Fantasia << fan TAY zhee uh >> is an instrumental musical composition that has no fixed form or style. Instead, it depends on the composer’s imagination.
Some fantasias are written in such a free style that they sound as though the performer is making up the composition as he or she plays. Such fantasias are composed mainly for organ or piano. In the 1700’s, Johann Sebastian Bach and his son Carl Philipp Emanuel were masters of this type of fantasia. Another type, called a fantasy piece, is a short, dreamlike composition. Robert Schumann wrote many fantasy pieces. Longer fantasias resemble a sonata, but they are much freer in form. Schumann, Franz Schubert, and Frédéric Chopin composed a number of longer fantasias in the 1800’s. In England during the 1500’s and 1600’s, composers wrote pieces for instrumental ensembles that were called fantasias or fancies.
