Haydn's keyboard sonatas, more than sixty in total, span almost his entire career. However, in the 1780s the genre became much less of a preoccupation for him while he concentrated more on string quartets and piano trios. An increasing number of commissions further added to his workload. Then, in the period when he was preparing for the second of his two visits to London (1794-5), we find the sonata genre crowded out by his other commitments. Nevertheless, the sonatas Hoboken XVI:48 to 52 (1789-94) are among the most richly satisfying compositions of Haydn's full maturity.

Haydn is the most unaccountably neglected of all the great composers. Few concert-managers find any reason to accommodate one of his inexhaustibly inventive symphonies in orchestral programmes. The equally wonderful string quartets fare rather better, regularly featuring in their respective repertoire. Haydn's keyboard sonatas, though still generally undervalued, are championed by more pianists than used to be the case forty years ago, when John McCabe wrote of "the shameful neglect of Haydn's sonatas. There can hardly be another such corpus of outstanding and fascinating works by one of the great masters so wilfully ignored by performers ..."