ABSTRACT

This chapter focuses on the concept of freedom, which entered the aesthetic discussion at the beginning of the nineteenth century without losing the ethical and political connotations gained in the years of the French Revolution. The passages that Adolf Bernhard Marx, the initiator of the theory of musical form, devoted to the relationship between 'law' and 'freedom' are enlightening in this respect. The chapter discusses the semantic instability of the term 'fantasia' in reference to various theorists and with a comparison of analyses of Mozart's Fantasia in C minor, K. 475. It explains the Romantic view on reality as contradictory and unstable is considered as a determinant for the discontinuous and interwoven time structures to be found in post-Beethovenian fantasias beginning with Schubert's Wandererphantasie. The chapter deals with an idea of the temporal process relevant for Romanticism: cyclical time, a concept central to compositions which were labelled as 'free variation form'.