When Ferruccio Busoni died, in 1924, the composer Kurt Weill wrote that “with himbspin, one of the greatest artistic personalities of all time has passed.”

Weill, then a rising star in Weimar-era Berlin, had been Busoni’s student, a witness to the life of an extraordinary musician: a restless composer, performer, writer and teacher, as well as a mentor to the likes of Schoenberg and Sibelius. All the changes to music history at the start of the 20th century, Weill wrote, “were initiated or at least announced by him.”

You could call Busoni the first truly modern composer. He embodied a new era not only in his field, as a progressive thinker liberated from convention, but also more broadly in the world, as a globe-trotting polyglot who welcomed the transformative powers of technology.

Busoni had enormous respect for the past, too, and in that regard he may be more appropriately described as the first postmodern composer. He viewed music history not as a patchwork chronology but as a cohesive entity constantly informing the present. His sound was undeniably new yet deliberatively familiar, as he crafted an aesthetic of everything.

“His compositions were little understood, even by some of his students,” the Busoni scholar Erinn E. Knyt has written. “Teeming with allusions to the past that were audibly juxtaposed to passages displaying new timbres, textures, harmonies and scales, they seemed to stand outside main musical trends of his era.”

Hence the years he dedicated to transcribing the works of Bach, a project that forms the core of his legacy among performers today. (He is also famous for his enormous Piano Concerto and the opera “Doktor Faust,” though those are more talked about than programmed.) Quieter, but more essential, is his influence as a teacher, with a lineage that can be traced through the 20th century, and perhaps into the 21st: There is still much we can learn from Busoni, an advocate of possibility who gave the world a timeless playbook for thinking about and creating music.

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