Piano Sonata in C sharp minor (H.XVI/36)

Like the Sonata No.49 in E flat, the Sonata No.36 in C sharp minor was written for a favourite musician - or, in this case, two favourite musicians, Caterina and Marianna von Auenbrugger. “The approval of the Demoiselles von Auenbrugger,” Haydn told his publisher Artaria in February 1780, “is most important to me, for their way of playing and genuine insight into music equal those of the greatest masters.”

If two or three of the five sonatas (Nos.35-39) dedicated to the Auenbrugger sisters require less than a great master’s insight - “some of the most Rococo and empty music he ever wrote,” according to one eminent authority - No.36 in C sharp minor is happily not one of them. The nearest relation to the angry first subject of the opening Moderato is the equivalent theme of Beethoven’s “Quartetto serioso” in F minor, Op.96, which was written as many as thirty years later. Like Beethoven, having created the tension, Haydn is reluctant to let it go. The second subject is in the relative major but it is more or less the same theme as the first, now pushed along by impatient scale figures and worried by bumpy phrasing and chromatic harmonies. So, although the two versions of the main theme are given equal prominence in the development section, the C sharp minor ending is never in any doubt.

In the first edition of the Auenbrugger Sonatas, published by Artaria as Op.30 in 1780, Haydn draws attention to the presence of the same theme in two different works in the set. In the first movement of Sonata No.39 in G it is the subject of a more or less regular theme-and-variations construction. In the A major Scherzando of Sonata No.36 in C sharp minor it is presented, more experimentally, as the basis of a theme-and-variations construction in a kind of rondo form.

Neither the Scherzando, in spite of its episodes in the tonic minor, nor the final Menuetto is as dramatically conceived as the opening Moderato. Even so, in the melancholy elegance of its C sharp minor outer sections and the intimacy of its Trio section in the tonic major, the last movement is aptly equipped to mediate between the other two.