ABSTRACT
The mystery that plagues the contemporary conception and reception of Joseph Haydn and his music has a long and remarkably unbroken history. Perhaps Haydn experienced the misfortune of living too long. Haydn had 'elevated all of instrumental music to a never before anticipated level of perfection'. Haydn's music was therefore 'untouched by the hardships of mature life'. Haydn's ideal of beauty had once been innovative in that it mirrored a new sense of freedom. It emerged out of Haydn's rejection of past constraints, including religious dogma, and a 'crystallized canon of old ideas'. By the 1820s the urban, middle-class artist and his audience had begun to romanticize the rural world as a place of cheerfulness, happiness, innocence and vitality: precisely the terms associated with Haydn's music. The starting-point for Haydn as a composer was the eighteenth-century strategy best articulated by Immanuel Kant that might properly be termed 'philosophical listening'.
