Few composers have taken as defensive a stance on music history as Arnold Schoenberg, who fiercely shielded his compositional aesthetic from criticism by invoking the practices of the canonic composers of music history. As might be expected, he portrayed Bach as a revolutionary, a “twelve-tone” composer, at a time when most others would have classified him as a stolid conservative. Conversely, Brahms, typically viewed as a reactionary by his critics, became for Schoenberg a “progressive” who forged a path that broke the bonds of tonality and changed the practice of thematic development forever.

Schoenberg's tendency to reevaluate received opinion on composers also extended to Haydn, and this was his entrée into the fray of the Haydn revival. Where Vincent d’Indy's connection with Haydn was of a technical nature and Heinrich Schenker's analyses were underpinned with political motivation, Schoenberg found sympathy for Haydn as a kindred spirit in composition. Schoenberg's self-image reflected what he saw in Haydn's music. As he saw it, both worked under the auspices of a newly changed aesthetic of composition, Baroque to Classical for Haydn and Romantic to Modernist for Schoenberg. At the same time, both dealt with theoretical and stylistic changes: contrapuntal to melody-dominated homophony for Haydn, and of course the very practice of tonality for Schoenberg. Just as Schoenberg saw Haydn leading musical taste away from arcane Baroque counterpoint while simultaneously creating forms and genres that were still in use in the twentieth century, he saw himself as leading an evolution in musical aesthetics away from Romanticism toward Expressionism. He, like Haydn, found himself forced to rethink the musical mediums that he inherited in order to find a path forward. No less important was Haydn's unprecedented popularity in the later years of his career among both sophisticated (Kenner) and unsophisticated (Liebhaber) audiences, a balance that Schoenberg struggled to achieve in many of his earlier works and one that he overtly worked toward after his irrevocable turn to atonality and serialism.

Schoenberg's ultimate success in connecting himself with Haydn may be most apparent, at least anecdotally, for general students of music history— one founded the First Viennese School, the other the Second Viennese School. As will be seen, more than enough evidence survives to suggest that he tacitly encouraged this very assessment.