Joseph Haydn

(1732-1809)

Even when Haydn’s piano sonatas were grievously neglected, many pianists played these Variations. Listeners found their melancholy depths of expression surprising and impressive. Haydn composed the variations in 1793, between his two visits to London. They were intended for Barbara (Babette) von Ployer, for whom Mozart, her teacher, wrote his concertos K.449 and 453.

The theme has the grave tread of a slow march, with dotted rhythms, quietly grieving. It is in two parts, each repeated – the second part more decorated and still more expressive. A second theme, in major of the same key, is lighter in mood and punctuated with cascading flourishes. This too is in two parts, both repeated. Then the theme in the minor returns, and is varied. Haydn is following a favourite pattern of his, a set of double variations, alternating two themes and the major and minor modes.

After writing two variations on each theme, Haydn originally intended to end with a few bars of F major flourish. But he changed his mind. He added a lengthy coda, which begins with a restatement of the theme. At the point of its climax, there is a dramatic pause, then the music veers off into a tragic outburst, a new world, all the more powerful, as John McCabe observes, for coming at the end of such an intimate, restrained work, and ‘leading to a conclusion that is the distillation of bleakness and emotional loss’.

H.C Robbins Landon thinks that in these Variations for a pupil of Mozart’s Haydn had that master in mind (Mozart had died in 1791), paying tribute to the way his younger colleague’s pianism ‘went to the heart’. Probably Haydn was even more affected by the death on 26 January 1793 of his intimate friend Marianne von Genzinger, wife of the Esterhazy court physician, to whom Haydn wrote his most revealing letters from London. The passionate coda could be an expression of Haydn’s very personal loss. This would explain why the last of his explorations of F minor, a return to the key of his intense Symphony No.49 of 1768, La Passione, ends in such darkness.

First published for Musica Viva, 2003