What Is a Symphony? How a Four-Movement Form Took Over the Concert Hall

The word comes from the Italian sinfonia, which in the early eighteenth century meant the short instrumental piece played before an opera to settle the audience. It came in three sections, fast, slow and fast, and composers began to write such pieces for concerts without any opera attached. In the 1750s and 1760s the court orchestra at Mannheim in Germany, famous for its discipline and its dramatic crescendos, made the stand-alone symphony a showpiece, and the form was ready for the composer who would define it.

Joseph Haydn wrote 104 symphonies over about forty years in the service of the Esterhazy princes in Hungary, and in doing so settled almost everything about the form: the four-movement plan, the use of a minuet as the dance movement, the balance of the orchestra, and above all the idea that a symphony should be built from short motifs developed with wit and argument rather than from long tunes. Mozart wrote 41, the last three in a single summer in 1788, and brought the form a melodic richness Haydn admired and borrowed.

The classical plan gives each movement a job, and the sequence has a logic of its own:

• •First movement: fast, in sonata form, presenting two contrasting themes, developing them and bringing them back; the intellectual weight of the piece
• •Second movement: slow, lyrical, often the emotional centre
• •Third movement: a dance, the minuet in Haydn and Mozart, replaced by the faster and rougher scherzo from Beethoven onward
• •Fourth movement: a fast finale, often a rondo or another sonata form, resolving the tensions of the first

Beethoven's nine symphonies turned a genre of entertainment into a vehicle for ideas. The Third, the Eroica of 1804, is nearly twice the length of anything before it and opens with two hammered chords in place of a slow introduction; its slow movement is a funeral march. The Fifth builds an entire first movement from a four-note rhythm and runs its last two movements together so that the triumph of the finale grows directly out of the darkness of the scherzo. The Sixth tells a story, of a day in the countryside, in five movements. The Ninth, in 1824, brings in four soloists and a choir for its finale, setting Schiller's Ode to Joy, and lasts over an hour.

After Beethoven the symphony was a statement. Composers approached it warily, Brahms took twenty years over his first, and the number nine acquired a superstition after Beethoven, Schubert, Bruckner and Dvorak all stopped there. Mahler, who believed the curse, called his ninth symphony a song cycle and then died having sketched his tenth.

The nineteenth century made the symphony longer, louder and more personal. Berlioz's Symphonie fantastique of 1830 follows an opium dream in five movements with a recurring theme for the beloved. Tchaikovsky's symphonies are confessional; Brahms's are classical in form and autumnal in tone. Bruckner's are cathedrals of sound built from the organ loft. Mahler's, at the century's end, run to ninety minutes, call for a thousand performers in the Eighth, and try to contain, in his phrase, the whole world. The orchestra doubled in size across the century to keep up, adding harps, tubas, a full percussion section and more of everything.

The twentieth century did not abandon the form so much as argue with it. Sibelius compressed his Seventh into a single movement. Shostakovich wrote fifteen under Soviet scrutiny, several of them coded protests. Stravinsky and the modernists mostly avoided the word, and then composers such as Lutoslawski and Gorecki reclaimed it. Symphonies are still being written, and a new one by a living composer remains an event.

The most useful thing a first-time listener can do is follow the first movement's argument: notice the opening theme, notice the contrasting second theme that arrives in a different key, and then listen for both being taken apart and reassembled in the development before they return home. Everything else in the piece is built on the same principle of statement, departure and return. Programme notes will tell you the themes; the point is to hear them come back changed.

It also helps to know what a symphony is not. A concerto puts a soloist against the orchestra; a symphonic poem or tone poem is a single-movement orchestral piece that tells a story; a suite is a set of dances or excerpts. A symphony is the orchestra alone, talking to itself at length.

A symphony is a multi-movement work for orchestra, standardised by Haydn into a fast sonata-form opening, a slow movement, a dance and a finale, and stretched by Beethoven and his successors into the largest statement a composer can make. Listen for the first movement's two themes and their return, and the rest of the form falls into place.