Fantasia in C Minor

The year 1785 was good for Mozart. The concerts he’d been giving in Vienna were popular, he was earning a considerable amount of money and he lived with his family in a comfortable apartment. So it’s not immediately obvious why the Fantasia in C minor he wrote for piano that year should be so emotionally turbulent in tone. Cast in a single movement lasting 11 minutes, the Fantasia, while drawing on Mozart’s talent for freestyle improvisation, is in fact organised into five distinct sections. It opens with an austere call to attention, a stabbing gesture that continues to bluntly interrupt the right hand’s efforts to establish musical fluidity. A measure of major-key stability is eventually gained, but the mood is fragile. A quicker section of music follows, with scarifying tremolandos suggesting intense anxiety, and a vertiginous upward sweep from one end of the piano to the other. Brief relaxation is offered in a deceptively insouciant interlude before the storm returns in a coruscating right-hand sequence of notes cascading dizzily down the keyboard. The Fantasia concludes by returning to the sombre mood and music of its opening section, one final upward-rippling glissando closing off all hope of a conventionally happy ending.