The symphony is in the standard four
movements: A typical performance takes approximately 35 minutes. The symphony's melodies have a distinctive Danish flavour and are imbued with Nielsen's personal style. Nielsen scholar
Robert Simpson describes the composer's symphonic debut as "probably the most highly organized first symphony ever written by a young man of twenty-seven." The work opens in
G minor, and closes with a rousing
peroration in
C major. This tendency to move away from the original key to C major is the basis of the whole symphony's
tonal structure, and displays for the first time Nielsen's hallmark compositional device, "
progressive tonality." (Nielsen at one stage even thought of calling the work "Symphony in C".) Simpson states "it is possibly the first symphony to end in a key other than that in which it started". ==Instrumentation==