Some seventeen of Haydn’s symphonies date from the early 1770s, years in which the form well and truly reached maturity in his hands. It was also the period in which a new profundity and tragic seriousness entered his music and that of his contemporaries. Although often linked to the Sturm und Drang (‘storm and stress’) movement in literature, the use of such a term in the musical field is a little misleading (though convenient) since the German literary movement to which it more properly applies (and which first coined it from the title of a play by Friedrich Maximilian von Klinger) itself began a few years after its manifestation in music.