Abstract
Even though the antecedents of the genre of the “descriptive fantasia” date back to the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, it was as a genre for piano that it came to fullest fruition, beginning with Franz Kotzwara’s Battle of Prague, composed around 1788. Striking a balance between modest technical demands and dazzling effects, this famous work served as a model for many other consumer-targeted pieces that depict battles, natural disasters, and other momentous events. Such pieces display both remarkable creativity in their depictive effects (various kinds of military ordnance, climatic phenomena, sighs and sobs, bells, and much more) and great resourcefulness in their formal paradigms, including intertextual uses of musical quotation and polygeneric construction. Descriptive fantasias are all but forgotten today, but many of the musical developments usually credited to celebrated composers were first seen decades earlier in these ephemeral middlebrow works.
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