Improvisation was a crucial aspect of musical life in Europe from the late 18th century to the mid-19th. Composers devoted themselves to this practice while formulating the musical ideas found at the core of their published works; improvisation was linked to composition itself. The full extent of this can be inferred from private documents and reviews of concerts, while these texts inform us that composers often performed in public as improvisers and interpreters of pieces. Improvisations presented were distinguished by a remarkable degree of structural organisation and complexity, indicating abilities in composition and familiarity with rules for improvising outlined by theoreticians.

Gianmario Borio is Professor of Musicology at the University of Pavia and director of the Institute of Music at the Giorgio Cini Foundation, Venice. His publications deal with several aspects of the music of the twentieth century, the history of musical concepts and the theory of musical form.

Angela Carone has been a collaborator at the Giorgio Cini Foundation in Venice since 2013. Among other topics, she has published essays on Carl Czerny, Franz Schubert and Robert Schumann's instrumental works and the concepts of musical work and style in the eighteenth to early nineteenth century.

Introduction, Gianmario Borio and Angela Carone; Part I Improvisation and music theory; 1. Formal elements of instrumental improvisation: evidence from written documentation, 1770-1840, Angela Carone; 2. Musical form in improvisation treatises in the age of Beethoven, Jan Philipp Sprick; 3. 'La solita cadenza'? Vocal improvisation, embellishments and fioriture in opera from the late eighteenth to the first half of the nineteenth century, Torsten Mario Augenstein; 4. 'Free forms' in German music theory and the Romantic conception of time, Gianmario Borio; Part II From improvisation to composition; 5. Fantastical forms: formal functionality in improvisational genres of the Classical era, William E. Caplin; 6. Four piano fantasias by Hummel: improvisation, motivic processing, harmonic enterprise and the 'memory function', Rohan H. Stewart-MacDonald; 7. A step to the 'Wanderer'. Schubert's early Fantasia-Sonata in C Minor (D. 48), Pieter Bergé; 8. Didacticism and display in the capriccio and prelude for violin, 1785-1840, Catherine Coppola; Part III Freedom as a tool for musical form; 9. 'Quasi una fantasia'? The legacy of improvisational practice in Ludwig van Beethoven's piano sonatas, Hans-Joachim Hinrichsen; 10. Improvisation practices in Beethoven's Kleinere Stücke, Marco Targa; 11. The fate of the antepenultimate: fantasy and closure in the Classical style, Scott Burnham; 12. 'Ad arbitrio dei cantanti': vocal cadenzas and ornamentation in early nineteenth-century opera, Giorgio Pagannone