Like his illustrious contemporary and colleague Joseph Haydn, Carl Ditters (who became known after ennoblement by Empress Maria Theresia in 1772 as Carl Ditters von Dittersdorf) was one of the most prolific symphonic innovators and practitioners of his times. With well over one hundred such works to his credit, Dittersdorf enjoyed widespread fame as a Classical symphonic composer. Dittersdorf's symphonies (or Sinfonias, as they were originally termed) provide the richest insights into his development as a composer, while (also like Haydn's) his works in this form fall naturally into several categories bespeaking evolving phases in his career.

This example, which is set in the gripping, volatile Sturm und Drang key of G minor, dates from no later than 1768. The work therefore belongs to a period in which Dittersdorf began to consolidate and perfect a number of novel solutions to the formal problems usually associated with the Classical symphonic form. Unlike many Dittersdorf symphonies, however, this one has survived in no less than seven authentic editions, and is mentioned in three contemporary thematic catalogs. Available evidence suggests that the work is almost exactly contemporaneous with the earliest of Haydn's so-called Sturm und Drang symphonies, also in the key of G minor. Indeed, many of the outward similarities are quite striking, and one is unurprised to learn that one extant original copy bears a mistaken attribution to Haydn himself.

Frequently compared with Dittersdorf's Sinfonia in D minor (Grave d1), chiefly on the basis of its Sturm und Drang sentiments, the G minor work is, if anything, even more surprising, for several reasons. Firstly, this symphony fully deserves the Sturm und Drang label: its sense of pathos and turbulent emotionalism is almost unremitting, whereas the D minor work actually spends a lot of its time in sunnier major modes.

But it is not sheer intensity alone that makes the G minor symphony noteworthy. The first of the four movements, a passionate Allegro set in conventional sonata form, features a daring development section which does not "develop" themes from the exposition, but instead offers completely new ones, never previously heard, and which seem at first completely unrelated to what has gone before. The structural rationale behind the use of these new themes, which are quite as pointed and severe as the first and second groups heard at the start, and which provide material for highly charged modulation and extension, becomes clear only in the Finale, as we shall see.

Both the Andante slow movement and succeeding Minuet and Trio are altogether more conventional, but even here, the darker aspects of the outer movements, with their tension and drama, are still powerfully felt. Only in the Minuet's trio section, in which the solo flute's doubling of the cello line provides a novel sonority, are these haunted apprehensions actually laid aside.

But with the Finale we return to Dittersdorf's daring structure. The ingenious way in which the sonata-rondo finale (marked Presto con garbo) clinches a most unusual organic unity between the two outer movements. Here, the development section is built unmistakably upon the powerful triadic first idea of the entire symphony. In other words Dittersdorf has, not reused material in the finale, but rathre somehow managed to anticipate the finale's development section as the first movement progresses. It is surely among the more original formal notions of the Classical symphonic era, but no less remarkable is the final master stroke: the music suddenly veers into G major, with a further new theme, before the symphony ends with a coda based upon the finale's opening ideas.

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