As the long nineteenth century drew to a close amidst musical and social upheaval, three major anniversaries were celebrated for Haydn and Mozart – two centenaries of death and a sesquicentenary of birth in 1891, 1909, and 1906, respectively – against the backdrop of an evolving musicological climate beneficial to both. For example, distrust in the idea of musical progress, aligned with continued and increasing skepticism about social and political progress more generally in the decades either side of 1900,1 worked to their advantage as composers of century-old works and to Haydn’s specifically as the first of the Viennese triumvirate. For Donald Tovey in 1902, artistic and scientific manifestations of the phenomenon needed to be distinguished.

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

Following a productive period of critical reception for Haydn and Mozart in the mid-nineteenth century, later decades would bring challenges wrought by ever-increasing temporal distance between their own lives, works and values, and the priorities and predilections of the present. Mozart’s letters might not initially attract the same attention from the public at large as Mendelssohn’s, we are told, as they are ‘so far removed from contemporary history’.1 And the distasteful late-eighteenth-century world of artistic servitude and concomitant restriction and limitation – as encapsulated by Haydn at Eszterháza for critics 100 years later – seemed a long time ago and had been much improved by the ‘sturdy independence of a Beethoven, who could stand unabashed in the presence of royalty … the intellect of a Schumann, whose written word is appreciated no less than his musical creations … [and by] a Mendelssohn, whose broad culture is apparent in letters and in painting as well as in his chosen art’.