Haydn Hob. XVI:23

My ambitious number of summer projects includes spending a lot of quality time with Mozart's piano concerto (K. 284). I haven't played any Classical Era music in what feels like forever. So, I'm digging up some old sonatas and such that I've played over the last few years, and reacquainting myself with the genre. This is the first piece that I found and looked through, a late-ish Haydn sonata. I worked through it during my freshman year at Baylor.

Let it be known that I love Haydn. The poor guy is incredibly underrated, particularly among casual listeners of classical music. I can't figure out for the life of me why this is. Because of his compositional style, his music is very accessible to those not familiar with classical music. This is true for the following two reasons:

1. He would often take just one theme, and develop that one theme throughout a piece (as opposed to, say, Beethoven, who would introduce and develop several themes in just one movement of a piano sonata). It's one "Haydnisitic" characteristic that I really enjoy. Incidentally, that is an easy way to distinguish Haydn's music from that of Mozart. (I will admit that they often do sound similar! And Haydn and Mozart were like BFFs, totally. So it makes sense.) Mozart used the several-theme approach to sonata composition. Haydn did not. Voila!

2. His music is light. It's well-known that Haydn was an excessively cheerful person. This is secretly why I love him so much. We are kindred spirits. I am, in fact, also BFFs with Haydn. This also makes me pretty tight with Mozart, and I'm hoping that will help in regards to the aforementioned concerto. Anyway, what I'm trying to say is that his music is happy, plain and simple. It is also well-known that Haydn had a natural propensity for practical jokes. There's a might-be-fable about Haydn getting kicked out of a choir when he was younger because he cut off a fellow chorister's pigtail.

The first movement of the sonata is a wonderful example of Haydn's basic thematic approach. Listen here. The first two measures, that pseudo-arpeggiated sequence, is developed through the entire first movement. The development of the sonata begins with that exact same theme, in a different key. And the recapitulation begins with that exact same theme, in the same key. Even besides that, the entire movement is riddled with little variations of this theme, some which are obvious and some which are harder to find. I think that it's really just a game that Haydn plays.

The second movement is a bit more pensive. Listen here. In fact, it sounds a bit Romantic Era in nature. There's a continual chord arpeggiation in the bass, played under a gorgeous melody in the treble. In spite of the yearning sort of quality, I think that it's still very true to Haydn's character. It strikes me as being earnest, and honest. Almost child-like.

Listen to the third movement here and try to find the theme of the movement over and over again. This might be my favorite movement of the three. It's so witty and teasing. It's like Haydn's sticking out his tongue at the listener, threatening to chop off someone's pigtail. A lot of that mischievous feel comes from what he does in the main theme. In the main theme, there's a two-note slur that ends on a strong beat, and opposed to an off-beat. Two-note slurs, technically speaking, are supposed to end on weak beats. Haydn is, in fact, breaking a pretty solid musical rule, and doing it fairly often throughout the movement.