Haydn: Complete Keyboard Music, Vol. 15 - Artur Balsam

Volume XV JOSEPH HAYDN (1732-1809) liner notes

The Variations in F minor, Haydn's greatest set of variations for the keyboard, may well have been composed under the most tragic of circumstances. H. C. Robbins Landon feels that this piece was Haydn's reaction to the blow he sustained with the sudden passing of his dearest friend, Marianne von Genzinger, for whom he had written one of his finest sonatas, Number 59 in E flat, a few months earlier...."Its good taste, singularity and elaborate finish are sure to please both experts and amateurs," Haydn remarked on his Capriccio in G. This work, dating from 1765, is, too all intents, a written down improvisation. The cheerful theme, based on the Austrian folk tune "Acht Sauschneider" (Eight sow-gelders) is treated rather freely in a kind of sonata-rondo form....While transcriptions for one piano, four hands of Haydn's symphonies offered as their primary function a way of appearing and performing these orchestral works in one's own home, the duet Il maestro e lo scolare (The Teacher and the Pupil) was probably composed for pedagogic purposes....The source of the Partita in F is a manuscript copy in the handwriting of Karl Ferdinand Pohl, a 19th century biographer and authority on Haydn, which is now in the Gesellschaft der Musicfreunde, Vienna.