ABSTRACT
In musical historiography, the myth of the exceptional quality of Viennese music during ‘Viennese Classicism’ is as persistent as the myth of the supremacy of an autonomous and absolute instrumental music. That knowledge and belief, of both global audiences and even many scholars, is still based on the conviction that Vienna’s three most outstanding composers – Joseph Haydn, W. A. Mozart and Ludwig van Beethoven – created Classical music language. However, this traditional view of Classicism too easily obscures several facts essential to understanding not only the Classicism of music in general but also Viennese music and, particularly, musical life. There are at least three factors which have to be taken into account in order to create a reliable picture of Viennese Classicism.
