In most discussions of the set, Op. 50 has been treated as another link in the grand chain left by the ‘father of the string quartet’; thus, finding itself in the middle of the oeuvre, it has received a disproportionate amount of inattention. In their comprehensive surveys many authors, having dwelt for so long on Opp. 20 and 33, accelerate past the succeeding sets to arrive in good time at Opp. 76 and 77, Haydn's last eight completed quartets. (Only the two middle movements of Op. 103 were completed for publication.) The progress theory has played its part in this tendency; coming at the end of the line, Opp. 76 and 77 have been fortunate in being treated mostly on their own merits, relatively unconditioned by a context of past and future achievements. There is, naturally, an inevitable danger that any wide stylistic account of musical works of art will lead, in the words of Carl Dahlhaus, to their being ‘perceived less in aesthetic terms, as selfcontained creations, than as documentary evidence on an historical process taking place by means of and through them’. This process of the individual work submitting to a collective force is all the more noticeable when, as in the case with Op. 50, the existing literature rarely treats the music in great detail.

The set has proved particularly susceptible to the adoption of a ‘bird's eye view’, given the striking economy of its musical procedures; ‘monothematicism’ has thus figured prominently in accounts of Op. 50.