ABSTRACT
Yet if the keyboard helped Haydn to compose freely, he was not entirely unconstrained in composing his music for keyboard: tempered by the graceful amateur pianism of his dedicatees, students, and imagined public, and circumscribed by his publishers’ requests (“to suit your taste, I have newly written the third Sonata with variations,” he wrote to his publisher Artaria in 1789).1 Because compositions that make only moderate technical demands are today typically judged less valuable than those combining virtuosity with musical substance, Haydn’s sonatas before the London period have been tainted by this association with dilettantism and the market. This judgment, however, was not universally held by Haydn’s contemporaries; an astute observer of the musical scene in Vienna and Prague in the 1790s praised Haydn’s keyboard pieces precisely because they were pleasing and usually easy to play, and thus more useful than the excessive difficulties with which other composers belabored students (Schönfeld 21). Haydn’s modest claims for his own keyboard ability (“I was not a wizard at any instrument…; I was not a bad clavier player”), which have also helped to create the impression that his writing for the keyboard was peripheral to his career, ought not to
distract attention from the ways in which his sonatas, variations, and capriccios reveal a flair for keyboard sonorities as well as his deepest compositional concerns.
