From the 19th century the
Toy Symphony was long taken to be a work of
Joseph Haydn; however, a
stemmatics analysis conducted by musicologist Sonja Gerlach shows that the earliest manuscripts circulating were rather associated with Joseph Haydn's younger brother
Michael Haydn. In 1953 musicologist
Ernst Fritz Schmid published his discovery of a
Cassation in
G major for toys, 2
oboes, 2
horns,
strings and
continuo by
Leopold Mozart in seven
movements, three of them identical to the well-known toy symphony, and concluded to have likely found the true composer. This position is no longer accepted: it was rather believed that Mozart had incorporated the earlier toy symphony into his own composition, authoring only the remaining four movements. More recently (1996) the Austrian
Benedictine monk (1740–1794) has been suggested to be the composer. If Angerer's manuscript (from 1765, entitled "Berchtolds-Gaden Musick") is the original, the
Toy Symphony was originally written not in G but in
C major. There is reason to believe that the true composer will likely never be known, in whole or in part, given its confused origins and the paucity of related manuscript sources. ==Other works for toy instruments==