During the 2020 Covid lockdowns, while my father was learning how to bake bread, I was immersed in another kind of pandemic project: reassessing my approach to cello technique. The natural place to look for inspiration was the great performing cellists of the 19th century: Popper, Grützmacher, Servais, and Piatti, among others. I had long idolised these virtuosos. Aside from being accomplished performers in their day, they were all prolific composers, particularly of etudes, caprices, and other pedagogical works. As I sifted through their published catalogues, searching for new works to practice, my original intentions were quickly derailed. I encountered, fascinating concert music of all kinds: mazurkas, sonatas, concerti, airs, variations, and more. What especially piqued my interest was one genre that every composer seemed to have explored at least once: the opera fantasy.

These early- and mid-19th-century opera fantasies used recognisable tunes from famous operas to create a free medley. There were few rules beyond the pure expression of the composer’s personality, interests, and strengths as a cellist. I recalled my encounters with opera fantasies as a musical form: I had heard some before, but only for piano or violin. I was playfully envious of violinists, who enjoy three fantasies on Georges Bizet’s Carmen (my favourite opera); in contrast, we cellists didn’t have any (or so I thought!). But I was quickly discovering that the fantasies were indeed out there, ready to be revived.

My first concert of opera fantasies was a digital livestream in February 2021. The challenge of playing these pieces was exhilarating. The composers of these fantasies, mostly virtuoso cellists, had created a circus act of sorts—daring themselves and others to execute high-wire feats of technical prowess, demonstrating that the cello had a broader range of expression than composers previously believed. Performing this forgotten genre was like cello cosplay: I imagined myself sitting in the dusty corners of 19th-century salons, fancifully whipping out these classic tunes and their virtuosic embellishments, emulating the great cellists of the past. These fantasies are a grand expression of musical freedom: the freedom to play, to wander, to risk, and to evolve. This feeling of freedom is what I hoped to celebrate most in the selection of works featured on this album.

The Belgian virtuoso Adrien-François Servais (1807-1866) was one of the most influential creators of operatic fantasies for cello and piano. His Fantaisie et Variations sur des motifs de L'Opéra La Fille Du Régiment de Donizetti is one of the jewels of the genre and brims with the joyful exuberance of virtuosity. The work begins with an elaborate recitativo alternating between dramatic proclamations and wistful musings, loosely based on “La voilà! La voilà …” from Act 1 of Donizetti’s opera. Servais then tiptoes into a coy presentation of one of the opera’s most famous numbers, “Chacun le sait …” followed by four variations on this tune. These variations are like a high-stakes relay race: each one explores a different virtuosic technique, escalating the demands of the previous. The final minute of the fantasy heightens the virtuosity further yet, requiring the cellist to play a series of figurations in which the bottom note of an octave is embellished with a triplet. This ornamentation would appear some forty years later in the first movement of Antonín Dvořák’s Cello Concerto in B minor—a testament to the influence this work exerted on later compositions for the cello.

Servais’ brilliant forays into the genre inspired me to search for other lesser-known fantasies of the same era. I first encountered the name François George-Hainl (1807-1872) while perusing the online International Music Score Library Project (IMSLP). Hainl’s lone work on the website, Fantaisie sur des motifs de Guillaume Tell de Rossini, immediately intrigued me, partly owing to the conspicuous absence of music from the opera’s famous overture. Biographical information about Hainl is so scant that I had to reference French-language periodicals from the 1840s and 50s to find context about his work. I learned that Hainl was born to an Austrian father and French mother and began his musical career as a virtuoso cellist, touring Europe throughout the 1830s. By the end of that decade, he had become weary of the itinerant performing life and shifted his focus to conducting. After an impressive tenure at the opera house in Lyon, Hainl prominently served as the chief conductor of the Paris Opera, leading many essential premieres of the era, including those of Verdi’s Don Carlos and Meyerbeer’s L’Africaine.

The copy of the Fantaisie sur Guillaume Tell in the Bavarian State Library is dated circa 1830, one year after William Tell’s premiere at the Paris Opera. The young Hainl’s work adheres to the standard blueprint of fantasies of the time, favouring a series of discrete sections. The piece features three significant musical numbers from the opera (“Asile Héréditaire” from Act 4, scene 1; “Ses jours qu’ils ont osé proscrire …” from Act 2, Scene 4; and “Où vas-tu?” from Act 1, Scene 5), all originally for male voices. Nestled between the first two numbers is a charming original theme, followed by a tender variation in which the cellist plays brisk harmonic arpeggios above a piano melody. Hainl’s most virtuosic writing in the Fantaisie is imbued with a graceful, lyrical sentimentality rather than the bombast customary in the genre—perhaps a reflection of Hainl’s disposition as a musician and cellist.

The two shorter selections on the album exemplify another closely related tradition of instrumental transcription: the aria as a cantilena showpiece. These lyrical excerpts from operas effectively contrast more technical showpieces, allowing performers to exhibit their poetic sensibilities and ability to imitate vocalists’ detailed inflections. August Wilhelmj (1845-1908) was a close associate of Richard Wagner, notably serving as the concertmaster for the premiere of the Der Ring des Nibelungen. His paraphrase of Walter’s Prize Song from Wagner’s Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg is a soulful amalgamation of Walter’s various verses throughout the opera. The paraphrase was originally transcribed for violin and piano, but here it is performed on cello and piano in a slightly abridged version that is nearly identical to the one recorded by cellist Raya Garbousova and pianist Erich Itor Kahn for RCA in the 1940s. Mikhail Bukinik (1872-1947) was a prominent Ukrainian cellist known for his hyper-virtuosic concert etudes. His sensitive arrangement of “Lensky’s Aria” from Tchaikovsky’s opera Eugene Onegin demonstrates the expressive potential of the cello’s tender middle register.

When the time came to assemble the works for this album, I was intrigued by the idea of writing a fantasy of my own. The genre’s loose parameters meant I could write almost anything I wanted to play and tailor the fantasy to my tastes as a cellist. As a starting point, I was drawn to Leoš Janáček’s (1854-1928) Jenůfa, which enthralled me with its dark storyline, creative orchestration, and unconventional uses of repetition. The traditional 19th-century opera fantasy had long fallen into obscurity by the time Jenůfa premiered in 1902. I felt it would be an exciting challenge to adapt Jenůfa’s idiosyncratic musical language while still working within the fundamental framework of a showpiece. In Fantasy on Jenůfa, my goal was to highlight the music I love most from Jenůfa and arrange it in a way that felt logical and true to the spirit of the opera. During the composition process, I avoided referencing the opera’s plot or libretto, instead searching for moments in the opera that I believed would be interesting in purely musical terms. The music of Jenůfa favours a continuous flow of musical ideas without clear structural breaks (an idea I wanted my fantasy to reflect), so I structured the work into four sections connected without pause, framed by an introduction and coda.

Marshall Estrin’s (b1996) Fantasia Carmèn is the final track on the album. I had floated the idea of a new Carmen fantasy to Marshall as early as 2018. While fantasies on Carmen for cello and piano exist (such as those by Joseph Hollman and Buxton Orr), I felt that none fully captured the cello’s capacity as a virtuoso instrument. When Marshall ultimately wrote the piece in 2022, he delivered a work that thoroughly surprised me. It is a score written in the tradition of the most outstanding examples of the genre; its extensive technical demands are like an encyclopedia of cello virtuosity—there were multiple passages I believed to be genuinely unplayable at first glance—and it contains a show-stopping lyrical aria I have already excerpted as an encore in live performance. But its more unconventional elements reimagine the notion of the fantasy itself, proving that the genre’s possibilities are far from exhausted—and, indeed, may only be in their infancy.

Zlatomir Fung © 2025