Fantasy Wanderer

Fantasy in C major (“Wanderer”) D760 (1822)

Allegro con fuoco ma non troppo –

Adagio –

Presto –

Allegro

When Schubert wrote his Fantasy in C major there were many other keyboard fantasies in the repertoire. Not one of them, however, bore any resemblance to this most extraordinary and, in some ways, inexplicable work. The extreme technical difficulty of the piece can be explained by the fact that it was written for an aristocratic pupil of the pianist-composer Johann Nepomuk Hummel, which Schubert no doubt took as a virtuoso challenge. It is so difficult in fact that the composer himself couldn’t play it: “Let the devil play the stuff!” he is said to have exclaimed when he got embarrassingly stuck in the last movement.

Nothing we know about the Fantasy, on the other hand, explains why it is such an uncharacteristically aggressive, sometime even angry inspiration. Even harder to understand is how, years before anyone else did anything of the kind, he came to write what is in effect a sonata in four movements linked not only by the absence of a break between them but also by a theme all but one of them have in common. Its direct descendant, by way of his (not very attractive) arrangement for piano and orchestra, is Liszt’s monumental one-movement Sonata in B minor, which was completed more than 30 years later.

The theme that links three of the four movements comes from Schubert’s unhappy song Der Wanderer, which is not presented in its original form until the beginning of the Adagio. But the motif they have in common is a three-note rhythm, a dactyl (one long and two shorts as in “Go for it”), which is heard twice in the opening bar of the work and literally dozens of times before the end of the first movement. It’s a simple idea adaptable to all kinds of situations. In these early stages it is a percussive tattoo, fierce to begin with in C major and then more gentle in E major. With the rhythmic pattern reversed in the middle of the movement, it lends itself to a positively melodious episode in E flat major.

By-passing the recapitulation that would have taken place in a regular sonata movement, Schubert uses the three-note rhythm to effect, on a long diminuendo, a transition to the Adagio, which turns out to be a series of variations on the dactylic Wanderer melody as it appears in the song but now in C sharp minor. For the most part the variations dwell on the lyrical potential of the melody, although the two hands can also get involved in a dramatic exchange over it or allow it to deliquesce in a texture so liquid that the line is not much heard as sensed in the fine spray of the figuration. Again there is no formal conclusion to the movement but a transition on a diminuendo, which in this case anticipates the opening theme of the Presto. The dactylic rhythm does not appear here but is replaced by another three-note rhythmic pattern which can be just as percussively insistent and, with a change of key, just as melodiously enchanting as the other. An unrelated theme introduces still more melodic charm in the middle section.

This time there is a short pause between movements, as though to give us a chance to draw breath before the renewed aggression of the concluding Allegro, which sets off as a robust fugue on a theme obviously drawn from the dactylic motif. Although it drops its fugal pretensions before long, it retains both its percussive energy and its pressure on a pianist who is driven through an unrelentingly frantic but ultimately triumphant pursuit of the C major it has been destined to achieve from the beginning.