Although surviving evidence indicates that Eduard Mörike actually liked Haydn's music quite a bit, his couplet manages to distill aptly the overarching nineteenth-century view of the composer and his music. It is not my intent in this chapter and the next to argue that opinion on the composer was monolithic throughout the century following his death—certainly there were thoughtful Haydn supporters scattered throughout Europe in addition to seemingly enthusiastic concertgoers—but it is equally clear that those musical figures whose opinions were most influential were unwilling to discuss Haydn publically in a serious way as one of “the greats” in the same way they did Beethoven, and even Mozart to a certain extent. Even when someone wrote a mixed review, saying something positive about the composer, as Robert Schumann did in the 1840s, it was the negative comments that received the most attention.

When he died in 1809, Haydn was in a very real sense the first composer to have achieved fame throughout Europe and was widely acclaimed as one of the greats. Revered by the Austrians, loved by the English, commissioned by the Spanish, and laureled by the French, he enjoyed an international reputation never before achieved by an individual composer. Yet seemingly the moment after his burial, the musical world set about dismantling his reputation, coining one dismissive cliché after another. “Roguish,” “childlike,” “naïve,” “old-worldly,” “dainty,” “neighborly,” and other terms were used by the Romantics to characterize Haydn's music as a failure insofar as emotional content and seriousness of purpose were concerned. The majority of these writers portrayed Haydn the person as some kind of cockeyed optimist shackled by his prerevolutionary birth and his employment as a naïve wig-wearing servant of the ancien régime.

Since the purpose of this book is to demonstrate the extent to which his music and reputation were revived in the twentieth century, as well as the fundamental reasons for why opinion reversed course so markedly at that later juncture, observing first the radical change of opinion that occurred—the demotion from revered “father” of cutting-edge music to out-of-touch “Papa Haydn”—seems a useful endeavor.