Alexander Melnikov / Katowice Culture Nature Festival - livestream / open-air screening - NOSPR

The genre of musical fantasy perhaps most fully expressed the spirit of the Romanticism: going beyond the limited circle of "here" and "now". The classical form of sonata imprisoned the Romantic composers, fantasia liberated them. It opened up new horizons, it could be an expression of longing and desire, and it could sometimes conceal "secret thoughts", like the works of Schumann or Chopin. Its genesis, shape and purpose may have been different. Schubert, an "early" Romantic, took as his starting point for his Fantasie in C major (‘Wanderer Fantasy’), a fragment of the song Der Wanderer, an expression of tragic loneliness in the world. Surprisingly, however, he gave his work a vital, sometimes even virtuosic character. On the other hand, the "late" Brahms in his cycle Fantasies, Op. 116 – a wonderful collection of Capriccios and Intermezzi – mused with nostalgia on the transience but also the beauty of the world. In his music we will not hear a note of resignation, there is a wise acceptance – and constant admiration. Scriabin, writing at the beginning of the 20th century, was even more different in his search for musical transgression already in his early Fantasie in B minor. This "infinite desire" would lead him years later to works as extraordinary as The Poem of Ecstasy or Prometheus.