Kant, Coleridge, and the “Moonlight” Sonata: Imagination, Fantasy, and Fantasies in Beethoven’s Time

Although the late eighteenth-century keyboard fantasy has become established in the musicological literature as a well-defined and singular genre, style, or topic, fantasy was a highly contested, ambiguous noun in German and British thought of the time. This article explores the musical ramifications of fantasy’s multiple meanings and introduces the ambiguity via the distinction between fancy (juxtaposing unrelated ideas) and imagination (synthesizing and unifying) in Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria—a distinction that was current in Germany from around the time of Beethoven’s birth. Crucially, the term Phantasie, in the hands of different German authors (Kant among them), could refer to Coleridge’s notions of imagination and fancy, showing that this split was inherent to how Phantasie itself was understood around 1800. Next, I place these different mental faculties in dialogue with the two primary subgenres of keyboard fantasy described by Carl Czerny. Reviews by contemporaneous critics suggest how the two sonatas quasi una fantasia of Ludwig van Beethoven’s op. 27 can be seen to exemplify Czerny’s two subgenres, and thus to illustrate in music the workings of Coleridge’s fancy and imagination. In particular, op. 27, no. 1, sets musical ideas side by side with an often violently contrasting effect, while the movements of no. 2 (the “Moonlight”) are almost monomaniacal in their uniformity of texture and motive. Finally, I show that this bifurcation in the genre of free fantasy had major consequences for later music. Czerny himself attempted to synthesize the two types using the technique of thematic transformation, a move that was later taken up by Czerny’s student Franz Liszt and those he inspired.