The Study Of Performing And Teaching Suhubert’s Piano Work "the Wanderer Fantasy"

When Schubert was composing this later stage piano phantasy “The Wanderer Fantasy”(D.760), he had already stepped into his mature period of composing career life. This phantasy possesses a distinctive character of typical Schubert’s music, in which he was fond of bringing the very emotional themes from his songs into his instrumental music. This preference makes his piano music much more expressive than others’. Meanwhile, he bridged the classic music and romantic music with the strength of his unique composing style, experience and techniques. This master piece influences the later compositions by its innovative phantasy and the playing techniques required is considerably high as well. All these features make it one of the most favorable musical works in the piano world. As one of my favorites as well, I performed this fantasy in my graduation concerto and set it as the topic of this thesis. Hopefully, this study could help us have a better interpretation of the inner connotation of Schubert’s music and provide some references for those who intend to perform this musical work.This thesis could be divided into two sections. The first part focuses on the music form analysis of the “Wanderer Fantasy”. The composer adopted a free composing style, instead of the traditional sonata form, in this musical work. As for the theme, he connected the four episodes with the melody from his art song. Since Schubert lived in the transition point between two historical periods of music, this work, not only from the perspective of music form, inherited the classic music style tradition and opened up the way towards the new era of romantic music style at the same time, which is also briefly discussed in this part.In the later part of this thesis, I shared some of my understanding and tips upon some difficult points in learning to play this work, such as the performance method of motive chord, the way to run arpeggios, scales and broken chords. Furthermore, some suggestions about how to move big arms, wrists and thumbs are also provided in order to carry out energy efficient performance way for large scale music.