Creating a New Music World: Liszt’s Hungarian Fantasia
By Maureen Buja , Interlude The Fantasia / Fantasy as a genre in the 19th century (versus the 17th-century English fantasias, which were very different) gave the composer enormous range to use his imagination on whatever he had decided to fantasize about. In Liszt ’s case, his Fantasia on Hungarian Folk Melodies from 1849–1852 takes Hungarian folk themes of contrasting character and, in a free form, makes improvisational-style permutations on the music. Hermann Biow: Franz Liszt , 1943 To look at where Liszt got this material, we have to look back through his own catalogue. Liszt’s Magyar Rhapsodiak/Ungarische Rhapsodien , S242/R105c, which was written for solo piano around 1846–1847, uses many of the same melodies that appear later in his Hungarian Rhapsody No. 14 in F minor , S242/R106, perhaps the most famous of his Hungarian Rhapsody cycle of 19 works, written in 1847. Some of the melodies in the 14th Rhapsody come from ...