During his eighteen-month second stay in Great Britain in 1794/95, Joseph Haydn wrote his three last piano sonatas for the German pianist Theresa Jansen, who was living there. It is striking how strongly they are shaped by the advances in piano construction in which the English instrument makers of the time played a leading part. Because Haydn extends the compass of the Sonata No. 60 in C major, Hob. XVI/50 up to a — a third higher than had previously been possible — it is assumed that this is in fact the last of the three. In the first movement he also uses novel pedal instructions which twice draw changes of harmony into the “open pedal”, achieving new mixtures of colour. The dynamic markings, too, are of an abundance that only becomes a matter of course in Beethoven’s piano writing.
Thomas Leander devotes the greater part of his booklet text to articulation. Baroque music up to the end of the 18th century was described by all the music theorists of the day as “speech in musical sound”; Beethoven still declared that his music could not be understood by anyone without a command of the prosody of the German language. This orientation towards language explains what seems to us today the sparing use of articulation markings, for example in the keyboard works of Johann Sebastian Bach: they were superfluous because performers knew the rules as well as we know the pronunciation of our mother tongue. Even Mozart wrote them in only where he wanted to circumvent an existing rule. Haydn, by contrast, is almost to be regarded as a revolutionary for his exact directions of delivery — he takes from the performer the misery of choice.
Haydn is equally famous for his proverbial humour, and his means are varied: harmonic turns, formal breaches of what had been customary, passages that sound simple, naive or amateurish and let the listener share the fun he must have taken in them. His slow movements are grave, perhaps even solemn, yet through their speech in musical sound they are — as in a dialogue — an exchange full of meaning and drama; one almost hears words sounding as music. For this the usual means no longer suffice him: he needs the articulation markings to lead us into the characters of his themes, into the moods of his developments, into the capriciousness and the joy of narration in his works. Over his own work Leander places a sentence from Chekhov’s “The Seagull”: that what matters is neither old nor new forms, but that something should pour freely out of the soul.
Thomas Leander, born in Düsseldorf in 1960, studied at the Robert Schumann Hochschule with Herbert Drechsel, in Vienna with Paul Badura-Skoda and in London with Geoffrey Parsons. After passing his final artistic examination with distinction he began his career as a soloist and lied accompanist; he has given piano recitals in San Francisco, Washington, New York, London, Florence, Rome, Warsaw and Salzburg and accompanied Karl Ridderbusch and Hermann Prey, among other places at La Scala in Milan and the Cuvilliés-Theater in Munich. In 1987 he gave the German premiere of Alfred Schnittke’s piano concerto in Mannheim; tours took him to Moscow, St. Petersburg, Kiev and Minsk. Since 1987 he has led a piano class at the Robert Schumann Hochschule Düsseldorf, which appointed him professor in 1995. The recording was made on 8 and on 20 and 21 September 1995 in the Festhalle Viersen; the cover painting is by the Düsseldorf painter Michael Irmer, who died in 1996 of injuries from a road accident.