Fantaisie for piano and orchestra

Composer: DEBUSSY, Claude
  • Debussy began composing the Fantaisie for piano and orchestra in 1889. He undertook subsequent revisions and it reached its completed state in 1896.1
  • The Fantaisie was one of Debussy’s first major symphonic works, and it is one of the few instrumental pieces he wrote without a programmatic title (i.e., one of his few pieces of “absolute music”)2
  • Form: the Fantaisie is loosely based on traditional three-movement concerto form, but the second and third movements are joined together without a pause.3
  • Listen for: a theme in the first movement returns in a marchlike iteration in the final movement. 4 This is an example of cyclic form: when similar thematic material appears in more than one movement of a work. (Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique5 and Beethoven’s 5th Symphony6 are famous examples of cyclic form.)

Sources

  1. François Lesure and Roy Howat, “Debussy, (Achille-)Claude,” Grove Music Online (2001), accessed August 27, 2019, https://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/grovemusic/view/10.1093/gmo/9781561592630.001.0001/omo-9781561592630-e-0000007353.
  2. Mark DeVoto, Debussy and the Veil of Tonality: Essays on His Music (Hillsdale N.Y., Pendragn Press, 2004), 8.
  3. Ibid., 9.
  4. Ibid., 13.
  5. Harvard Dictionary of Music, 4th ed., s.v. “Cyclic form” (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003).
  6. “Cyclic form,” Encyclopædia Britannica (2007), accessed August 29, 2019, https://www.britannica.com/art/cyclic-form.

Cut IDs

19700