In estimating Haydn's life-work as a composer, the principal stress must be laid on him as a reformer in his art. Contrapuntally, music had reached its highest development, but in many other important directions it was at a low ebb. Concerted music had not yet achieved any prominence as a distinct branch of the art. Vocal music was in the ascendant and the church and the opera-house offered the principal if not the only means for composers to achieve distinction. In Vienna, the Emperor, Joseph II., was a liberal patron of music, and the nobles, after the fashion of nobles generally, followed the example of the court, and entered into rivalry with each other in founding and supporting costly musical establishments of their own. The Viennese, however, had no very marked sympathy with art at its highest. One hundred and twenty-five years ago, Leopold Mozart wrote: "The Viennese public love nothing that is serious or reasonable; they have not the sense to understand it, and their theatres prove sufficiently that nothing but rubbish such as dances, burlesque, harlequinades, ghost magic and devil's tricks will satisfy them. A fine gentleman, even with an order on his breast, may be seen laughing till the tears run down his cheeks, applauding as heartily as he can, some bit of foolish buffoonery; while in a highly pathetic scene he will chatter so noisily with a lady that his wiser and better-mannered neighbors can scarcely hear a word of the piece." From which it will be seen that fashion changes but little as time passes.
Instrumental music was, for the most part, confined to dance tunes, and minuets, allemands, waltzes and ländler were the rage. Presently these rose to importance and musicians began to take greater care in composing them, until at length came the suite, which was formed of a series of dances all written in the same key but varying in accent and character. Then followed a second part to the minuet, in the fifth of the key, and a return to the first part, which proved to be the stepping-stone to form; and the minuet survived the suite, of which it was originally a part, and continued an indispensable element of the symphony down to the time that Beethoven enlarged it into the scherzo.