One of Haydn’s most remarkable piano works, this set of variations is on two themes, the first in F minor, the second in F major. The autograph manuscript (in New York Public Library) is headed ‘Sonata’ and dated 1793, while a manuscript copy with a title page in Haydn’s hand title calls it ‘Un piccolo divertimento scritto e composto per la stimatissima Signora de Ployer’ (Barbara von Ployer, for whom Mozart composed the Piano Concerto K453). Haydn took the work with him to London on his second visit (1794–5) where he played it on one of Broadwood pianos that he had come to admire on his first trip to England. It was not published until 1799, when it was given the title ‘Variations’, and a new dedication: to Baroness Josephine von Braun, wife of the director of the court theatres in Vienna and also the dedicatee of Beethoven’s Piano Sonatas Op. 14. Haydn originally ended the work with the second F major variation and a short coda. He then had second thoughts, adding a reprise of the F minor theme and a long, harmonically adventurous coda that ends in despair. It has been suggested – not unreasonably – that the tragic mood of this work may owe something to the sudden death in January 1793 of Haydn’s close friend Maria Anna von Genzinger.