Symphony no. 2

Glass wrote his Second Symphony, in C minor, op. 28, in 1899, five years after the First. By this date he had abandoned the piano and settled into the double life of a Copenhagen musician — teaching at the school he inherited from his father, conducting, and composing at a pace that produced six symphonies, chamber music and choral works. The debt to Bruckner is plainest in the symphonies of this period: long paragraphs, brass chorales, slow harmonic rhythm. Danish audiences of the time preferred Nielsen's leaner manner, and Glass slipped from the repertoire for most of the twentieth century.