Sales of the sonatas

[Chaszz]

On the Charles Rosen concert thread, reading one of the newspaper reviews of it I posted, I noticed that only two of B.'s sonatas were performed publicly in his lifetime. This would suggest they sold well in score, otherwise why would he have written so many? Is this true? Or were they "art for art's sake?"

And can we assume that most of the amateur pianists (mostly women I assume) who performed them at home were competent enough to play these very difficult works?

[Peter]

They were not really intended for the concert hall as the solo recital as such didn't really exist. They were meant to be performed to small social gatherings in salons. Virtually every middle class home would have had a piano and young ladies expected to play as part of their education - in a city such as Vienna filled with fine musicians and teachers I'm sure standards were probably quite high.