Symphony No.39 in G minor

Symphony No.39 in G minor

Allegro assai

Andante

Menuet

Finale: allegro di molto

Symphony No.39 in G minor has been long and affectionately regarded as the earliest of Haydn’s “Sturm und Drang” works – those moved by the short-lived but irresistible pre-romantic revolution in the arts around him in the late 1760s and early 1770s. Recent efforts to exclude it from the “Sturm und Drang” symphonies, on the ground that the date of its composition might be two or three years earlier than everybody thought, makes little sense. If this dramatically written score dates from 1765 or 1766 that must be when Haydn’s “romantic crisis” began. The first of his symphonies which both begins and ends in a minor key, it is an impulsive and, indeed, stormy and stressful work. It was so strikingly expressive in its time that it inspired several others like it, not least Mozart’s “Little” G minor Symphony, K.183 (also with four horns) in 1773.

The Allegro assai is characterised above all by its unremitting quaver movement – unremitting, that is, except in the silences which emphasize rather than relax the impetus – by its obsessive economy in the use of only one main theme and by the pressure of the brief but complex contrapuntal development. It is true that the second movement, an easy-going Andante in E flat major for strings alone, relieves the tension. The Menuet in G minor, on the other hand, with its churchy modal inflections and its lean two-part texture, is a serious event, effectively offset as it is by its more colourful B flat major Trio. As for the Finale, it not only restores the pressure of the first movement but redoubles it by means of an urgent tempo carried on persistent semiquavers, nervously wide leaps in the opening theme, hard-edged wind scoring, theatrical dynamic contrasts, and string figuration which could be taken at times for an operatic representation of a storm. If that isn’t “Sturm und Drang”…