Following a productive period of critical reception for Haydn and Mozart in the mid-nineteenth century, later decades would bring challenges wrought by ever-increasing temporal distance between their own lives, works and values, and the priorities and predilections of the present. Mozart’s letters might not initially attract the same attention from the public at large as Mendelssohn’s, we are told, as they are ‘so far removed from contemporary history’.1 And the distasteful late-eighteenth-century world of artistic servitude and concomitant restriction and limitation – as encapsulated by Haydn at Eszterháza for critics 100 years later – seemed a long time ago and had been much improved by the ‘sturdy independence of a Beethoven, who could stand unabashed in the presence of royalty … the intellect of a Schumann, whose written word is appreciated no less than his musical creations … [and by] a Mendelssohn, whose broad culture is apparent in letters and in painting as well as in his chosen art’.