Fantasia in G minor, Op.77

For anyone who does not remember what it was like to hear Beethoven improvise at the piano - and there are surely not many in today’s audience who can - here is an authentic reminder. It is not quite clear how much of it was thought out before Beethoven performed the Fantasia in his famously long and notoriously cold benefit concert in the Theater an der Wien on 22 December 1808. Nor is it clear how much of the piano Fantasia first published by Clementi in London in 1810 represents what Beethoven actually played on that occasion. But, certainly, the Fantasia in G minor has always been identified with the Fantasia item announced in the programme for that concert. And, certainly, it differs from almost everything else Beethoven wrote in that, while prolonging the virtuoso display at the beginning, it is so obviously feeling its way towards something that will capture the composer’s interest .

Muzio Clementi, who had commissioned several new works from Beethoven and had been rewarded for his enterprise by the Sonata in F sharp, Op.78, and the Sonata in G, Op.79, must have been amazed by what he saw when he read through the manuscript of the Fantasia in G minor. The scalic flourishes are conventional enough, but there are so many of them and so many changes of key, of tempo, and of metre that, arresting though the various ideas are, it is difficult to trace any continuity of thought between. After a tumultuous Allegro con brio in D minor, however, Beethoven tries out a motif of repeated notes in an A flat Adagio and, although he abandons it for a dramatic Presto in B minor, he comes back to that motif later. It is from the repeated notes that he evolves the principal feature of an attractive Allegretto melody in B major, which in its turn inspires seven short but eventful variations. After a sixth variation which presents the melody in heavy profile at the bottom end of the keyboard, the seventh reintroduces the scalic figuration and a coda neatly gathers together some of the remaining loose ends.