Haydn Miracles
Eight Easy Minor - Key Trios from Sonatas That Piano Students Love to Play
Selected and Edited by Michael Mauldin
Published by legacy publisher, Trigram Music in 1998. These piano pieces are easy enough to learn and enjoyable to play for beginners or those who want to take on a 2nd instrument.
Intermediate piano students, especially adolescent boys, avoid playing 18th-
century piano music because they mainly notice its major- key "politeness"
mistaking its elegance for superficial sweetness. At the risk of being executed for letting students perform only a portion of a movement of something, have let these students satiate themselves with the wonderful, dark, 'take-me-seriously'
music making in the minor-key trio sections of a number of the menuet-and-trio movements of the Haydn sonatas. Finally, they are ready t o enjoy (with the rest of us) the ?breath-of-spring? return to the major key in the Da Capo of the menuet.
It also helps for them to know a little of Haydn?s biography. When they know
some of what he went through as a child, they can relate even more to his
serious side. The fingering, dynamics, articulation, phrasing and realization of ornaments are my own . The sonata numbers and dates of composition are as given by
Hoboken in his catalogue .