Commentary on "Dittersdorf 'Die vier Weltalter'" by Ben Cross

First of all, great post Ben. I enjoyed reading along in your blog as I listened to Die vier Weltalter. I appreciated your description of the musical elements that you think indicated the different programmatic elements of the piece. I haven’t heard much about Ovid’s Metamorphoses or Dittersdorf’s sinfonias on them before visiting your blog (I suppose that is why we are assigned to listen to them, after all). I am curious about the relation this simfonia has to the other eleven in the set. As the first sinfonia, does it also correspond to the first part of Metamorphoses?
Another question that immediately came to mind when I started reading about this work was how much programmatic instrumental work was being produced around the time that Dittersdorf wrote this piece. Outside of opera, I thought that programmatic instrumental works were not popular until the Romantic era, and as you said, Dittersdorf’s piece is a Classical work. Was his set of of 12 sinfonias an unusual work, or was it becoming more fashionable to write program music around the turn of the century?
One aspect I would have like to see expanded in your blog was the discussion of form. One of the hallmarks of the Classical Era was composers’ adherence to form –though composers like Mozart commonly explored a form and made it their own, they did not push its limits as much as Beethoven and Romantic composers would in the coming years. You mention in one paragraph that the first movement features “somewhat of a sonata form,” and it makes me ask in what ways the form is similar and different from Sonata form.