In the ideal sense,” he declares, “I first found my way as a composer in the Second Violin Sonata (Op. 36a), which among friends I also call my Opus 1…. But my entire personal vision I put down at last and for the first time in the Elegies (finished January 1908).”

The Elegies are a cycle of seven pieces for the piano, dedicated to Busoni's students; the four piano pieces that make up the cycle An die Jugend are dedicated to them as well.