During the second half of the 18th century, new potential sources of income made it possible for musicians to disengage themselves from the grip of their traditional employers, and attain the level of respectable citizen. Anton Eberl is a perfect example of a composer affected by the changes occuring during the last decades of the 18th century and the beginning of the 19th, especially in Vienna. He clearly illustrates the range of services a musician had to develop in order to ensure an independent livelihood, the changes the musical world imposed on the image of musicians, and the effect of these influences on the production of music itself – as much on musical form and instrument choice as on the inexorable evolution of composition towards a romanticism of which Eberl can be seen as a true pioneer.
Austrian Anton Eberl was very highly regarded by his contemporaries in his grievously short life, being widely considered the equal of Mozart, Haydn and the young Beethoven, alongside whose Sinfonia Eroica Eberl's own E flat Symphony was premiered - and by at least one critic deemed superior! Several of Eberl's piano works were even published as by Mozart, something which Eberl and Constanze Mozart fought to rectify. As late as 1944 Eberl's Symphony in C was heralded in Italy as a new Mozart discovery...