Le Haydine is Giuseppe Carpani's most important book, as well as one of only three contemporary sources for Haydn's biography, together with Griesinger's «Notizien» (Leipzig 1810) and Dies's «Nachrichten» (Wien 1810).
A resident of Vienna since 1796, Carpani had the opportunity to frequent Haydn through the Italian translation of The Creation of the World (Vienna 1801), which was very accurate and already praised at the time: the letters on Haydn, however, often leave the confines of pure biography to become ethical and aesthetic musical essays, according to the taste of the author who was an inflexible conservative and, in the words of Stendhal himself, «a man of spirit, and a plus excellent connoisseur of music» ( Vie de Haydn 1854, p. 163). «Le Haydine is an exuberant, exaggerating, sprawling book which, unlike those of Griesinger and Dies, soon assumes an existence of its own quite independent of its ostensible subject, Haydn» (Gotwals, p. 449). -- «Le Haydine can be considered one of the most notable examples of Italian musical literature» (Marchi, entry DBI vol. 20, 1977). It must have been for this reason that, in preparing his first work, Stendhal chose "The Haydine" as his main source. In 1814, the man who would become the celebrated author of "The Red and the Black" and "The Charterhouse of Parma" made his print debut with a hundred lives of famous musicians and opinions on contemporary music: "Letters écrites de Vienne en Autriche, sur le célèbre composer Jh. Haydn," published under the pseudonym Louis-Alexandre-César Bombet. This book is two-thirds a genuine free translation of "The Haydine," and the remaining third is a collection of other, albeit less blatant, plagiarisms.