Haydn: Early Keyboard Works

This program features some of Haydn's earliest compositions, works that survive (in Christa Landon's words) only through "happy accident." Haydn himself felt no compunction to preserve his earliest efforts. When, in the last years of the 18th century, Breitkopf set about an authorized edition of Haydn's complete keyboard works (published 1800-1806), the composer, with a view towards posterity, expunged not only spurious works that had been published in his name, but also, as the preface explained, "those works of my early youth, which are not worth preserving." Those works that do survive from the 1750s and early 1760s are thus of particular interest, not simply as a measure of Haydn's subsequent development but also, as Landon remarks in the preface of her own complete edition of the composer's keyboard sonatas, because they possess "moments of such beauty that they should be kept alive by performance and not be allowed to fall into oblivion." Here on this new disc in Albany's continuing series devoted to the piano works of Haydn, you have the opportunity of hearing these early works for yourself and judging their value.