Looking in detail at Haydn's symphonies, this book attempts to clarify what Haydn's fundamental principles of formal logic might have been. It shows how Haydn employed those basic compositional principles to structure his forms, providing explanations that account for specific details of individual movements as well as the relationships between the movements. Beyond what they show about Haydn's formal thought and the individual works discussed, the discussions in this book also stress the idea that compositions cannot be analyzed in a meaningful manner if the analysis is divorced from the work's historical context.
