A symphony is a composition for orchestra, usually in multiple movements that differ in tempo and key (or harmonic "home base"). The name means something more specific than just a piece of orchestral or ensemble music. The first "sinfonias" originated in Italy in the early eighteenth century. They were short orchestral pieces that served as curtain-raisers for operas or other large works. (read more)

A symphony is a composition for orchestra, usually in multiple movements that differ in tempo and key (or harmonic "home base"). The name means something more specific than just a piece of orchestral or ensemble music. The first "sinfonias" originated in Italy in the early eighteenth century. They were short orchestral pieces that served as curtain-raisers for operas or other large works. By the late 1730s the sinfonia had become an independent concert work, picking up ideas from various other Italian instrumental forms. Soon the new genre was popular around Europe, and by the mid-1760s Haydn, at the country estate of his employer Prince Esterházy, had written the first few of an eventual 107 symphonies. The first symphonies tended to have three movements in a fast-slow-fast pattern, but Haydn helped to standardize a sequence of four movements. The first movement was in a quick tempo, although there might be a slow introduction, and increasingly often it would be cast in sonata form, a structure in which the music's departures from and returns to the home key were coordinated with the melodic material for maximum dramatic tension. The second and third movements would offer a slow movement and one in a dance tempo; for most of the rest of the century, the slow movement, in a related key, came first and was followed by a Minuet, a graceful French court dance in triple meter. A brisk movement, typically shorter than the first movement, wrapped things up. The capstone was placed on the Classical-era symphony by the final movement of Mozart's Symphony No. 41 (1788), a whirlwind of complicated counterpoint. Mozart's last three symphonies, not written in response to any known commission, were all towering masterpieces. The four-movement pattern held well into the nineteenth century, through Beethoven (who treated it freely in his nine symphonies), Schubert (whose sweeping Ninth Symphony was praised for its "heavenly length"), and Mendelssohn, up to Brahms, whose four symphonies are all cornerstones of the repertory. Freer kinds of orchestral music became more common during the Romantic era, and a designation of "symphony" came to denote a piece that showed traces of Classical procedures even if, as in Berlioz's Symphonie fantastique, much of its form was dictated by an external story or "program." An orchestral work whose form was totally dependent on an external idea was usually known in the later nineteenth century as a tone poem or symphonic poem. The drama inherent in traditional symphonic form proved adaptable to modern concerns, and many of the twentieth century's great works were symphonies, numbered in the usual way. The American iconoclast Charles Ives, who was virtually unknown during his prime years between 1895 and 1920, wrote four symphonies that quoted and evoked a wide range of American music and thought. The tumultuous events of Russian life found expression in the 15 symphonies of Dmitri Shostakovich. Nationalist composers like Finland's Jean Sibelius and England's Ralph Vaughan Williams used the symphonic framework to introduce local music or mood into their works. Even composers at the century's end, notably the Finn Einojuhani Rautavaara, continued to write symphonies. The symphony, it seemed, was one of the central ideas of European and American musical culture, a form that had something new to say to each new generation.(collapse)