Sinfonia in A

Though Joseph Martin Kraus (1756-1792) became the most influential Swedish musician of the 18th century, he was born and educated in Germany and lived only eight years in Stockholm before his early death at the age of 36. Yet in that brief period he had taught composers and created the Swedish school of opera. Kraus had a lifelong fascination with drama and unsurprisingly his symphonies are full of unexpected twists and turns and contain many forward-looking stylistic devices that anticipate music of the next century. The Sinfonia in A is one of the earliest Kraus symphonies to have survived. Stylistic evidence dates the work to his first years of formal musical study in Mannheim (1768-1772) when he came under the influence of members of the famed Mannheim Kapelle. The performance circumstances are unknown although it is likely that it was played by one of the various student musical groups that existed in that city. This work is unusual in that it is only one of two Kraus symphonies to be in a four-movement form that includes a minuet.