The Keyboard Sonata in C major, H. 16/21, is the first in a series of six that Franz Josef Haydn composed in 1773 for his patron, Prince Esterházy, and published the following year. Though the series was warmly received and enjoyed numerous reprintings during subsequent decades, the C major sonata (numbered 21 in the Hoboken category 16, but later numbered 19) is one of Haydn's somewhat less-familiar works among modern audiences. It nonetheless exhibits the balance, expressiveness, and wit characteristic of his most notable keyboard pieces. This work is cast in a standard form of the period with a quick, somewhat galant first movement, a slow, dramatic middle movement, and a lively finale. Though marked Allegro, the rising arpeggios, triplet trochee rhythms, and restrained ornamentation of the opening movement suggest a stately mood, one that turns mysterious with the momentary lapses into minor mode and steady triplet runs. The second movement is more ornate and long limbed, with chromatic inflections, pensive harmonic turns, and unexpected melodic leaps—most notably the almost melodramatic descending sixths that fall from ever-higher peaks. The final movement grows out of witty, perfunctory phrases with the kind of offbeat metric play for which Haydn is well known. Modern performers have been in some disagreement regarding the instrument on which Haydn intended for this sonata (and others in the same series) to be played. Even though the title page preceding the C major sonata in its 1774 publication specifies harpsichord, the 1770s in general were a period of transition for Haydn, during which he began to compose with other instruments in mind, including the fortepiano and perhaps the clavichord. In fact, in his historically oriented 1997 recording of the work, Alan Curtis set off the C major sonata from others in the same series, making the unusual choice of employing the modest, nuanced tone of the clavichord to lend the longer notes at the end of the first movement's upward arpeggio gestures a flourish of vibrato—"bebung"—that would be mechanically impossible on the harpsichord. The languorous second-movement Adagio may likewise benefit from the ebbing flow of a more malleable instrument, though on such terms it could rightly be on the modern piano as well, which also lends a more pronounced dynamic curve and variety of weight to the nimble Presto finale.

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