This study of Haydn's revival has been conceived in the broadest possible way, basically by surveying as many figures as possible. It is, admittedly, impossible to examine every major musical personality from the era, and so a description of the methodology used to determine who was included in this investigation and who was not seems warranted. At the heart of my methodology lay two guiding ideas. The first was to show preference for major figures. The second is to study those who treated Haydn's music with a fresh perspective at an early point in time.

This book shows partiality toward well-known musical figures (the “big names” in music at the turn of the century) because these would have been the people most capable of affecting a broad revival of the repertoire. Undoubtedly there are a number of relative unknowns who called for increased attention to Haydn's music, as James Garratt demonstrated in his study of the composer's late nineteenth-century reception. The reason that these figures have been avoided in my study is precisely because they were not well-known figures. They simply would not have had the potential to influence opinion on a large scale or within one of the early twentieth century's many compositional movements. Demonstrating the way that the thoughts of a single person could influence those of many others is no easy task even for those figures whose ideas were widely disseminated; it is virtually impossible for those figures who were only locally known in their time and since. Whether as composers, critics, performers, conductors, or scholars, the figures studied in this book were all history makers in their own right and influential both in their time and ours apart from what they said about Haydn's music. That they took an unusual or marked interest in the composer's music along the way set them apart from their contemporaries and marked them as important to investigate in detail.

Despite slanting my approach, there needed to be an additional filter, if only because virtually everyone from the era wrote about “Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven” or even “Haydn and Mozart” in passing. Chapters 1 and 2 reveal the extent to which these turns of phrase were not really about Haydn at all, but really more about Viennese Classicism generically.