A Berlioz concert at the Cirque Olympique on the Champs-Élysées, engraving of 1845. Gallica, Bibliothèque nationale de France, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain).
Anyone who opens the programme of a symphonic concert almost always finds the same architecture: four movements, a fast one, a slow one, a dance, a finale. Nobody decided it at a desk. It is the result of a couple of centuries of trial and error, and understanding how it formed is the quickest way to find your bearings inside any symphony, from Haydn to Mahler.
At first the word symphony did not indicate a genre but a service. In the Italian theatres of the early eighteenth century the sinfonia avanti l’opera was the instrumental piece played to get people seated: three sections, fast, slow, fast, on the model set in Naples by Alessandro Scarlatti. It worked so well that someone began performing it alone, without the opera behind it. The opening number had eaten the evening.
The fourth movement comes from Germany. In the mid-eighteenth century the Mannheim orchestra, the most disciplined in Europe, and composers like Johann Stamitz got into the habit of slipping a minuet between the slow movement and the finale. It was the most elegant dance of the age, the audience recognised it at first hearing, and it gave the evening a moment of social breathing space. Haydn, who wrote one hundred and six symphonies, turned that scheme into a house to live in: first movement in sonata form, that is the argument, the place where two ideas introduce themselves, quarrel and reconcile; slow movement, that is the aria, the song that in opera would have fallen to the voice; minuet, that is the body, the dance; finale, that is the farewell, often a rondo with an easy tune, built to be whistled on the way out.
Beethoven inherited the framework and changed its blood. The minuet, too courteous, became the scherzo: same position, double speed, irony in place of the bow. From then on the exceptions can be counted precisely because the rule had become iron: the Sixth has five movements, because the thunderstorm did not fit the scheme; the Ninth carries a chorus inside it; Tchaikovsky’s Pathétique has the nerve to end with the slow movement, and still today someone in the hall applauds at the wrong spot. The four-movement architecture is a machine for creating expectations, and whoever knows it hears exactly the moment a composer honours it and the moment he betrays it.
The listening advice is to take a Haydn symphony, any one, and listen knowing only this: first movement the argument, second the song, third the dance, fourth the farewell. Those who want to go into the detail of the first movement will find on Melos the guide to sonata form, the one on the trick of the deceptive cadence and the six differences between a period orchestra and a modern one. Four movements, four ways of being in the world: the rest is variation.