It is difficult not to agree with author Bryan Proksch that “Haydn's revival provides a compelling case study for the complex … endeavor that is critical reception history” (p. 3). Indeed, the field of reception history might just about have been invented for Haydn, given the entrenched perception that his was a classic case of the rise, fall, and rise again of an artistic reputation—and this then tells us something of the extent to which musical quality and significance lie contingently in the ear of the listener, determined by the assumptions and priorities of an age. But there is a catch. As signaled in the quotation above, the revival that Proksch traces is a critical rather than a broader public one, since in the nineteenth century “Haydn's music never really lost its appeal to audiences even as the critics disparaged it more and more” (p. 2). Proksch describes this as...

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