Hamelin - Haydn, 01.Biblioteka muzyczna, Klasyka, Haydn J, Fortepian
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Sonatas
MARC-ANDRÉ
HAMELIN
HAYDN
Piano
closely associated with the piano sonata than with
the string quartet or symphony. Though a more than
competent pianist (one writer in London described his
playing of the brilliant fortepiano solo in the Symphony
No 98 as ‘neat and distinct’), he was by his own admission
no ‘wizard’ on the keyboard, and unlike Mozart and
Beethoven never wrote sonatas for his own performance.
Yet the keyboard remained central to Haydn’s creative
process. His morning routine would invariably begin with
him trying out ideas, for whatever medium, on the clavi-
chord, the harpsichord or, from the 1780s, the fortepiano;
and he composed prolifically for keyboard through most
of his adult life, beginning with the harpsichord works he
produced for aristocratic pupils during his ‘galley years’
in Vienna and culminating in the three great sonatas
(Nos 50 –52 in Hoboken’s catalogue) inspired by the
sonorous Broadwood instruments he encountered on his
London visits.
With a few exceptions, Haydn’s sixty-odd sonatas are
habitually relegated to teaching fare, ignored by all but a
handful of leading pianists. Yet far more than Mozart’s
much slenderer body of sonatas, they chart and epito-
mize the evolution of the Classical sonata: from the
lightweight early divertimenti and partitas, modelled on
the harpsichord style of composers such as Galuppi and
the Viennese Georg Wagenseil, through the more
individual sonatas of the late 1760s and early 1770s,
several influenced by the
Empfindsamkeit
of C P E Bach,
and the consciously ‘popular’ idiom of the 1770s and
1780s, to the magnificent, often prophetic works written
for public performance in London.
No Haydn sonata is more indebted to Emanuel Bach’s
brand of
Empfindsamkeit
—the language of heightened
sensibility that had its literary roots in the works of Jean-
Jacques Rousseau and the German poet Klopstock—than
the Sonata in A flat,
No 46
1
6
, composed around
1767– 8. Beyond any specific influence, this beautiful
work reflects the striking intensification of Haydn’s
musical idiom in the years immediately following his
elevation to full Kapellmeister at the Esterházy court in
1766. Opening with a typically
empfindsamer
theme,
irregularly phrased and characterized by delicate
ornaments and sighing appoggiaturas, the first movement
surpasses all its predecessors in scale, expressive richness
and variety of rhythm and texture. As so often in Haydn’s
earlier sonatas, the central section is more a free fantasia
than a true development, though here the exhilarating
toccata-like figuration sweeps through an unusually
adventurous spectrum of keys.
For the
Adagio
, Haydn moves to the subdominant,
D flat major, an outré key in the eighteenth century and
one never used by Mozart. With the extreme tonality goes
a peculiar intimacy of expression: from the delicate con-
trapuntal opening, with the bass descending passacaglia-
style, this is one of the most subtle and poetic of all
Haydn’s slow movements. The polyphonic and chromatic
enrichment of the main theme in the development
suggests not so much C P E as J S Bach at his most inward;
and Haydn opens up further strange harmonic vistas in
the coda. With its catchy, quicksilver main theme, the
compact sonata-form finale provides a glorious physical
release. Yet for all its exuberance this is no mere frothy
romp. The darting semiquaver figuration always has a
strong sense of direction, above all in the powerful chro-
matic sequences just before the recapitulation.
The other A flat sonata here,
No 43
2
4
, published
in London in 1783 but almost probably composed a
decade or so earlier, is a far slighter work. Indeed, with the
autograph lost, some commentators have even doubted
the sonata’s authenticity. If it is by Haydn, it shows the
composer at his most blithely
galant
. The monothematic
2
I
I
N POPULAR MYTHOLOGY Haydn’s name is far less
first movement has a certain amiable charm but none of
Haydn’s usual sense of adventure or delight in surprise.
Next comes a minuet that contrasts the mock-military
dotted rhythms of the main part with a flowing, almost
Schubertian Ländler trio. The most vividly Haydnesque
movement is the racy
Presto
finale, a characteristic amal-
gam of rondo and variations. Near the end the main
theme acquires a slightly zany twist with unscripted leaps
to a higher octave.
Two of the sonatas in this programme, Nos 23 and 24,
come from the set of six composed in 1773 and printed
the following year—the first authorized publication of
any of Haydn’s works—with a judicious dedication to his
employer, Prince Nikolaus Esterházy. Haydn was careful
to tailor these predominantly lightweight pieces to the
taste—and the technique—of the flourishing amateur
market. The tone is, again, essentially
galant
. But there is
more Haydnesque inventiveness and drama than in the
A flat sonata, No 43. The crisp opening movement of the
F major,
No 23
2
1
, again trading mainly on scintil-
lating toccata-style figuration, is enriched by sudden dips
to the minor mode. Between this and the gamesome
finale—a sonata-form movement that varies and deve-
lops its contredanse theme with characteristic guile—
comes a rhapsodic F minor
siciliano
: music that surely
influenced Mozart in his F major sonata, K280, of 1775,
though unlike Mozart’s
siciliano
it relies less on melody
than on dreamy figuration and richly expressive harmony.
The first movement of the D major sonata,
No 24
2
7
, in
time, is an athletic, tautly developed piece,
alternating wiry, two-part writing with brilliant toccata
sequences. At the start of the development Haydn
intensifies the main theme in a series of canonic
imitations. The D minor
Adagio
opens with a dolefully
hesitant theme over a Baroque-style repeated-note
accompaniment—a peculiarly Haydnesque blend of
pathos and austerity—before growing more floridly
expressive. Following the example of many of Emanuel
Bach’s slow movements, Haydn then lets the music
dissolve into the mercurial
Presto
finale. This takes the
form of a gracefully syncopated theme, an airy variation
that makes even greater play with syncopation, and what
promises to be a reprise of the theme before a pause
on an alien chord mischievously derails the listener’s
expectations.
With the sonata
No 32
2
bl
, one of a group of six
published privately in manuscript copies in 1776, we move
from inspired
galanterie
to the vehement astringency
characteristic of Haydn’s music in B minor (compare the
string quartets Op 33 No 1 and Op 64 No 2). In his later
works Haydn preferred a cheerful, major-mode resolution
in his minor-keyed movements. Here, though, the recap-
itulations of the fiercely concentrated outer movements
remain grimly in the minor throughout; and what had
seemed brilliant or (in the first movement’s dancing trip-
lets) even skittish in the exposition subsequently acquires
a tense, anxious edge. The finale, with its obsessively
pounding theme—the mainspring of virtually all the
musical action—and weird, unsettling silences, is
perhaps Haydn’s most violent sonata movement, culmi-
nating in a laconic coda that thunders out the theme in
stark octave unison. Amid this turbulence, the dulcet,
long-spanned central minuet in B major, in effect a
surrogate slow movement, provides harmonic balm, with
its darkly agitated B minor trio evoking the mood of the
sonata as a whole.
One of Haydn’s few pre-London sonatas to have
entered the popular repertoire is the D major,
No 37
2
bo
, from the set of six published by the Viennese firm
of Artaria in 1780. The sonatas were dedicated to the
talented sisters Franziska and Maria Katherina von
Auenbrugger, whose playing in aristocratic salons drew
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JOSEPH HAYDN
During the 1780s Haydn’s production of solo keyboard
music fell off sharply, partly because of lucrative foreign
commissions (most famously
The Seven Last Words
and
the Paris symphonies), partly because of his renewed
absorption in the string quartet and the piano trio.
Between the Auenbrugger sonatas and the first London
visit of 1791 Haydn wrote no more than a handful of
sonatas, among them the triptych of two-movement works
(Nos 40 – 42) published by the firm of Bossler in 1784.
These were dedicated—perhaps as a wedding gift—to
the sixteen-year-old Princess Marie Hermenegild Ester-
házy, who the previous year had married the future
Prince Nikolaus II, destined to be Haydn’s last Esterházy
patron.
Reviewing the sonatas in 1785, Cramer’s
Magazin der
Musik
noted that they were ‘more difficult to perform
than one initially believes. They demand the utmost
precision, and much delicacy in performance.’ For all
their surface lightness, all three are sophisticated, subtly
wrought works.
Allegretto innocentemente
is the mar-
king for the first movement of
No 40
1
4
, a set of
alternating major–minor variations (a favourite form in
Haydn’s later works) in a lilting, pastoral
metre. But
unlike the finale of No 37, the innocence is not to be taken
quite at face value. Even at the opening Haydn disturbs the
bucolic idyll with offbeat
sforzando
accents (smoothed
out in most nineteenth-century editions); and there are
further disruptive accents in the contrasting G minor
theme, with its broken, sighing phrases and tense
harmonies. The finale likewise trades on variations and
major–minor contrasts, though here the mood is one of
quixotic humour. The madcap opening theme, highly
irregular in its phrasing, leaps absurdly down three
octaves at its first cadences and then plunges to a surprise
key (B flat after D major) for a miniature development of
the theme (this whole first section has the outline of a
the admiration of both Leopold Mozart—never one to
dish out compliments lightly—and Haydn himself. The
D major’s popularity is easy to understand. The first
movement, with its irrepressible, chirruping main theme,
evokes the spirit of Domenico Scarlatti at his most
dashing within the dynamic of the Classical sonata style.
At the centre of the development Haydn offsets the
prevailing mood of jocularity with a powerful sequence
of suspensions. The
Largo e sostenuto
, in D minor, is
especially striking: a grave, sonorously scored sarabande,
archaic in flavour, with a suggestion of a Baroque French
overture in its dotted rhythms and imitative contrapuntal
textures. Like the slow movement of No 24, it leads
without a break into the finale, a guileless rondo marked
innocentemente
and built around a fetching tune that
could have been whistled on any Viennese street corner.
4
miniature sonata form). After a syncopated contrapuntal
episode in E minor, the main theme returns with renewed
glee, elaborately, almost zanily embellished.
The boldly assertive opening
Allegro
of
No 41
1
9
is
the only movement in the three Marie Esterházy sonatas
in full sonata form. Its second group of themes begins
with a radical reinterpretation of the first before moving to
F minor for a new, restlessly modulating theme over an
Alberti-style bass. As in the finale of No 40, the develop-
ment immediately dips a major third to a relatively distant
key (here D flat after F)—a favourite dramatic ploy of
Haydn’s in the 1780s and 1790s. Almost before we have
got our bearings, the music swerves abruptly to an equally
surprising E flat major for a restatement of the main
theme. Haydn follows this
Allegro
with a movement both
mercurial and tautly worked, often freely contrapuntal in
texture. Its form (ABA, with the ‘A’ section playfully varied
on its reprise) is akin to the finale of No 40, though here
the central section, in B flat minor, begins as a free
paraphrase of the opening.
It is a far cry from these delectable lightweight works
composed for amateur domestic performance to the
large-scale sonatas written during Haydn’s second London
visit of 1794 –5 for the professional pianist Therese
Jansen (
c
1770 –1843). Born in Aachen, Jansen became a
star pupil of Clementi’s after her move to England. Haydn
warmly admired her playing, composing for her not only
the sonatas Nos 50 and 52 (possibly, too, the slighter
D major, No 51) but also three of his greatest piano trios,
Nos 27–29. In May 1795 he was a witness at her wedding,
in St James’s Piccadilly, to the picture dealer Gaetano
Bartolozzi, son of the famous engraver Francesco Barto-
lozzi.
The first movement of the C major,
No 50
1
1
—
probably the last of Haydn’s sonatas—is a
ne plus
ultra
of thematic concentration, a brilliant, extrovert
counterpart to the strenuous ‘Fifths’ Quartet, Op 76 No 2.
It opens with a bald, staccato theme, virtually unharmo-
nized and typically irregular in phrase structure—a
vision of dry bones. Haydn immediately repeats and
elaborates the theme, initially with full, rolling chords
(presaging the orchestral style of much of the writing),
then with hints of two-part counterpoint that will have
significant consequences later. This single fertile idea
reappears, contrapuntally enriched, as a ‘second subject’
(with the theme initially in the bass), and is treated
with endless resource in the harmonically breathtaking
development. The development’s climax comes with the
famous ‘open pedal’ passage, where the once-bare theme
is transformed into something rich and strange in the
remote key of A flat. What Haydn seems to have envisaged
here was not the sustaining pedal, as is sometimes
assumed, but the
una corda
(i.e. soft) pedal available on
the new Broadwood instruments but rarely found on
contemporary Continental pianos. In the recapitulation
the theme attains its lyrical apotheosis with another, more
extended ‘open pedal’ passage, now ethereal rather than
darkly mysterious.
After a poetically embellished, quasi-improvisatory
Adagio
in F—a rhapsodic meditation such as we find in
many of the late piano trios—the finale is a candidate for
the most subversively comic piece that even Haydn ever
wrote. A scherzo in all but name, it continually baffles
with its lopsided phrases (the quirky main theme consists
of five plus two bars), outrageous sudden silences and
disorienting feints to absurdly remote keys that, unlike
Haydn’s usual practice, remain arbitrary and unexplained
to the end.
Remote tonal relationships are also a prime feature
of the noble, almost symphonic E flat Sonata,
No 52
1
bm
, Haydn’s grandest and most spacious work for
the piano. Here, though, they are integrated into a boldly
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