Piano Sonata in F major, K.280

Installed in Munich for the rehearsals and first performance of his opera La finta Giardiniera at the Salvatortheater in January 1775, Mozart would have been drawn into the musical life of the city and called upon to play his own music from time to time. It was presumably for that reason that, in Munich early in 1775, he wrote the six piano sonatas, K.279-284. But why, never having written a keyboard sonata before, he should have chosen that particular form at that particular time is a question to which there is no certain answer. It has been suggested that the stimulus came from the recently published “Esterházy” Sonatas by Haydn. Bearing in mind the quality of those works and a number of at least superficial resemblances between the two sets of sonatas, it is certainly a plausible theory.

One of the most interesting of the Haydn sonatas is the F major (Hob.XVI/23) which, like Mozart’s K.280 in the same key, includes an F minor Adagio between an opening Allegro and a closing Presto. While Mozart’s Allegro assai, attractive as it is, cannot claim equality with Haydn’s Allegro moderato - it is Haydn’s adventurous development section that sets the man apart from the boy in this case - the Adagio is a different matter. Indeed, there is no more beautiful slow movement in any of Mozart’s sonatas. Like Haydn’s, Mozart’s Adagio is in 6/8 time and offers a hint of siciliano rhythms in the opening bars but the F minor pathos is more intimately expressed here and the early change of key to A flat major more touching, not least because of the way the melodic line seems to have to gasp for breath as it face deflections into unexpected harmonies.

As for the Presto movements, there is little to choose between them. Mozart’s doesn’t have quite the virtuoso interest of Haydn’s but it is certainly no less entertaining. Mozart’s development section is again short but its suddenly dramatic treatment of the second subject more than compensates for any lack of enterprise at the equivalent point in the first movement.

Gerald Larner ©2006