It was finished in 1966, as part of the soundtrack for Volker Schlöndorff's film adaptation of Robert Musil's novel The Confusions of Young Törless.
Fantasia for Strings is an abridged concert version of the full score for Der junge Törless, which has never been published and has only been performed for the film.
[1] Part of the Fantasia is played over the closing credits of the 1973 horror film The Exorcist.
[4] Some experts have stated that the work could be considered as a four-movement composition, because movements one, two, and three all resemble one another, creating thus a tripartite adagio and are used in the movie as the Törless family arrives at the school.
However, Henze uses the divisi a number of times throughout the whole composition, to the point that some of the voices can be divided into more than four staves.