ABSTRACT
Joseph Haydn's nineteenth-century reception attribute a decline in his popularity to a particular interpretation of both the composer and his music that is said to have begun to take hold in the years immediately following his death in 1809. Haydn's presumed lack of spiritual and emotional complexity is said to have made him into a respected but frankly boring figure, the cheerful, honest, straightforward, essentially naïve but bland and passionless founder of a normative Classical style. A set of qualities related to Haydn's place as the father of the Classical style are mainly of interest in a comparison of British and German criticism. Like the music of his Baroque predecessors, Haydn's was thought to appeal directly to the intellect through its mastery of abstract formal procedures, and the composer himself is presented as a master of counterpoint, the virtual creator of thematishe Arbeit.
