The Free Fantasia and the Musical Picturesque

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.