While the debate over the Croatian question raised by William Henry Hadow and Franjo Ksaver Kuhač raged in the 1910s and 1920s—a debate that by its very existence at least tacitly acknowledged the importance of Haydn's music— Donald Tovey was quietly forging what we now think of as the modern reception of Haydn locally in Edinburgh. His Essays in Musical Analysis (1935–39), originally short program notes written beginning in 1914 when he was hired as a professor at the University of Edinburgh and especially for the Reid Symphony, which he organized and conducted beginning in 1917, are written in layman's terms but with the kinds of personal opinions and analytic insights that demonstrate his genius as an educator and “popularizer” of music. To be sure, his ongoing influence on Haydn's reception testifies to his success as a “popularizer” in the long term.

Insofar as the British reception of Haydn is concerned, Donald Tovey's 1935 Essays in Musical Analysis changed everything, or as Lawrence Kramer puts it: “The twentieth-century Anglophone Haydn is essentially Tovey's Haydn.” Kramer defined “Tovey's Haydn” as “the master as well as the innovator of the classical aesthetics of music, a figure of unrivaled originality and expressive range not to be upstaged by Mozart or anyone else, not even by Beethoven, the Leviathan himself.” Tovey's reappraisal of Haydn, a reaction to Kuhač and Hadow's arguments, was seen as so influential in later decades that it has been credited as the initiator of the revival. The most prominent citation of Tovey was in Rosemary Hughes's 1959 essay, not coincidentally entitled “The Rediscovery of Haydn.” Hughes argues that Tovey “cut away the tangle of preconceptions about the tidy symmetry of Haydn's forms,” opening the way “for us to explore his works as they really are, with all their adventurousness, their harmonic audacities, [and] their amazingly strong yet flexible structure.” During and in the wake of World War I, breakaway ethnic groups from the former Austro-Hungarian Empire were seen as responsible for throwing Europe into a catastrophic war; and as it became increasingly evident that Haydn was not Croatian, after all, Tovey's writings would serve to denationalize the composer. Tovey's rejection of this nationalist interpretation of Haydn would in the end restore his reputation as one of the timeless “greats” in a way not seen since 1809.