In the middle decades of the nineteenth century, the juggernaut of Mozart reception is witnessed in full flow – in momentous biographies, lavish anniversary celebrations, delightful fiction, and laudatory criticism. Musicians and writers had become increasingly invested in Mozart; any questioning of his genius, or collision between legends and realities in the life story, could elicit a torrent of argument and counter-argument.1 His quasi-sacred status is captured in a humorous exchange from The Musical World (1841). Deemed a heretic for questioning Mozart’s instrumentation in the Don Giovanni overture, Henry Tilbury confessed that ‘there is no such wretch living (at least I hope not) that would attempt to tarnish the bright and glorious halo of Mozart’s name’; he was duly admitted – tongue firmly in cheek – by the ‘Lord High Archbishop of the “Musical World” … into the bosom of the “Mother Church” again’.2

Haydn and Mozart’s individual and collective critical reputations in the second and third decades of the nineteenth century were affected above all by the contents and orientations of a diverse range of writings and by Beethoven’s immense musical presence. With the immediacy of Haydn’s death receding and Mozart long gone, biographical work was able to build on foundations laid by distinguished writers such as Schlichtegroll, Niemetschek, Griesinger, and Dies in order both to feed an appetite for information about their lives and music and to demonstrate their continued relevance in a new era. In the process, similar and different perceptions of the two composers emerged, with biographical narratives stimulating explicitly fictional endeavours – where Haydn and Mozart were most readily able ‘to have, experience, exhibit, prove, live and perform … [their] selfhood’ in line with a key tenet of romanticism1 – as well as ostensibly factual endeavours.

Among critics in the first decade of the nineteenth century, Johann Friedrich Reichardt and E. T. A. Hoffmann lay especially strong claims to promoting a Viennese triumvirate of composers. In one of a series of letters from a trip to Vienna in 1808, subsequently published in the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung (AmZ) in 1810, Reichardt described a sequence of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven string quartets played by violinist Ignaz Schuppanzigh’s ensemble.