As one of the most erudite figures in the musical establishment of the Holy Roman Empire in the second half of the eighteenth century, who had good relationships with major composers in Vienna and elsewhere (and was himself no sluggard when it came to violin performance or composition), Carl Ditters von Dittersdorf has been put in the equivocal position of being either seen as second-rate or, even worse, representative of generic mediocrity. While his Lebensbeschreibung, an autobiography dictated to his son and finished only a few days before his own death in 1799, can be seen as an important source of anecdotal evidence for musical life in Vienna, his own life and music are not thoroughly studied or regularly performed, save for a handful of works.