Symphony in G major (W 182/1, H 657)

One great quality Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach inherited from his father, Johann Sebastian - along with a useful proportion of his genius - was his extraordinary creative energy. He composed a vast amount of music in the fifty or so years of his working life. Most of it was for the keyboard instruments he himself played so well, particularly the clavichord, but he also wrote a multitude of chamber pieces as part of his job at the court of Frederick the Great in Berlin and, after his appointment as music director to Hamburg in 1768, literally dozens of often large-scale choral works for the city’s five main churches. As a symphonist he was less prolific - partly because his official duties rarely required that kind of work from him and partly because the symphony was not yet the major form it was to become by the end of the eighteenth century. So he wrote only nine short symphonies in Berlin, between 1741 and 1762, and ten more in Hamburg between 1773 and 1776.

The Symphony in G for strings is one of a set of six commissioned in 1773 by Baron van Swieten, Austrian diplomat and enlightened patron of music, who (we are told by a contemporary) encouraged the composer “to let his creativity run free without consideration of the difficulties which may result from it in the practice.” The result, cast in an old-fashioned three-movement form, is a harmonically liberated construction that has little in common with the Viennese classical symphony being developed by Haydn and Mozart at the time.

Unlike, say, Mozart in his Symphony No.25 in G minor, which was also written in 1773, C.P.E. Bach does not present his melodic material as clearly defined first and second subjects to be developed and duly recapitulated. The lively opening gesture of the Allegro di molto first movement certainly performs the function of a main theme but the episodes between its several reappearances are more like improvisations which “run free” and are not motivated by classical symphonic considerations. Indeed, the first movement does not so much end as come briefly to rest on an indecisive harmony and a pause. Following immediately on that non-ending, the Poco Adagio proceeds at a measured walking pace but, repeatedly jostled as it is by less patient material, does not reach any certain destination. The one movement with a defined objective is the last, which adds a clearly conclusive coda to its pattern of cheerful themes in regular repetitions.