31 марта исполняется 290 лет со дня рождения великого Йозефа Гайдна (31 марта 1732 г. - 31 мая 1809 г.) IIII Joseph Haydn Piano Sonata nº 59 in E flat, Hob. XVI:49

Alfred Brendel, piano By the late 1780s, Haydn’s works for keyboard were clearly intended for the piano as opposed to the harpsichord. His exploitation of the dynamic potential of the relatively new piano grows with each of his last sonatas. Until Beethoven’s middle-period sonatas, Classical-era works for solo keyboard were very often written for a composer’s students and were intended to stress certain aspects of technique. At the time, the concerto was the vehicle for the performing virtuoso. Haydn was never a keyboard virtuoso, but had a number of students for whom he composed piano sonatas. The wide range of ability among his students accounts for the disparate levels of sophistication and technical difficulty we find among the surviving sonatas, most of which were written before 1770. Some of these works have been lost because Haydn gave the manuscripts to his students without making copies. A few of Haydn’s sonatas, however, were not composed for his students.