William Henry Hadow

“ Among the mourners who followed him to the grave were many French officers from Napoleon’s army, which was then occupying Vienna.
Haydn’s place in musical history is best determined by his instrumental compositions. His operas, for all their daintiness and melody, no longer hold the stage; the Masses in which he “praised God with a cheerful heart” have been condemned by the severer decorum of our own day; of his oratorios the Creation alone survives. ”

“ The quartets in particular exhibit a wider range and variety of structural invention than those of any other composer except Beethoven. Again it is here that we can most readily trace the important changes which he wrought in melodic idiom. Before his time instrumental music was chiefly written for the Paradiesensaal, and its melody often sacrificed vitality of idea to a ceremonial courtliness of phrase. Haydn broke through this convention by frankly introducing his native folk-music, and by writing many of his own tunes in the same direct, vigorous and simple style. ”

“ Even the naïf pictorial suggestion, of which free use is made in the Creation and in the Seasons, is closer to the manner of Handel than to that of the 19th century: it is less the precursor of romance than the descendant of an earlier realism. ”