The Fantasy for piano, vocal soloists, mixed chorus, and orchestra, Op. 80, usually called the Choral Fantasy, was composed in 1808 by then 38-year-old Ludwig van Beethoven.
Beethoven intended the Fantasy to serve as the concluding work for the benefit concert he put on for himself on 22 December 1808; the performers consisted of vocal soloists, mixed chorus, an orchestra, and Beethoven himself as piano soloist. The Fantasy was designed to include all the participants in the program and thus unites all of these musical forces.
The work is noted as a precursor to the later Ninth Symphony.
Background, composition, and premiere
The Fantasia was first performed at the Akademie of 22 December 1808, a benefit concert which also saw the premieres of the Fifth and Sixth Symphonies and the Fourth Piano Concerto as well as a performance of excerpts of the Mass in C major. To conclude this memorable concert program, Beethoven wanted a "brilliant finale" that would unite in a single piece the different musical elements highlighted in the concert night: piano solo, mixed chorus and orchestra. The Fantasia, Op. 80, written shortly before, was thus composed expressly to fulfil this role. Beethoven himself played the piano part and the opening solo offers an example of his improvisational style (at the premiere he did, in fact, improvise this section).
Beethoven wrote the piece during the second half of December 1808 in an unusually short time by his standards. He commissioned a poet—whose identity is disputed—to write the words shortly before the performance to fit the already written parts. According to Beethoven's pupil Carl Czerny, the poet was , but the later Beethoven scholar Gustav Nottebohm doubted this attribution and suggested it may have been Georg Friedrich Treitschke, who in 1814 prepared the final text of Beethoven's opera Fidelio.
The premiere performance seems to have been a rather troubled one; according to the composer's secretary, Anton Schindler, it "simply fell apart", a result most likely attributable to insufficient rehearsal time. Because of a mistake in the execution of the piece, it was stopped halfway through and restarted. In Ignaz von Seyfried's words:
The Choral Fantasy and the Ninth Symphony
The work includes a sequence of variations on a theme that is widely felt to be an early version of a far better known variation theme, namely the one to which Beethoven set the words of Friedrich Schiller's "Ode to Joy" in his Ninth Symphony. The two themes are compared below.
Michael Broyles has suggested another musical similarity: the two works share essentially the same harmonic sequence at their climactic moments, the chords (in C major) C–F–D–(G)–E, where the E stands out from its harmonic context and is performed fortissimo. The words sung at this point are (for the Choral Fantasy) "Lieb und Kraft" ("love and strength") and (for the Ninth Symphony) "Über'm Sternenzelt! Über Sternen muss er wohnen." ("Above the tent of the stars, above the stars he must dwell.")
There are also affinities in the texts. The theme of the Choral Fantasy text – universal fraternity with the meeting of arts – evokes similar feelings as the "Ode to Joy" text.
Beethoven himself acknowledged the kinship of the two works. In a letter of 1824, when he was writing the Ninth Symphony, he described his project as "a setting of the words of Schiller's immortal '' in the same way as my pianoforte fantasia with chorus, but on a far grander scale."
The Choral Fantasy theme is itself taken from an earlier work by Beethoven: it is a slightly modified version of the composer's "Seufzer eines Ungeliebten – Gegenliebe,” a lied for high voice and piano written c. 1794–1795.
Form
The Choral Fantasy, which lasts about twenty minutes, is divided into two movements, played without a break:
The piece is scored for solo piano, mixed chorus, two soprano soloists, an alto soloist, two tenor soloists, a bass soloist, and an orchestra consisting of two flutes, two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, two horns, two trumpets, timpani and strings.
The Fantasy opens with a slow but virtuosic 26-bar piano introduction, beginning in C minor and modulating through a variety of keys in florid, improvisatory fashion. At its midpoint it settles on the dominant of the dominant, G major, with an extended cadenza. The implied key is never confirmed and the music eventually returns to C minor in a stormy passage, which at the last moment turns once more toward the dominant seventh of G in a sweeping arpeggio. This concludes the opening section.