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 the song cycle that followed his Eighth a symphony without giving it a number, then wrote a numbered Ninth after all and died while working on 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 concert programme might list Mozart's Symphony No. 41 in C major, K. 551, Jupiter, and each part tells you something. The number is the work's place in the composer's output, though early numbering was often done by publishers and scholars and has gaps and disputes. The key names the home key the piece starts from and returns to, which in the classical period also hinted at mood: C major for brilliance and ceremony, minor keys for storm or tragedy. The letters and numbers after it come from a catalogue of the composer's works.

Mozart's works carry K numbers from the catalogue Ludwig von Kochel published in 1862, Haydn's carry Hob. numbers after the collector Anthony van Hoboken, and Beethoven's carry opus numbers, assigned largely at publication, so his Fifth is Op. 67. Nicknames are a separate matter. Mozart never called his last symphony Jupiter; the name was attached after his death, probably in London. Haydn's Surprise symphony earned its name from a sudden loud chord in the quiet slow movement. Nicknames help to sell tickets, but they rarely come from the composer.

Watching a modern orchestra, you might assume a symphony has always needed a figure with a baton at the front. In Haydn's and Mozart's day it usually did not. A performance was typically directed from within the orchestra, either by the composer or a musician at the keyboard, giving cues and holding things together while playing, or by the leading violinist, who set tempos with the bow and body movements. Orchestras were smaller and the music, though intricate, was designed to be held together by players listening closely to each other.

As the symphony grew in length, complexity and orchestra size during the nineteenth century, that arrangement stopped being enough. A Berlioz or Wagner score, with shifting tempos and dozens of extra players, needed one person standing apart, shaping the whole. Felix Mendelssohn at Leipzig, Berlioz and Wagner helped establish the modern role, in which the conductor plays nothing, rehearses the orchestra, and makes interpretive decisions about speed, balance and phrasing. That is why recordings of the same symphony by different conductors can differ by many minutes, and why listeners compare interpretations as keenly as they compare composers.

The hush between movements that modern concert-goers observe is a fairly recent custom. In Mozart's day audiences clapped whenever they were pleased, including in the middle of a movement. Writing to his father from Paris in 1778 about the first performance of the symphony now known by that city's name, Mozart described placing a passage he was sure would delight the listeners, and reported with satisfaction that they applauded it on the spot. Popular movements were sometimes repeated at once: at the premiere of Beethoven's Seventh Symphony in 1813, its second movement, the Allegretto, was encored.

Over the nineteenth century the mood changed. As symphonies came to be treated as serious, unified works of art, and concert halls became places of quiet attention rather than social gathering, applause was increasingly held back until the end so that the piece could be heard as a single arc. By the first half of the twentieth century silence between movements had become the norm in most halls. Some musicians now argue the rule has gone too far, pointing to movements such as the march in Tchaikovsky's Pathetique, which ends in such a blaze that audiences often clap anyway.

A conductor works from a full score, in which every instrument has its own line and all of them are stacked on the page so that each bar can be read from top to bottom at a glance. The order is fixed by convention: woodwind at the top, from flutes down through oboes, clarinets and bassoons; then the brass, with horns, trumpets and trombones; then timpani and other percussion; and the strings at the bottom, from first violins down to double basses. A large Romantic symphony can need thirty or more lines at once, so a single page may hold only a few bars.

Some of those lines are not written at the pitch they sound. A clarinet in B flat sounds a tone lower than its written notes, and a horn in F sounds a fifth lower, a convention that lets players keep the same fingerings on differently pitched instruments of the same family. A composer therefore has to think in several keys at once. The players themselves never read from the full score: copyists wrote out a separate part for each instrument by hand, containing only that line, with counted bars of rest. Errors in those early copied parts are one reason editors still compare sources when they prepare a modern edition.

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.