Movements

Scored for 2 oboe

Oboe

The oboe is a double reed musical instrument of the woodwind family. In English, prior to 1770, the instrument was called "hautbois" , "hoboy", or "French hoboy". The spelling "oboe" was adopted into English ca...

s, bassoon

Bassoon

The bassoon is a woodwind instrument in the double reed family that typically plays music written in the bass and tenor registers, and occasionally higher. Appearing in its modern form in the 19th century, the bassoon figures prominently in orchestral, concert band and chamber music literature...

, 2 horn

Horn (instrument)

The horn is a brass instrument consisting of about of tubing wrapped into a coil with a flared bell. A musician who plays the horn is called a horn player ....

s, and strings.It is in four movements:

1. Allegro, 4/4
2. Un poco adagio cantabile, 2/4
3. Menuetto
   Minuet
   A minuet, also spelled menuet, is a social dance of French origin for two people, usually in 3/4 time. The word was adapted from Italian minuetto and French menuet, and may have been from French menu meaning slender, small, referring to the very small steps, or from the early 17th-century popular...
   
    e Trio, 3/4
4. Presto assai, 2/2

The opening movement begins with a hammerstroke and a dotted-rhythm fanfare of repeated notes which serves as the first theme for the sonata-form movement. The line between the development and recapitulation is blurred by the reappearance of the dotted-rhythm in G minor (the home tonic but the wrong mode) followed by standard recapitulation of the second theme group. The first theme is finally resolved in the concluding coda

Coda (music)

Coda is a term used in music in a number of different senses, primarily to designate a passage that brings a piece to an end. Technically, it is an expanded cadence...

.

The slow movement is a theme with four variations

Variation (music)

In music, variation is a formal technique where material is repeated in an altered form. The changes may involve harmony, melody, counterpoint, rhythm, timbre, orchestration or any combination of these.-Variation form:...

in invertible counterpoint. Through the third variation, each appearance of the ternary theme with winds appearing only in the middle section framed by muted strings in the outer sections. In the second outer section, the theme in two voices is inverted. Also, through each of the first three variations the surface rhythms are accelerating from eighth notes to sixteenth notes to triplet-sixteenths to thirty-seconds. The fourth variation varies from this pattern in that it is fully scored for the entire variation and serves as a recapitulation for the movement. What follows is a coda where the theme slowly dies away.

The "Minuetto al Roverso" is the reason this symphony is sometimes called "The Palindrome": the second part of the Minuet is the same as the first but backwards, and the Trio is also written in this way.