Petersen's Third Symphony in C sharp minor received it's premiere in 1934 under the baton of Karl Friderich in Darmstadt; a further performance followed on September 24, 1935, under Hermann Abendroth in Berlin. The present recording is the first to have been made of this work. Petersen wrote a short factual commentary on his Third Symphony for the September 1935 issue of the Zeitschrift für Musik. Only in a few places does the text depart from a dispassionate sequence of events and indicate the "content" of the music, with such terms as "tragic climax", "breakdown", "tender transfiguration".