In his early years, Beethoven was renowned for extemporizing at the piano. He could improvise music in standard forms (sonata, rondo, theme and variations) but also in more freeform styles.
We might get a little idea of these improvisations by the music he called “fantasies.”
Much like the opening piano part of Beethoven’s earlier Choral Fantasy (Day 214), the Opus 77 Fantasy for Piano has an improvised feel, as if Beethoven is wandering through a landscape of musical possibilities but tossing away anything that refuses to develop.
The Opus 77 Fantasy takes us through several episodes in various keys, meters, tempos, and levels on the calm-to-agitated continuum, before surprisingly settling into a formal theme and seven variations (all 8 measures long in two 4-measure phrases) with (of course) More Coda!
#Beethoven250 Day 226
Fantasy for Piano in G Minor (Opus 77), 1809
In Austrian pianist Sophie Druml's dazzling performance, the Theme & Variations section begins at 5:15. The 7 variations are at 5:36, 5:55, 6:16, 6:35, 6:54, 7:11, and 7:29.
The [Opus 77] Fantasia is one of Beethoven’s most original, challenging, and forward-looking piano works, with a Romantic wildness that easily obscures its ingeniously crafted design. (Barry Cooper, Beethoven, p. 202)
The [Opus 77] work is the father of a series of nineteenth-century piano fantasies: four by Schubert, including the grand Wanderer Fantasy, Schumann’s great Fantasy Opus 17, and even Liszt’s Fantasies. (Lewis Lockwood, Beethoven, p. 287)