What was the nature of the “face” hiding behind the masks of Busoni's “old” and the “new” artistic principles? What was the real, as opposed to the imagined, pathos of his art?

This pathos was in his struggle against the Academic and Neoclassical Romanticism that reigned in art between the end of the nineteenth and the early years of the twentieth centuries. This was the stylistic hybrid whose self-indulgent passions swallowed and dissolved both the intense ardor of Romanticism and the joyful freshness of Classicism. Busoni was not the first among composers, but first among pianists to acutely sense the breath of imitative, derivative decadence and dissipation that wafted from the elegant lyricism of Hofmann, Essipoff, Arenski, or Massenet, as well as the heavy, deceptively profound rhetoric of Reger or Glazunov, Reisenauer, or Pugno, who sensed the falseness of this “style-less” style, so akin to the “overwrought Viennese palaces, and the costume dramas of Ebers and Felix Dahn, the corteges of Makart,” the style in which the creative inventions of the great Classics and Romantics became mere “tricks of craftsmanship,” stereotypical, mass-produced devices, death masks of once profound emotions and thoughts. With great talent and determination, especially in his playing, Busoni led an attack against all that, began the f ght for a new Rinascimento, for the rebirth of pure styles, the art of great emotions, profound ideas, and impressive creative power.