Wanderer-Fantasie in C Major

Schubert had a natural aversion to flashy virtuosity. His piano music, while by no means easy to play, is almost entirely free of pyrotechnical display. However, there is one piece that in terms of its virtuoso flamboyance stands apart from his output as a whole: the Wanderer-Fantasie of November 1822—a work so technically demanding that Schubert gave up even trying to play it. He took his inspiration from a setting of Georg Philipp Schmidt’s poem Der Wanderer D. 489 he’d composed in 1816, which in answer to the wanderer’s question, “Where can I find happiness?” responds enigmatically, “Where you are not.” The song’s distinctive repeated notes (long–short-short, long–short-short) act as a launching pad for all four movements of the Fantasie, which unconventionally run together. This paved the way for the B minor Sonata (1853) of Hungarian piano wizard Franz Liszt, who incidentally arranged the Wanderer-Fantasie for piano and orchestra and for two pianos. The work’s distinctive rhythm is at its most emphatic as the ebullient opening Allegro con fuoco gets under way, driving the music insistently toward a tonally distant (C sharp minor) Adagio slow movement that meditates further on the original song’s main theme. Transformed into a skipping dotted rhythm, the Presto scherzo climaxes in a torrent of arpeggios, setting up the Allegro finale, in which a series of assertive fugal entries pushes the music excitedly onward to its exultant conclusion.