Any study of Haydn's posthumous reputation must wrestle with several key problems. To start with, it may appear that Haydn's reception over the century following his death has little relevance to our engagement with the composer and his music: an essay on this topic might therefore seem to offer merely a stroll through the byways of nineteenth-century journalism and belles lettres, of marginal importance to our picture of Haydn. Yet many of the perspectives that emerged in the nineteenth century continue to shape popular perceptions of the composer. Indeed, Jens Peter Larsen has argued that it is an exaggeration to speak of a modern image of Haydn, as opposed to a diluted variant of earlier views. If Larsen is correct, it might seem that in exploring this topic, our task is to unmask the distortions that accrued over the course of the nineteenth century, to assert our own truths against earlier fallacies. Certainly, this impulse has motivated most studies of Haydn's reputation. For Leon Botstein, the “stubborn veneer of the nineteenth century” must be “dissolved and scraped away” if a new picture of Haydn is to emerge; similarly, in 1935 Adolf Sandberger claimed that “one of the most important artistic tasks of the present” was to discard earlier images of the composer in order to “re-establish the full truth.” But, as is evident from Sandberger's study, such attempts to assert the unadorned truth add their own layers of ideological veneer to the picture of Haydn.