The Free Fantasia and the Musical Picturesque (New Perspectives in Music History and Criticism)

This book brings together music and visual arts, especially the art of landscape gardening, in the context of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century English and German culture. The aesthetic of the picturesque, derived from the controlled wilderness of the landscape garden, provided writers on music with a language in which to describe the musical genre of the free fantasia, and the picturesque emerges here as a vital means for understanding the fantastical elements in the music of C. P. E. Bach, Haydn, and Beethoven.