Classical Music | Piano Music

Recorded on 10/03/2011, uploaded on 10/03/2011

Musician's or Publisher's Notes

The “Wanderer” Fantasy, written in 1822 when Schubert was 25, has often been described in such terms as “Lisztian”, “heroic”,  “confident”, and “virtuosic”, qualities that we do not normally associate with most of Schubert’s works today.  Indeed, Liszt loved the piece so much that he arranged it as a work for piano and orchestra. However, it is not uniformly extroverted and actually conveys a wide range of character, encompassing both the stormy and delicate, big and small, public and private.

The Fantasy is the first great work to be entirely generated from a single musical idea – a motif deriving from Schubert’s own song “The Wanderer”, which is based onvon Lübeck’s rather somber text. This motif is at the heart of the four parts of the fantasy – four “movements” that are integrated into one large-scale movement in sonata form. The work is also innovative in that the piano is treated as if it were an orchestra with various instrumental colors, textures and a wide dynamic range. On the difficulties of performing the work, Schubert is known to have said after trying to play it himself: “The Devil may play the piece”!

Courtesy of International Music Foundation.