D minor

The Symphony No. 9 in D minor, Op. 125, is a choral symphony, the final complete symphony by Ludwig van Beethoven, composed between 1822 and 1824. It was first performed in Vienna on 7 May 1824. The symphony is regarded by many critics and musicologists as a masterpiece of Western classical music and one of the supreme achievements in the history of music. One of the best-known works in common practice music, it stands as one of the most frequently performed symphonies in the world.

The Ninth was the first example of a major composer scoring vocal parts in a symphony. The final (4th) movement of the symphony, commonly known as the Ode to Joy, features four vocal soloists and a chorus in the parallel key of D major. The text was adapted from the "An die Freude (Ode to Joy)", a poem written by Friedrich Schiller in 1785 and revised in 1803, with additional text written by Beethoven. In the 20th century, an instrumental arrangement of the chorus was adopted by the Council of Europe, and later the European Union, as the Anthem of Europe.

The Piano Concerto No. 2 in D minor, Op. 23 by Edward MacDowell was completed in late 1885. Although some obvious similarities with Edvard Grieg's, Camille Saint-Saëns's and Franz Liszt's concertos have often been stated, MacDowell’s composition proves to be quite original, at least compared to his First Concerto. It was the first major piano concerto written by an American. It was also the only large-scale composition by MacDowell to remain in standard repertoire.

D major is a major scale based on D, consisting of the pitches D, E, F♯, G, A, B, and C♯. Its key signature has two sharps. Its relative minor is B minor and its parallel minor is D minor.

In music theory, a chromatic fourth, or passus duriusculus, is a melody or melodic fragment spanning a perfect fourth with all or almost all chromatic intervals filled in (chromatic line). The quintessential example is in D minor with the tonic and dominant notes as boundaries:

The chromatic fourth was first used in the madrigals of the 16th century. The Latin term itself—"harsh" or "difficult" (duriusculus) "step" or "passage" (passus)—originates in Christoph Bernhard's 17th-century Tractatus compositionis augmentatus (1648–49), where it appears to refer to repeated melodic motion by semitone creating consecutive semitones. The term may also relate to the pianto associated with weeping. In the Baroque, Johann Sebastian Bach used it in his choral as well as his instrumental music, in the Well-Tempered Clavier, for example (the chromatic fourth is indicated by the red notes):

The Violin Concerto in D minor, Op. 8, is a concertante work written from 1881 to 1882 by the German composer Richard Strauss.

This violin concerto was written during the composer's teenage years while he was still attending his last two years of school, and is less distinctive than many of his later orchestral works. Despite this it contains some bold and inventive solo writing as well as occasional passages that hint at the composer's mature harmonic style. Though written in the romantic tradition of its time, it hints at the young composer's reverence of masters of the preceding classical period, especially Mozart and Beethoven. In 1880 he had first begun to turn to large scale compositions during a tempestuous compositional interval after having decided to devote his life to composition, including a symphony in D minor (TrV 94), which was well received. The following year he began to sketch the Violin Concerto in D minor, among several other compositions. Although it is today rarely performed, it received encouraging reviews, including the following by Karl Klindworth from May 1882, before its premiere:

The Symphonie espagnole in D minor, Op. 21, is a work for violin and orchestra by Édouard Lalo.

Although early advocates such as Robert Kajanus, Sir Thomas Beecham, and Serge Koussevitzky had conducted many of Sibelius's symphonies for gramophone in the 1930s and 1940s, none of these Sibelians recorded all seven. Instead, the earliest complete traversal dates to 1953, four years before the composer's death on 20 September 1957; it is by Sixten Ehrling and the Stockholm Radio Orchestra, recorded from 1952 to 1953 for the Swedish label Metronome Records (released by Mercury Records in the United States). Ehrling had outpaced Anthony Collins and the London Symphony Orchestra, whose cycle—recorded from 1952 to 1955 on Decca Records—was concurrent with Ehrling's but arrived second. Since these two pioneering examples, the Sibelius cycle has, as of May 2025, been recorded an additional 49 times. The most recently completed (51st) cycle, finished in 2025, is by Jukka-Pekka Saraste and the Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra; an additional two projected cycles are in progress, according to press releases.

The Violin Concerto in D minor, Op. 47 of Jean Sibelius, originally composed in 1904 and revised in 1905, is the only concerto by Sibelius. It is symphonic in scope and included an extended cadenza for the soloist that takes on the role of the development section in the first movement.

F major is a major scale based on F, with the pitches F, G, A, B♭, C, D, and E. Its key signature has one flat. Its relative minor is D minor and its parallel minor is F minor.