fantasia

fantasia, in music, a composition free in form and inspiration, usually for an instrumental soloist; in 16th- and 17th-century England the term was applied especially to fugal compositions (i.e., based on melodic imitation) for consorts of string or wind instruments. Earlier 16th-century fantasias for lute or keyboard consisted of short sections based on one or more musical motives. In England the fantasy or fancy for keyboard, lute, or viola had a late flowering at the time of Henry Purcell (1659–95).

In the 17th and early 18th centuries in Germany the organ Fantasie reflected this improvisatory character, in direct contrast to the highly structured fugue that usually followed. Freedom of form and execution persisted in the fantasias of Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach (1714–88), Mozart, Beethoven, and Franz Schubert, some of which retained the fugal element as well. Robert Schumann in his Fantasie, Opus 17 (1836), and Frédéric Chopin in his Fantaisie in F Minor (1840) maintained the tradition of a single, self-contained movement, at least outwardly. But later works, including Arnold Schoenberg’s Phantasy for Violin and Piano (1949), frequently recall the sectionalized arrangement that prevailed during the Renaissance and early Baroque periods. The complex contrapuntal keyboard fantasias of J.S. Bach (e.g., Chromatic Fantasy and Fugue, c. 1720), on the other hand, inspired similar works by Franz Liszt, Max Reger, and Ferruccio Busoni. Some composers have exploited the fantasia for its programmatic, or descriptive, possibilities, among them John Mundy (died 1630), who wrote a fantasia on the weather, and Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, who composed his symphonic fantasy Francesca da Rimini in 1876. While appealing particularly to the romantic imagination, the fantasia served, from the beginning, also as a vehicle for instrumental elaboration of vocal music (e.g., Schubert’s “Wanderer” fantasy [1822], based on one of his own songs, and Ralph Vaughan Williams’s Fantasia on “Greensleeves” [1934]).