Haydn's Opus Two and Opus Three

Extract

It is on record that Haydn frequently told the publisher, Artaria, that he wished his string quartets to be reckoned as beginning only after the first eighteen, since these early works did not embody the true principles of quartet form.

It is also related that Haydn, as an old man, used to tell his friends that he had had “no real masters, but had taught himself entirely by listening and reading and by observing everything.”