Fantasy in F minor, D940 (1828)

Allegro molto moderato - Largo - Allegro vivace - Tempo I

No one wrote better for four hands at one piano than Schubert, not even Mozart. He was drawn to the medium from an early age - his first known work is a piano-duet Fantasy in G major written when he was thirteen - and he retained his interest in it until at least a few months before his death, when he completed the Fantasy in F minor.

One particular stimulus to Schubert’s creativity in this area was his work as tutor to the young Countesses Marie and Caroline Esterházy at their father’s castle at Szeliz in Hungary (now Zeliezovce in Slovakia) in the summer months of 1818 and 1824. On the second occasion he seems to have fallen in love with the younger sister Caroline, who was eighteen years old by then, and certainly it was during the summer of 1824 that he wrote some of his most inspired piano duets - the Grand Duo, the Eight Variations in A flat, the Divertissement à l’hongroise - either for the sisters to play together or, perhaps, for the composer to play with one of them.

Caroline Esterházy is said to have complained to Schubert that he had never dedicated anything to her, to which Schubert is said to have replied, “What’s the point? Everything is dedicated to you anyway.” In fact, in 1828 he did formally dedicate to her one of the greatest of all works of its kind, the piano-duet Fantasy in F minor, D940. It is tempting to wonder whether Carolin recognised anything of herself in the nostalgic, faintly Hungarian main theme of the work. Whether in the minor, as at the beginning, or in the major a little later, it has a touchingly innocent quality about it. Set against that vulnerable little tune there is a robust, almost clumsy theme, also in F minor, in the secondo part. The themes are contrasted in alternation rather than developed - except that the more vigorous one does undergo a remarkable lyrical transformation just before the tempo changes from Allegro molto moderato to Largo.

Like the earlier “Wanderer” Fantasy in C major, the Fantasy in F minor has four linked movements with no break between them. The short slow movement, in the distant key of F sharp minor, is based on the same sort of contrast as the first movement. This time the violent expression, the equivalent of the second theme of the Allegro, comes first. The lyrical material, a fragment of a romantic duet for soprano and bass, forms a decorative middle section in the tonic major.

The Allegro vivace, which is also in F sharp minor, is the longest movement of the four. A remarkable construction, it is either a rondo or a scherzo with a delicate D major middle section which is either the central episode of the rondo or the trio of the scherzo. Thematically and emotionally this Allegro vivace has little to do with the two preceding movements, however, and it is with a jolt that the tonality returns to the F minor and the tempo to the Allegro molto moderato of the opening of the work. The nostalgic Hungarian melody proves to as welcome as ever, of course. Besides, the dramatic potential of the second theme had not been developed in the first movement and now there is an opportunity for Schubert to do just that in a masterful display of four-handed counterpoint. Too fragile to be treated in the same way, the first theme is only briefly but still tenderly recalled before the extraordinary last few bars of the work.