Piano Sonata in E major (H.XVI/31)

The Sonata in E major is one of those which, after their publication by Hummel in 1776, got Haydn involved in a curious controversy with a composer he sincerely admired. They seemed to a writer in the European Magazine to have so much in common with sonatas by C.P.E. Bach that he assumed they must have been “expressly composed to ridicule Bach of Hamburg” who, it was alleged, had irritated Haydn by uttering “scurrility and abuse” of his work. Nothing could have been further from the truth. Bach issued a strongly worded denial that he had ever “written against the good Herr Haydn,” adding that “this worthy man, whose works continue to give me much pleasure, is surely as much my friend as I his.”

Although Haydn seems to have remained silent in this particular debate, he is on record as saying that “whoever knows me thoroughly must discover that I owe a great deal to Emanuel Bach, that I understood him and have studied him with diligence.” That much would have been clear anyway from the first movement of the Sonata in E major which, far from ridiculing C.P.E. Bach in his “capricious manner, odd breaks and whimsical modulations” flatters him by imitating those things and creating something quite fresh out of them. The delicately fastidious first subject, the dramatically contrasted passage of bravura with its heavy octaves in the left hand and firmly profiled downward scales in the right, the sudden change of key to C sharp minor for the second subject, which is to be recalled in the recapitulation in an anomalous F sharp minor - all these add up to a sincere tribute to Bach of Hamburg.

The rest of the work is more characteristic of Haydn of Esterháza. The E minor Allegretto is not so much a slow movement - its walking pace is obviously too quick for that - as a gently teasing introduction to the final Presto which, following without a break, liberates itself from tempo constraints in a set of four variations and coda on busy little theme in E major.