Fantasie in C Major

The three movements of Robert Schumann’s C Major Fantasie (1836) are intimately bound up with his intense feelings for his future bride, prodigy piano virtuoso Clara Wieck. “You can only understand the Fantasie,” he confided to her in a letter, “if you cast your mind back to the unhappy summer of 1836 when I renounced you.” Headed by a revealing quote by poet Friedrich Schlegel—“In earth’s colourful dream / A quiet sustained note sounds / Through aIl other notes / For the one who secretly listens”—the Fantasie finds Schumann rethinking traditional sonata procedures with a bracing, almost improvisatory freedom. The “quiet sustained note” turns out to be a musical quotation heard at the end of the first movement (originally titled “Ruins”), from Beethoven’s groundbreaking song cycle An die ferne Geliebte (To the distant beloved). The Fantasie’s impassioned opening theme was intended as a portrait of Clara—the music is tantalisingly grand yet also intimate—that then combines with amorphous pre-echoes of the “Distant Beloved” theme to create a compelling sense of the music unwinding toward its whispered conclusion. The march-like central movement is a majestic outpouring of joy, culminating in a dazzling sequence of celebratory contrary-motion leaps that reportedly gave even Liszt (the dedicatee) a few sleepless nights. The finale creates the strange sensation of time being suspended, dissolving all worries in a radiantly poetic movement that is one of the miracles of Romantic piano music.