A few months back MHS issued the ''complete'' Mozart piano-and-violin sonatas (or all that are fit to print, anyhow). I've been whiling away the Great Blizzard of '78 by playing them; what lovely works--and what lovely performances !--they are. And NOW (there should be a flourish of trumpets here, or at the very least a tucket), they bring you the Complete Haydn Piano-and-Violin Sonatas!! And in future, no doubt, you may expect the complete Debussy organ partitas, the complete Chopin string quartets, and the complete piano music of Normal Mailer.
Sahan Arzruni, the admirable pianist in this venture, was supposed to supply the liner notes, but so far l've not been able to track them down, and there's a deadline looming. I hope that my rather negative report will not take the wind out of his sails, or spike his guns, or wreck other such naval phenomena on him and his efforts. I am well aware that Robbins Landon is daily unearthing undiscovered Haydn masterpieces from the refectories of Croatian monasteries, but I am unable to find anyone who will tell me that these include eight fiddle sonatas. All of which leaves me with the melancholy fact that, to all intents and purposes (whatever that means) there are no Haydn fiddle sonatas.
Not that I insist on being doctrinaire in my negativism. Haydn did, in fact, list two p. & v. sonatas in his personal tally of compositions. One of these, a work subtitled ''The Dream'' that supposedly posed some sticky problem for a certain disdainful virtuoso, has vanished. The other (No. 1 in G major of the present collection) is an unpretentious twomovement affair, published in 1803 with a dedicatory letter from the composer to the wife of Napoleon's Marshal Moreau. Because of this late date (though it had in fact been submitted for publication nearly ten years earlier), the piece came romantically-morbidly to be known as la derniere sonate--the ''last'' sonata. But even this work is suspect, for it also appears as a piano trio (Hob.XV:32), and no one is sure which is an arrangement of which. (Haydn did, however, write a set of sonatas, or duos, for violin and viola, which perhaps Ms. Ajemian and Mr. Vardi might think about.)
The eight "Violin sonatas" have, to be sure, been around for a long time, published under such distinguished imprints as those of Breitkopf and Hartel, and C.F. Peters. German origin, however, does not assure veracity, German capitalists being just as eager to turn a quick Thaler as other capitalists. This is not to say that the sonatas are out-and-out fakes; in fact, in every case the solid underpinning is unquestionably Haydn's. The last two in the set are arrangements of the first two string quartets in Op. 77, and, incidentally, have been recorded by Rampal and others in versions for flute and piano. Numbers two through six are piano sonatas (Nos. 24, 25, 26, 43, and 15--the last arranged from a divertimento!) with added violin parts. It may be that Haydn himself contributed the fiddle parts to some of the final four, but he emphatically did not do so to the others.
It was none other than Dr. Charles Burney who did that. His reputation as the arbiter and chronicler of the musical taste of his times has tended to obscure the fact that Burney was a thorough musician, and a professional organist and harpsichordist. He was also the sire of the novelist Fanny Burney, who later strove to escape her name by becoming Mme. d'Arblay. But Karl Geiringer tells us that Burney concocted violin parts to fifteen more Haydn keyboard sonatas, which provides an argument against the "completeness" of this set.
Pianist Sahan Arzruni has made several fine records for MHS. Anahid Ajemian has a long-established reputation as one of the finest violinists around. In recent years she has been a member of the superb Composers' String Quartet; earlier on, she often appeared en duo with her pianist-sister Maro.
