The largest of Copland's piano works and one of his most ambitious compositions, the Piano Fantasy was completed in 1957 after several years of work. It began life in 1951 as a piano concerto that the Louisville Orchestra wanted to commission for performance by the young pianist William Kapell (1922 - 1953). The commission fell through, however, and Copland decided to use the concerto sketches to create a solo piano work for Kapell. At about the same time composer William Schuman, then also resident of the Juilliard School of Music, asked Copland to write a piece for an American music festival celebrating the School's 50th anniversary. But then came word of the tragic death of Kapell, at age 31, in a plane crash. Copland abandoned the cantata he had begun for Juilliard and decided instead to complete the solo piano work in fulfillment of the commission, dedicating it to Kapell's memory. Finished too late for the music festival, the Fantasy was premiered at Juilliard by pianist William Masselos on October 25, 1957. In an unusual strategy, the Fantasy was the only work on that evening's program; Masselos played it twice, both before and after intermission. Copland had himself played the first performances of most of his other major piano works, but decided not to in the case of the Fantasy because, as he put it in a letter to Benjamin Britten, "the Fantasy is quite beyond me."

The work is approximately half an hour in length, with no pauses, and contains considerable technical hurdles for any performer. Copland's directions in the score are detailed and frequent: at different points he uses such descriptions as "clangorous," "bell-like," "brooding," "hurried and tense," "crystalline," "poetic, drifting," "violent," "muttering," and "with mounting excitement." As Leo Smit, who has recorded all of Copland's piano music, has written, "Aaron's instructions to the performer in the Fantasy are so personalized that it's as though he was standing behind you looking over your shoulder. I know of no other work that is so filled with the physical presence of a composer."

Overall, the Fantasy falls roughly into a tripartite, ABA form. Bold and dramatic gestures mark the spare, jagged opening. Another idea, more pastoral, breaks through occasionally. There are several distinct themes and some development of them, but they do not fall into any easily recognizable pattern. Copland once wrote that in the Fantasy he had set out "to suggest the spontaneity of improvisation while, at the same time, keeping a discrete formal control the whole time." The Fantasy is one of only four works that Copland wrote using 12-tone techniques; although much of the music is quite dissonant, there are also lengthy passages which sound quite tonal. After the slower material of the opening, there are hints of jazz in some of the faster passages in the Fantasy's central section. The slower ideas from the beginning recur in the work's final section, and the Fantasy ends quietly and mysteriously.

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