Piano Sonata in E flat major Hob.XVI:52 (1794)

Haydn’s last three Pianos Sonatas, like his last three Piano Trios, were written for Theresa Jansen, a pupil of Muzio Clementi and herself a highly successful piano teacher when he met her in London in the 1790s. As one of three witnesses at her marriage to Gaetano Bartolozzi at St James’s Church in Piccadilly in 1795, he clearly knew her very well and he presumably admired her not only for her piano technique but also for her musicianship and her personality. Certainly, the Piano Sonata in E flat, which he dedicated to her a year earlier, presupposes a lively imagination and an open mind as well as a thoroughly accomplished technique.

An ordinary pianist of the day would have found the work difficult enough to play but even more difficult to understand. The first movement is particularly daring in its changes of harmony, some of them approached with disconcertingly little preparation, and in the abrupt changes of mood that go with them. Haydn’s modulations are so adventurous in fact that by the end of the development he is presenting his playful second subject in E major, which is as far from the starting point as he could get. It takes considerable technical skill in to restore the tonic key within just a few bars before the beginning of the recapitulation.

Haydn persists in his harmonic adventure by setting the Adagio in that same remote key of E major. Based on only one main theme, it is an extraordinarily fertile and liberated improvisation on the three-note phrase introduced in the very first bar. The Finale restores the tonality to E flat major with a brilliant example of the sustained exuberance Ms Jansen inspired in more than one of the works Haydn wrote for her. It is another monothematic structure, offering as its second subject a heavily emphatic version of the repeated notes which are the principal feature of the first subject. It is far from lacking in melodic interest, however, still less in harmonic inspiration and textural variety. The baroque-style toccata episodes are particularly remarkable phenomenon in this classical context.