The Free Fantasia and the Musical Picturesque. (Cultural Topics).

The Free Fantasia and the Musical Picturesque. By Annette Richards. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. [xiii, 256 p. ISBN 0-521-64077-6. $59.95.]

This is a highly unusual book, one that persuasively views music in the context of another art, in this case late-eighteenth-century English and continental garden art. A wide variety of musical writers and critics considered the aesthetics of the cultivated landscape and the free fantasia to be analogous. This is a largely overlooked aspect of Enlightenment music criticism, and it is crucial. The comparison contributes a great deal to understanding how the apparently chaotic, unpredictable aesthetic of the fantasia--a genre which was either improvised or composed in such a way as to sound improvised--was heard, understood, and perceived to be (after a fashion) coherent. The defining figure in the history of the solo keyboard fantasia was of course Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, but Richards pursues the subject through the Emfindsamer developments to the early nineteenth century and the splendid, instructive op. 77 fantasy of Beethoven.

Richards quotes a variety of writers on the comparability of musical and landscaping phenomena, notably Henry Home, Lord Kames: "it is an improvement to intermix in the succession rude and uncultivated spots as well as unbounded views, which in themselves are disgreeable objects ... The greatest masters of music have the same view in their compositions: the second part of an Italian song seldom conveys any sentiment; and, by its harshness, seems purposely contrived to give a greater relish for the interesting parts of the composition" (p. 8). Both the tended beauty and cultivated wildness of the well-designed garden had musical parallels, and each art was frequently explained in terms of the other. A fundamental symmetry between the landscape and the sounded musical work thus approached a critical commonplace of the period.

The free fantasia, however, presented specific critical problems to an era that valued coherence and form. Richards establishes the essential differences between fantasia and the sonata (the latter much more thoroughly studied and defined than the former) at the outset. After acknowledging the sonata's dependence on the listener's memory of tonalities and thematic material, she observes that "the fantasia tends to evade clear harmonic trajectories, period structures and formal design; even when it is formally motivated, the fantasia treats such strategies mischievously" (p. 17). It was not that the fantasia genre was comprehensible to everyone, or even to all supposed Kenner; Georg Joseph Vogler is quoted to the effect that C. P. E. Bach's music was needlessly forced, artificial, and insufficiently well-planned and simple (p. 35), and others also found Bach too recondite. Against such objection was the famous testimony of Charles Burney, the admiration of Christian Friedrich Daniel Schubart, and others who s aw in Bach's fantasias a level of learning and inspiration that, in the words of Carl Friedrich Cramer, editor of the Magazin der Musik, left "the greatest virtuosos ... astounded at his bold ideas and transitions, his daring, unprecedented, and yet technically correct modulations." Such musicians "rubbed their brow [in disbelief] and expressed regret that they did not possess such knowledge themselves" (p. 17).

These parallels between a good fantasia and a ...