Few writers in the history of music have been as outspoken and blunt in their opinions as Heinrich Schenker. A staunch defender of the German musical heritage, he devoted much of his theoretical writing to the music of Bach and Beethoven. Yet while Schenker's rhetoric espoused the superiority of the German masterworks (“German,” generally speaking, without distinguishing between Austrian and German), his biases toward Haydn's works initiated a reversal of nearly a century of neglect toward the composer's music in German-speaking lands. Schenker's prose on Haydn speaks louder than his analytic graphs; perhaps this is why his position has been overlooked even in cases where his graphical analyses are known. Another aspect may be a tendency to assume that the emphasis he placed on Beethoven led him to think in much the same way as many of his contemporaries. He acknowledged the potential problem, remarking upon how all too often “Haydn's name and circumstances only come up when someone chatters on at length about Mozart and Beethoven.” While Mozart and Beethoven “revered Haydn as a supernatural being,” Schenker lamented that more recent generations had abandoned him, chalking it up to being “the German way: always out when a genius pays them a visit” in a typically frank jab at Robert Schumann's assessment of the composer.

The circumstances of Schenker's personal life together with his reaction to the socioeconomic and political pressures arising from the harsh terms imposed on Germany and Austria by the Treaties of Versailles and Saint- Germain led him to make the restoration of Haydn's stature as a compositional genius a crucial battle in his fight to reclaim Germany's cultural history in the wake of the First World War. Schenker's staunch German nationalism, his strong background in eighteenth-century keyboard music, and his endeavors to preserve and examine manuscript sources firsthand combined to place him among the most vocal and influential personages behind the burgeoning revival of Haydn's reputation in interwar Europe.

As the lingering influence of Romantic-era composers and critics slowly faded, a small number of scholars in Germany and Austria began markedly to reappraise Haydn's music. Eusebius Mandyczewski, a Romanian musicologist working in Vienna and a part of Brahms's circle, initiated the first effort to create a unified urtext of Haydn's works in 1907, and had completed seven volumes before his death in 1929.