noun

• 1A musical composition with a free form and often an improvisatory style.

  ‘Brahms's Violin Concerto begins with a long ritornello, but for most 19th-century composers sonata form and the fantasia were more important than the ritornello principle.’

  More example sentences

  • ‘The fanfare fantasia before the choral entrance even includes clams.’
  • ‘The finale is a joyous fantasia on much of the music deployed earlier with such skill and evident delight.’
  • ‘It falls somewhere between a large symphonic movement and a fantasia.’
  • ‘Though four generations older than Henry Purcell, Orlando Gibbons wrote a body of music for viols that exerts much the same fascination as Purcell's later and more familiar viol fantasias.’

  1. 1.1A musical composition based on several familiar tunes.
     ‘Dowland, of course, had written seven lute fantasias based on his song ‘Break now, my heart, and die’ under the title Lacrimae, or Seven Teares.’
     More example sentences

     • ‘Glinka once again established formal and stylistic ground plans for future Russian composers in his orchestral fantasia Kamarinskaya, based on two Russian folk tunes.’
     • ‘As with its corresponding number in the first orchestral set, the second movement - depicting a camp meeting - is a fantasia based mainly on ragtime dances Ives wrote for the piano in the early 1900s.’
     • ‘The famous Pye recordings of Vaughan Williams ‘Greensleeves’ and Thomas Tallis fantasias are reproduced in stunning sound and they remain my particular favourite for these overplayed works.’
     • ‘This young Chinese clarinettist's recital of potted fantasias on operas by Verdi, Bellini and Ponchielli is bravura fluff.’
  2. 1.2A thing composed of a mixture of different forms or styles.
     ‘the theatre is a kind of Moorish and Egyptian fantasia’
     More example sentences

     • ‘This re-release of Amadeus, described by Shaffer as ‘a fantasia based on fact’, boasts 20 additional minutes of music and drama.’
     • ‘Perelman's free-associative style spun fantasias out of girdle ads, tabloid tattle, sleazy pulp fiction and recipe prose.’
     • ‘Based on Virginia Woolf's glittering fantasia written as a love-letter to Vita Sackville-West, the story covers four hundred years of history.’