"What most piano teachers mean by a beautiful tone is centered on bringing out the melody, and always setting the melody in high relief is characteristic of Viennese piano style. Ferrucio Busoni, ideologically more Viennese than Italian, once said that “any melody worth playing should be played mezzo forte”; in the end, this leads to the typical conservatory performance of a Bach fugue with the opening motif played louder than all the other voices each time it appears. Most theories about beautiful piano tone try to impose the same kind of sound on every style from Bach to Debussy."
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Charles Rosen, "Lost Chords and the Golden Age of Pianism" in Freedom and the Arts (2012), p. 298
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Ferruccio_Busoni
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