Off the Cuff with Chopin's Fantaisie-Impromptu
The Backstory
Fantaisie-Impromptu in C-sharp minor, Op. 66
Hello, I'm Chopin, and this is the backstory of my Fantaisie-Impromptu. Here you'll learn how it came to be written for a baroness, and why nobody can say for sure what made me keep it from the public. On this site my fellow composers and I also teach you to recognize our pieces as soon as they start playing, so take the Trainer for a spin .
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A Busy Man With a Quiet Reputation
By the time I wrote this piece, around 1834, I had been living in Paris for three years. I earned a good living from publishing and from teaching wealthy pupils, and I rarely played in public. So the Fantaisie-Impromptu was born in a drawing room, not in a concert hall. George Sand hadn't entered my life yet, since I only met her in 1836.Packing a Suitcase Between Pages
That year I travelled to the Lower Rhenish Music Festival in Aachen with my friend Ferdinand Hiller. On the way I met Mendelssohn in Düsseldorf, and we got along very well. In 1835 I saw my parents in Carlsbad for the last time, and I also met Maria Wodzińska there. I can't tell you which tune belongs to which journey, but those were full, emotional months.A Piece With a Name on the Envelope
The oldest manuscript we have is dated 1835, and it belonged to a Baroness d'Este. Its title page says the piece was composed for her by Frédéric Chopin. That is not a printed dedication like the ones I put in my published works, just a line on a handwritten page. It's a small detail, but it has given people plenty to talk about ever since.Why Did I Keep It in the Drawer?
Honestly, nobody knows why I never published it. Arthur Rubinstein suggested that the baroness's page reads like a paid commission, and that I may have felt the piece belonged to her. Others think it sounded too much like a famous sonata that came before it. Both explanations are only guesses, so you may pick the one you like best.A Little Moonlight in the Shadows
The scholar Ernst Oster noticed that my piece shares its key, C-sharp minor, with Beethoven's "Moonlight" Sonata. He also heard a similar run and cadenza in the finale, and a D-flat major middle section that echoes the sonata's slow second movement. There is also a resemblance to an Impromptu in E-flat major by Ignaz Moscheles, which was published in 1834. I admired both composers, so I won't pretend I never listened to them.A Wish That Nobody Followed
When I was dying in 1849, I asked for all my unpublished manuscripts to be destroyed. My mother and sisters saw it differently and asked Julian Fontana to look through what remained. He chose 23 piano pieces and gave them the posthumous opus numbers 66 to 73, and the Fantaisie-Impromptu came first. That is why it carries the number 66 even though I wrote it earlier than many pieces with smaller numbers.Who Gave It Its Name?
The word "Fantaisie" in the title was probably not mine. Fontana was my copyist and general helper in Paris, and his hands shaped the edition that people first read in 1855. When you compare my own manuscript with his printed text, you find several small differences. Still, his version is the one most pianists play today, so I suppose he earned his place in the story.The Manuscript Comes Back From the Dead
For a long time the baroness's album stayed out of sight. Then in 1960 Arthur Rubinstein bought it at an auction in Paris. In 1962 he published the manuscript with G. Schirmer, so pianists could finally see what I had written myself. It must have felt like finding a letter in a coat pocket that someone had left for you a century earlier.Loved by Audiences, Frowned at by Critics
Today the Fantaisie-Impromptu is one of my most performed and best-loved works. Audiences adore the flowing right hand and the singing melody in the middle. The critic James Huneker, however, found parts of it "mawkish", which is a polite word for a bit too sugary. I'll let you decide whether he was right.The Tune That Kept Travelling
The middle melody found a second life in a song called "I'm Always Chasing Rainbows", with music by Harry Carroll and words by Joseph McCarthy. It was published in 1917 and introduced in the Broadway show Oh, Look! in March 1918. Later composers quoted me as well, among them Federico Mompou in his Variations on a Theme of Chopin and George Crumb in his Makrokosmos. A piece I left in a drawer has ended up in places I could never have imagined.---
Now you know how the Fantaisie-Impromptu came to be, from a quiet drawing room in Paris to a printed page that I never lived to see. Looking back, it still amuses me that a piece I kept in a drawer has become one of the works people love to play most. Did you enjoy learning about the backstory of Fantaisie-Impromptu? I hope it gave you a little more to listen for the next time those restless hands begin. There is still a good deal more to explore in this piece. You can discover how it is built, how it sounds in different hands, and where other musicians have borrowed from it. If you're curious, click on the links provided and carry on exploring the Fantaisie-Impromptu at your own pace. I'd be glad to have you along.