Programme Notes:
Piano Fantasies
May 2022

“I sat down [and] began to fantasize [phantasiren]… Once I had seized upon [erhascht] an idea, my whole effort was to develop and sustain it, according to the rules of the art.”

— Haydn, 1810, quoted by Griesinger

For Haydn, as for other eighteenth-century composers, the keyboard was a site of inspiration, the interface at which one met and realized his ideas. While the act of fantasizing was imperative to the act of composition, the genre of the fantasia is scarcely the hallmark of each of these three composers’ wide-ranging and highly prolific oeuvres. Standing at the periphery of formal convention and expectation that characterized their respective epochs, these fantasias offer a glimpse into these composers’ processes of imagination: they are traces of thought processes in formation, utterances of unmediated musical ideas and design.

From being an improvisatory moment in which composer, improviser, and performer converged in various permutations (occasionally becoming one) to a genre of music predicated on the unpredictability of expression and instability of affect, performing these fantasies today offers a way into understanding and embodying these composers’ intellectual and creative processes. In this process, the bi-directionality of time is brought to the fore; as these works unfold in time, a performance necessarily traverses time into the distant past. As I sit down at the keyboard to play these works and explore the various dispositions adopted by these fantasies, I hope — at least in part — to re-capture and re-imagine the imaginative worlds of Bach, Mozart, and Chopin some three centuries on.

W. A. Mozart

Fantasie in D minor, K. 397 

Composed: ca. 1782

“[Extemporizing before the beginning of a piece […] is to be regarded as a prelude which prepares the listener for the content of the piece that follows […], determined by the nature of the nature of the piece which it prefaces; and the content or affect of this piece becomes the material out of which the prelude is fashioned.”

— C.P.E. Bach, Versuch über die wahre Art das Clavier zu spielen, 1752

The preambulatory arpeggiations perfectly encapsulate the improviser-performer’s state of mind. Brooding, lonely, wandering, yet curious, their darkness foreshadows the desolation, agitation, and nervousness that would grow to characterize the work. Fragments of musical material are juxtaposed, segregated by an abundance of caesurae; disrupting and suspending the musical narrative both midway through a musical idea and at the end of a phrase, such complete breaks in the texture and sound are a key characteristic of this work. Initially seeming illogical, these motivic fragments are gradually assembled into a temporal mosaic as the music unfolds. Just when the listener has been convinced of the despondent nature of this fantasia, a sustained pause sees a sudden turn to the tonic major. Radiating with exuberance and grace, this section is a quintessential representation of eighteenth-century galant style, replete with Alberti bass textures and a regularity of phrasing. The music is no longer fragmented; as the longest section of the work, it sustains the same affect and idiom throughout. Despite its internal coherence, this section is incongruent with the larger rhetorical developments of the fantasy. If the opening prelude was to foreshadow the affect of the work, then how can one conceive of this section — an emotional release, resolution, or perhaps, yet another fleeting, displaced turn?

This fantasy was neither published nor completed during Mozart’s lifetime. When Bärenreiter published the first edition in Vienna in 1804, the work had been left suspended on a fermata over a dominant seventh chord. Whether Mozart ever intended to complete this work, or whether it was a potential prelude to a later piece (as in the case of the C major Fantasia & Fugue K. 394 from the same year, 1782) remains a subject of contention. The Bärenreiter and Henle Urtext versions published today include a “completion” by August Bernhard Müller, a contemporary and admirer of Mozart. In this, the stylistic shift to the major is reaffirmed with unreserved warmth and depth. While it is this “completion” that most present-day performers opt to perform, others like Mitsuko Uchida have taken it upon themselves to present their own ending of the work; today, these often hark back to the preliminary preluding material, creating a (temporally imbalanced) symmetrical tripartite structure. Yet, does, and will, this work ever achieve resolution? Does it ask to be resolved?

J. S. Bach

Chromatic Fantasie & Fugue in D minor, BWV 903                              

Composed: ca. 1720, revised 1730

Predating Mozart’s fantasie by half a century, Bach’s chromatic fantasie is devoid of thematic content; it is an extemporization, an exploration of figuration, modulation, and harmonic extremities. Its material consists of two distinctly different styles: first, a moto perpetuo toccata-like texture construed of rising and falling scaling figuration and free arpeggiation occasionally disrupted by caesurae; second, a more lyrical recitative style in which an outpouring of melancholy, desolation, and helpless is conveyed by a lone voice. The fantasie is not delineated, and cannot be comprehended, by any structural units, nor an overarching sense of shape or direction. Instead, the different figurations are suspended and fragmented by means of sudden caesurae or simply, an elision into the performer-improviser’s next train of thought.  The juxtaposition of the recitative against the moto perpetuo disrupts the rhythmic build-up, and time is suspended.

More so than in the initial extemporizing section, the occasional highly chromatic chordal punctuation in this recitative boldly explores harmonies, pushing the boundaries of early-eighteenth-century harmonic conventions. It is in this pensive, lamenting, introspective section that the chromatic essence of the fantasia is truly brought to the fore. Though relished, its pensive lyricism nevertheless yields to the extroverted display of relentless motion; as the fantasie draws to a close, the intimate and the virtuosic meld together.

Richard Kramer has described this work as a set of dichotomies, with the fantasie being a means of exercising the mind and fingers — a “preliminary tuning up” before the reason of the fugue comes into focus (2008). While the genre of the fugue — logical, rational, and intellectual — portrays itself as aesthetically antithetical to the fantasy, the fugal subject here creates an illusion of spontaneous thought; neither metrically nor thematically defined, it presents itself to be unrestrained by otherwise typical conventions of the fugue. Bearing traces of its earlier fantasie, boundaries between fantasie and fugue are now blurred. The improviser is lost; in wandering, the colors of the interval of a half-step is relished and carefully considered, not once, but twice. The chromatic line itself is singled out and brought to the fore. As the fugue progresses, the horizontal dimension of its chromaticism extends, too, to the vertical: the fugue is not just thematically chromatic, but also harmonically.

W. A. Mozart

Fantasie in C minor, K. 475 

Composed: 1785

Standing at a distance from Bach’s chromatic fantasie, this fantasie echoes Mozart’s earlier fantasie in that it juxtaposes material of contrasting affect; in a similar manner, it is as though the improviser-performer has forsaken their existing train of thought, and chosen, instead, to pursue a new inspiration. Unlike the singularity of affect in the D minor fantasie, however, his C minor fantasie is a juxtaposition of the antithetical: the dark and the light, the tragic and the hopeful, the menacing and the beautiful. If Mozart’s earlier fantasy was an improvisation in progress and improvisation as process, then this fantasie is — on a thematic and structural level — more measured and considered than it is impulsive, though exploring far bolder and colorful harmonies than in his earlier fantasie.

Although the idea of structure is directly antagonistic to the concept of the fantasy, this work represents a step away from the spontaneity and whimsical nature of the free improvisation and extemporization that characterized works such as Bach’s. It hails a shift from the conception of the fantasy as improvisation-in-progress, exploring means by which the fantasy could come into being as a genre of its own through defining — but ultimately “idiosyncratic” — treatment of musical structure: a precursor to composers’ subsequent formal treatment of the fantasy, as is reflected in Chopin’s Op. 49.

Frédéric Chopin

Fantasie in F minor, Op. 49

Composed: 1841

Composed over a century after Bach’s free-form fantasia and half a century after Mozart’s, Chopin’s Op. 49 is governed by internal structure, coherence, unity, and logic. In what is essentially a tripartite structure, Chopin’s fantasy is no longer predicated on any illusion of spontaneity. It is, instead, best perceived within its nineteenth-century cultural and aesthetic milieu; in an era where form, structure, and formal structure was growing increasingly codified, this work represents a departure from those very structural foundations that was taking an increasing foothold on composers’ treatment of works and approaches to composition.

Scholars have read the fantasie as being Chopin’s improvisation on national themes from his native Poland. The work begins with a solemn, bleak funeral march; over the course of the introductory section, the work traverses darkness and lightness, though its glimmers of hope and yearning eventually yield to a torrent of arpeggiations that propel the fantasia into a more clearly defined thematic material that would grow to characterize the work.

The main body of this fantasia comprises alternations between sections intensely passionate agitation and those whimsical and lyrical. Each successive iteration of the material is displaced by a step downwards, with the tonal centers gravitating towards an eventual attainment of the tonic minor with which the work had begun (F minor). In this, an overarching narrative of desolation is created as the music is hopelessly propelled into, and plunges into, the depths of despair. Carefully calibrated, these larger sections yield to an overarching musical narrative; though the spontaneity of the genre is lost, it is through this very loss that an overarching musical narrative is acquired, one almost teleological in nature, but fragmented by moments of respite and wandering.

At the heart and kernel of the fantasia is a chorale whose warm harmonies and sonorities are elided seamlessly into and lingered on. Beyond being a brief affective respite, this chorale suspends time and transports one into a new sonic and emotional realm, one which is otherworldly and distant. It is, too, on this note that the work draws to a close, but only nearly; having arrived at the relative major, its textural and figural ethereality seeks to be an affirmation and gratification of its initial longing. Trailing off into the distance, one is almost convinced that the work has ended, only to be jarred by a final minor plagal cadence — a final poignant, heart-wrenching cry.

“Today, I finished the Fantasy — and the sky is beautiful, my heart is sad — but that doesn’t matter at all. If it were otherwise, my existence would, perhaps, be of no use to anyone.”

— Chopin, October 1841