Phantasie in C major Op.131 (1853)

arranged by Fritz Kreisler (1875–1962)

One of Fritz Kreisler’s less celebrated but more valuable achievements was his restoration of Schumann’s Phantasie in C to the repertoire. According to a contemporary account, probably deriving from Kreisler himself, he had undertaken the revision in response to a request made by Joseph Joachim, the dedicatee of the work, shortly before his death in 1907. Apparently – although it is not easy to believe, since he had given Schumann detailed advice on the violin writing and had played the Phantasie many times as it was published in 1854 – Joachim had long intended to revise it himself but had never actually brought himself to do it. Whatever the truth of these claims, the fact is that after Joachim’s death the Phantasie had all but disappeared from the repertoire, not least because the late date of its composition – it was written only a year before Schumann’s mental breakdown – had given rise to a prejudice against it. As early as 1869, for example, when Joachim played it for the first time in Vienna, this work of “merry character,” as the composer had described it, was criticised by Hanslick as “tormented, gloomy and perverse.”

So by 1915, when Kreisler completed his alleged eight years of work on the Phantasie, it certainly needed to be rescued. One way of doing it was to make the solo violin writing, which was too modest for Kreisler’s virtuoso contemporaries, more “grateful.” Another way, was to make the harmonies more attractive and update the scoring of the orchestral version. By present-day standards, none of this was necessary: the Phantasie is quite brilliant enough as Schumann (with Joachim’s help) wrote it, while the original harmonies are an integral part of its personality. Even so, the Kreisler arrangement is unarguably effective in its way and a fascinating document of the taste of its time.

Whatever the version, the basic shape of the Phantasie remains the same. It is constructed in two parts, with a slow introduction and a quicker main section, in the same way as the two works for piano and orchestra, the Introduction and Allegro appassionato Op.92 and the Concert Allegro Op.134, written in succession to the Piano Concerto in A minor. Characteristically, Schumann is careful to integrate the two sections. So the somewhat plaintive (but far from “gloomy”) melody introduced by the piano in A minor in the opening bars recurs in the (there is no other word for it) “merry” sonata-form section that follows in C major. Its reappearance is reservered, however, for the beginning of the development section, the cadenza – which, like that of Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto in E minor, ends in arpeggios designed to accompany the last return of the main theme – and the coda.