Working for the musically ravenous Prince Nikolaus Esterházy and spending much of each year providing entertainment at a remote country palace, Haydn, as he later acknowledged, “was forced to become original.” One new direction he explored starting in the late 1760s was the Sturm und Drang (“Storm and Stress”) aesthetic that was also cropping up in the theater, literature, and artwork of the time. The tendency toward heightened emotion and drama led Haydn to try composing symphonies in minor keys for the first time, including this Symphony No. 39 in G minor, which was likely the earliest example.

One defining characteristic of the first movement is its use of pregnant pauses to build tension. Another more subtle feature is its reliance on a very small amount of thematic material, with one main idea (starting with a leap up to a bouncing repeated note) informing every portion—an approach that points the way toward Haydn’s future student-turned-rival Beethoven. After such a serious start, the Andante finds Haydn in a playful mood, with dance-like strides interrupted by forte interjections and more pauses that here serve to set up the comic timing.

The linear interplay between the melody and bass line in the Menuet serves a reminder that Haydn, for all he did to move musical style forward, was still a child of the Baroque era and its arcane systems of counterpoint. He was also writing at a time when horns had no valves and were limited to a confined set of pitches, so he cleverly used two pairs of horns tuned to different keys so he could feature their outdoorsy sound in the contrasting trio section.

The finale exemplifies the relentless forward drive and wild theatricality that Haydn cultivated in his Sturm und Drang phase, a sound that influenced every composer in his wake—above all young Mozart, who happened to work alongside Haydn’s brother in Salzburg, giving him early access to unpublished scores. For undeniable proof of Haydn’s impact, just look at the symphony that the 17-year-old Mozart wrote a few years after this one, in the same key of G-minor.

Two oboes, bassoon, four horns, strings