Chopin’s “Fantaisie” has given rise to numerous interpretations, both performance-based and scholarly. Leo Mazel (1937) proposed a coherent structural-semantic conception of the work as a synthesis of sonata form and ballad form. Yet Chopin did not call the work a ballad, and its formal structure allows for interpretations other than a sonata-form reading. This article proposes a new interpretation of the “Fantaisie,” based on a different understanding of its form and genre. In the author’s view, the “Fantaisie” has a narrative plot that unfolds not linearly, according to the sonata principle, but spirally, according to the principle of the cyclic rondo, and recursively, according to the principle of a “story within a story.” It displays features of a monodrama, in which the protagonist is not an abstract “narrator” (as in Mazel’s interpretation), but the composer himself, Chopin. As a result, characteristic Romantic motifs—doubling, creativity, patriotism, death, and immortality—acquire autobiographical dimensions in the “Fantaisie.” Assuming that the “Fantaisie” has a hidden program, as does the early Nocturne in G minor, Op. 15, No. 3, the author employs a hermeneutic approach to uncovering it.
