The Confession is a key document of Lutheranism and its Presentation to Emperor Charles V in June 1530 was a momentous event of the Protestant Reformation.

[1] In December 1829, a year before the King of Prussia Frederick William III had even announced the tercentennial Augsburg celebrations, Mendelssohn began work on the Reformation Symphony.

In late March the symphony was still in a state of fabrication, and in an inauspicious turn of events Mendelssohn caught measles from his sister Rebecka.

Grell was extremely conservative in his compositions; his piece for male chorus perhaps matched what the Augsburg celebrations demanded, in contrast to Mendelssohn's extensive symphony, which may have been thought inappropriate at the time.

In Paris, in 1832, François Antoine Habeneck's orchestra turned the work down as 'too learned'; the music historian Larry Todd suggests that perhaps they also felt it to be too Protestant.

However, only the slow introduction is written in D major, whereas the main theme and the cadence setting of the first movement are in D minor.

The fourth movement is based on Martin Luther's chorale "Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott" ("A mighty fortress is our God").

[8] At the very end of the coda, a powerful version of Martin Luther's chorale is played by the entire orchestra.