Clarinetist David Shifrin abandons the stage and his colleagues during Joseph Haydn's "Farewell" Symphony last month at Chamber Music Northwest. Haydn calls for the players to turn off their stand lights and leave the stage, one by one, until only one player remains. Debates about "best" composers are silly, but in this year of Haydn, his admirers are seizing the opportunity to right a few wrongs when it comes to their favorite composer. And wronged they feel. Everybody knows Mozart's name, whereas Joseph Haydn's is an afterthought. Mozart was a wunderkind, a prodigy with a divine spark and a wicked sense of humor, who wrote exquisite music and whose death at 35 perpetuated his fame. Haydn Haydn, who met the 25-year-old Mozart in 1781, was never so flashy. Modest and sweet-tempered, he led an orderly life, toiled for one employer, mostly in the countryside, and wrote reams of music that even today is enjoyed as "quaint" or "square." The city of Vienna, which should know better, is party to this injustice, celebrating the 200th anniversary of Haydn's death this year with a budget of around $40million. Three years ago, the Austrian hoopla about Mozart's 250th birthday cost four times as much. Audiences love Mozart, but Haydn's music holds a special place for those who know it. With perfect technique, clear layout, rich harmonies and generous emotions, he leaves listeners optimistic, buoyant, engaged. Mozart One of those people is Kenneth Woods, a conductor living in Wales who programs Haydn symphonies whenever he can. Until this season, Woods led the Oregon East Symphony in Pendleton. "Haydn doesn't have to be a minority interest," he says. "When people hear his music done well, they adore it." On his music blog, a smart, opinionated forum about composers and conducting, Woods leads the charge in support of Haydn: "I've said it here before, but I'm not sure everyone heard me," he writes. "Haydn was a more creative, more talented and more skilled composer than Mozart." I might not go quite that far -- Haydn doesn't rock my emotional world as deeply as Mozart -- but even if you don't agree with Woods, here are some facts that can't be disputed. Haydn was the most celebrated musical figure in Europe during the Enlightenment. In an age that prized logic, emotional restraint and reason, he shaped new musical ideas more than anyone. Unlike the cultural upheavals that would come with 19th-century Romanticism, artists in Haydn's time didn't boast about their gifts or go into swoons about their visions, their sufferings, their ideals and aspirations. Instead, they admired proportion in all things, turning away from the wickedly complicated fugues of the Baroque era toward melody. To them, music was entertainment and shouldn't strain the head or the heart. Haydn reflected those values more closely than any composer of his age. He was daring but not too daring, religious, but not too religious, intelligent but not showy, adventurous but not as angry, repressed or rebellious as Mozart. Not much to look at, he had a face pitted by smallpox, legs too short for his body and a polyp on his nose that he was sensitive about. He was even-tempered, industrious, generous, funny and modest enough to say about Mozart, "My friends often flatter me about my talent, but he was far above me." He also was comfortable in his role as a musical servant to the aristocracy. "I have had converse with emperors, kings and great princes," he wrote, "and have heard many flattering remarks from them, but I do not wish to live on a familiar footing with such persons, and I prefer people of my own class." He meant other musicians. We still have much to learn about the richness and many-sidedness of Haydn's music. Mozart, we've figured out. We've gone beyond the stereotype of boy genius, inexplicable and mysterious, a composer so facile, he simply "took dictation" when he composed, never revising or anguishing over notes, unlike Beethoven. In fact, he did struggle, particularly with a set of six string quartets he dedicated to ... Haydn. "He sweated blood over them," Woods says in an interview. "They're so beautifully wrought because he thought Haydn was the greatest composer alive, including himself." Mozart had enormous human empathy, as his magnificent Requiem and his late operas attest. Is there a more poignant moment than the slow unfolding of "Porgi, Amor" ("Grant, love, some comfort") from "The Marriage of Figaro," where the Countess laments her husband's infidelity? Haydn's piano concertos and string quintets radiate every emotion between joy and sorrow. The finale of the "Jupiter" Symphony, when six separate themes dance around each other before staging an astonishing reunion, may be the greatest symphonic movement ever written. Haydn's genius lies in his instrumental works, in almost any of the 104 symphonies, 83 string quartets, 52 piano sonatas and many concertos and other chamber works. His greatest contribution was consolidating the sonata form, a three-part musical structure that lays out a couple of themes, messes around with them and then restores them to their original design. Before Haydn, tunes didn't develop much; they unfolded and repeated. He took a tune, slapped it around, put it through different keys and stretched it over changing rhythmic textures. This middle "development" section was a test of a composer's ideas and technique. Haydn took the idea of development further than his contemporaries, even if he didn't overtly change the form itself, as Beethoven did. Maybe that's why we tend to take Haydn's music for granted. But, with exceptions, of course, his key structures could be more daring than Mozart's: F-Sharp Minor, E Minor, F Minor, B Major. Mozart was adventurous within key structures. Before the early-music movement arrived, performances of Haydn's symphonies tended to sound heavy and broad, like Brahms. At the other extreme, his chamber music, even today, can sound precious, Mozart-lite. They're both wrong. Haydn called for a huge range of tempos and dynamics that should make his music sound fresh, alive, urgent. Not as thundering as Beethoven, but not quaint, either. Says Woods, "I think people expect Haydn to be polite, and he's anything but."