Fantasie in C major, Op. 17

About the work

Schumann's grandest work for solo piano, written in 1836 during his enforced separation from Clara. The first movement carries an epigraph from Schlegel — 'through all the sounds there sounds one soft note for the one who listens in secret' — and Schumann told Clara that the note was her. Against every sonata convention, the finale is a long, quiet adagio. The leaping coda of the second movement is one of the most perilous passages in the Romantic piano literature.

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