ABSTRACT
This chapter considers improvisation, not limiting to the style of fantasia alone, in order to point out some musical elements that contribute to define the rhetoric of improvisation and how they can be used in order to give music an improvisatory character. The style that is usually associated with the idea of improvisation is fantasia. Simply by reading Carl Czerny's treatise on the art of improvisation, Systematische Anleitung zum Fantasieren auf dem Pianoforte one gets an idea of how many different forms of improvisation were typically adopted in public performances. In public improvisations, or in competitions between pianists on the Viennese piano scene in the late eighteenth century, one of the most interesting parts of the performance was undoubtedly the moment when the pianist improvised a sequence of variations on a theme. Carl Czerny's huge output of fantasias exemplifies the new kinds of improvisation that had become trendy in Ludwig van Beethoven's final years.
