In the roster of prematurely-lost musicians, Juan Crisóstomo de Arriaga must occupy a dubious place of honor, dying of tuberculosis 10 days short of his 20th birthday. He left behind few surviving works, including three string quartets, the Symphony in D and the overture and a few fragment of an opera, Los Esclavos Felices, composed and staged at age 14 in Bilbao.

Arriaga, a Basque, was born in the northern Spanish city of Bilbao to a well-to-do family who encouraged his musical talent. He wrote his first composition at age 11 and with the aid of Luigi Cherubini was accepted to the Paris Conservatory in 1821. By 1824 he was a teaching fellow in harmony and counterpoint, assisting his own teacher. It was in the same year that he published his three quartets.

After his death, Arriaga was frequently referred to as “The Spanish Mozart.” But in the 1950s he became a symbol of Basque nationalism and was often referred to as “The Basque Mozart.”  From the meager evidence we have, it appears that Arriaga was well on his way to branching out from 18th century classicism. Had he lived, he most likely would have embraced the tenets of Romanticism, and we would be regarding his Symphony as “transitional” or by some other term that would have cast it in the shadow of later, greater creations.

The overture has a Rossini flavor, opening with a pastoral scene, building up to a crescendo leading to the coda. But in his stay in Paris, Arriaga learned something from the surprises in the symphonies of Haydn, popular in Paris at the time. As the coda comes to an end, and you expect the closing cadence, there is a short pause, and the coda grows a 10-bar mini-coda to the close.