Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Symphony No. 40 in G Minor, K. 550

IV. Personal Reaction.
On a personal level, I was also inspired with the same unexplained feeling of urgency and anxiety while listening to this symphony. The first movement creates this mood with its very first motive. However, it seemed hard for me to follow through the entire piece without having lost some of this impression to the more subdued second and third movements. Perhaps Mozart's emotions at the time were too complex for me to understand at this point; after all, these two movements were not composed just to fill the void between the first and the last movements. But maybe Mozart knew that the listeners would be exhausted if the same mood prevailed throughout the entire symphony.
Either way, my personal preference remains with the more sonically and emotionally powerful productions of such composers such as Chaikovsky, Prokofiev, Grieg, and Wagner who managed to deliver similarly strong emotions through shorter, more concise pieces of music. …