Fantasy on Der Freischütz

It was Theobald Boehm who designed and made the early models of the modern flute but it was Paul Taffanel whose prodigious artistry demonstrated what could be done with it. Although he was probably less influential as a composer than as a performer and as a teacher at the Paris Conservatoire – where he he initiated a whole new school of flute playing – his works give a good idea of his accomplishment as a flautist and his musicianship in general. Operatic fantasies, like this one on themes from Weber’s Der Freischütz, were common in his day but they rarely demonstrated such sensitivity to the original material while drawing on it for virtuoso elaboration. And they rarely gave the piano such an interesting part.

The Fantasy begins with an allusion to the famously scary Wolf’s Glen scene and, like Weber’s overture to the opera, introduces at an early stage the passionately uneasy theme uttered by Max in Act I when he begins to realise that supernatural powers are ranged against him. The lovely melody heard in the expressive lower register of the flute belongs to Agathe’s second-act aria “Leise, leise, fromme Weise” and the one which occupies so much attention in the middle, where it is introduced by the solo instrument and then taken up by piano under an extraordinary delicate tracery of flute counterpoint, comes from the celebrations of virtue rewarded in the last act. That is not where Taffanel stops, however, since he has the great idea of transforming Aennchen’s arietta from Act II into a polonaise, which makes a suitably brilliant ending.