It comes as no surprise that this work is a product of the fabled artistic life of Paris in the 1920s. The city's artistic elite were constantly seeking the new, the modern, the latest sensation. By the end of the 1920s, the futuristic musical landscapes of Edgard Varèse began to appear, and the mechanical sounds of modern life were center stage.

Bohuslav Martinu, a Czech composer already in his thirties, came into this milieu in 1923, seeking a more receptive audience than he could find in his own Czech homeland. He said later it took him three years to make sense of all the chaotic currents of music that buffeted him.

This is a work of his early productive years in Paris, fully in tune with Parisian love for the new sounds. The work also joins in the habitual French distrust of intrusive amounts of emotionalism. The single-movement piece is tough and unyielding and uses all the force that the two-piano medium makes possible. La Fantaisie, then, is one of Martinu's most rhythmically powerful and dissonant works, and at the same time, one of his least emotional. It lacks the characteristic joyful and humorous leaping quality that marks Martinu's best melodic ideas. However, it still packs a rhythmic and emotional punch. The emotion is grim, and the texture is diamond-hard, bright dissonant chords on the two pianos, or thick, linear counterpoint, often in conflicting keys.

This work demonstrated that Martinu was beginning to achieve honor in his home country: The premiere came not in Paris, but at Mánes Concert Hall in Prague. Some younger Czech composers had been reading, playing, and admiring Martinu's Paris-based music for a few years, and organized a concert that included La Fantaisie, which they described as a model work for young Czech musicians.

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