The following notes by pianist Glenn Gould accompanied the Columbia Master record album on which Mr. Gould recorded the Fantasy.

Oskar Morawetz' Fantasy (1948) is the first of three compositions for solo piano to bear that name. It was given its first public performance by me in 1951, at which time the entirely logical, if rather unfashionable, parenthesis (in D minor) was appended to its title.

Even in 1948, it required a measure of courage for a composer to advertise key relationship in a title. But the music of Morawetz is nothing if not courageous. For a quarter of a century he has compiled, with fervor and facility, an imposing catalog of compositions that have remained constant in their attachment to the formal prerequisites of an earlier generation.

In the case of the present work, the parenthetic appendage as to its tonality is, in fact, more relevant than the title "Fantasy." For despite its length and its extravagant invention, the work is but a generously expanded sonata-allegro, observing all the definitions of theme and key order thus implied (1st theme, D minor; 2nd theme, F major; 2nd theme, recapitulation, D major, etc.).

The fantasy-like attributes have to do with a sense of proportion. The development segment within this particular sonata-allegro introduces a substantial body of new material. The coda, though a contrapuntally souped-up version of the opening measures, is itself an appendage to a wistful postlude which terminates the tripartite sonata structure. Even the matter of supplementary key relationship is treated with a Bruckner-like latitude (the tempestuous subgroup of the second theme appears in the exposition, not surprisingly, as an F-minor statement, but then turns up in the recapitulation, emphasizing, in relation to the home key, the tritonic ambiguity of A-flat minor).

The influences behind this work, and Morawetz' style in general, are not difficult to assess. The piano writing, as such, is possessed of a tactile fluency which often recalls Prokofiev; that sense of unhurried motivic stocktaking, generated by the several bridge-passages through which fragments of the primary themes flicker fitfully, suggests Franz Schmidt; the pursuit of atonality, challenged but never imperiled by chromatic elaboration and made to bear the brunt of the work's secure rhetoric, invites comparison with the best of the post-Romantic contrapuntists from Max Reger to Paul Hindemith. There is also, and it is perhaps Morawetz' trademark, a certain rhythmic quirkiness which, though it surfaces more prominently in later works, identifies uniquely with Bohemia's meadows, forests and conservatories.

Glenn Gould