Playing the piano was for Aaron Copland one of the necessities of life, like eating or breathing. Wherever he was there was always a piano somewhere near. Even during conversations and interviews, so it is said, his fingers used to move involuntarily on the table-top like on an imaginary keyboard. And it is in piano works that Copland's compositional development found its culmination again and again. The "Passacaglia" is his very first large-scale work, and the 5"Piano Fantasy" can be regarded as his most ambitious, most extensive composition in the field of absolute music, a work in which he sums up and concentrates many characteristics of his musical style in a late work.
