Haydn: Piano Sonata No 31 (3rd movement)

Haydn, the son of a wheelwright, was far too much the natural gentleman to hold a grudge (in his own old age he published "six introductions and fugues for string quartet, taken from Werner’s oratorios") but it is tempting to detect, in the sublime level-headedness of Haydn’s music of this period, a sense of the composer’s blessed relief and sense of new freedom. And the feeling lasted: Haydn was to remain in the same employment, nominally at least, for the rest of his life. A court musician on a remote estate and isolated, for the most part of his life, from other composers he was, as he put it, "forced to become original".
For his own part, Madzar considers the A-flat sonata "a surprisingly unfunny, unnaive and untragic jewel of a sonata; all of it lofty, serene, beyond ordinary human concern. The three movements are in sonata form, (rather unusual, possibly unique with Haydn, rare even with Beethoven) and the three developments do bring in a fair amount of shadow, and even drama. However, all invariably ends well, for this music seems to speak of a world where things are as they ought to be."

Tags

Music at Plush, sonata, Aleksandar Madzar, Haydn, and 31