According to Cambridge University Press’s website:

Compared to other volumes in the series, The Cambridge Companion to the Symphony treats an especially vast and varied subject. The questions that came to mind prior to reading it were whether it is comprehensive and comprehensible enough for its intended readership, and how it would navigate the subject’s accrued analytical and historiographical issues. Having finished, and despite some reservations, I believe that this book is both a successful series entry and an indispensable resource.

Editor Julian Horton’s introductory essay effectively sets the tone for the rest of the Companion. In addition to establishing objectives, including offering ‘scholarly yet accessible essays’ on a ‘wide range … of symphonic subjects’ (p. 9), it presents a short overview of the genre, rightly invoking ‘the formidable historical, philosophical and analytical challenges’ it poses (p. 1). Horton does well in tackling the recurring claim of the genre’s ‘death’, and discussing its ‘bewildering variety of guises’ and ‘capacity for renewal’ (p. 2). So too does he acknowledge that ‘the symphony’s formal parameters are separable’, and that ‘the tonal properties of sonata form can be modified or abandoned’ (p. 3). But then he immediately follows this up by saying, ‘a recognisable genre marker will remain in place so long as sonata-type thematic or textural procedures are deployed’, and ‘a symphonic movement may be loosely rhapsodic or densely motivic; yet if it applies generic concepts of material, textural or tonal contrast, then the resulting structures will be recognizably symphonic’ (p. 3). This comes off as an unhelpful definition of the symphony after Horton had introduced and problematized the genre so nicely. It carries the danger of prescribing what symphonies should be, while prompting the impulse to under-privilege works less compatible with chosen standards, or works dubbed ‘symphonies’ for reasons apart from merely form. (There is also the temptation to view any or all formal contrasts in terms of ‘sonata-type thematic or textural procedures’.) One other statement in the introduction bears mentioning. Referring to authors’ coverage throughout the rest of the Companion, Horton writes that ‘no attempt has been made to resolve divergences of opinion where they arise’ (p. 10). This is particularly noticeable with regard to the authors’ varying historical values, and also their coverage of different repertoires, as we shall see.

The Companion is in three parts – ‘Historical overview of the genre’, ‘Studies in symphonic analysis’, and ‘Performance, reception and genre’. Chapters adhere closely to these headings, but there is some overlap between subject matter, as well as periods covered. For the sake of simplicity, the remainder of this review will consider chapters according to approximate periods. The writings dealing with the eighteenth century are especially informative and even-handed, both because of the material covered and because their authors can more easily avoid post-Beethovenian baggage. Richard Will’s chapter, ‘The symphony and the classical orchestra’, treats the important link between the makeup of eighteenth-century orchestral ensembles and composers’ scoring practices, pointing out how ‘all of the century’s most influential composers of symphonies spent time directing orchestras’ (p. 317). In effect, experience and practicality were major guiding principles for these musicians. Mary Sue Morrow’s chapter, ‘Other classical repertoires’, is for this reviewer among the Companion’s finest. In her words, it is ‘a “socialist” history of the symphony. It identifies no “major figures”; it does not trace influence or connections; it does not chronicle innovations or attempt to identify who did what first. Instead, it views symphonic composition as a collective enterprise in which thousands of composers participated’ (p. 29). How refreshing! Would that more surveys of later symphonies have adopted such a broad and inclusive perspective. Morrow offers clear, concise examination of the eighteenth-century symphony’s terminology, regions of composition, instrumentation, and some of the many styles and forms encountered. In doing so, she teaches the reader much about the early history of the genre. Her tables outlining composers’ geographical locations, as well as examples of four-movement symphonic plans before 1760, provide helpful visual aids.Footnote ²

John Irving’s chapter on the Viennese symphony from 1750 to 1827 treats issues of terminology and form, while also examining the settings and patronage of the symphony during that span. He emphasizes larger patterns of how composers fashioned works in response to their venues. Acknowledging that there are standout individuals in this history, and that the symphony had gained considerable prestige by the end of this era, Irving nonetheless resists a simplistic narrative of successive great men. Michael Spitzer’s ‘Six great early symphonists’ analyzes works by Sammartini, Stamitz, Johann Christian Bach, Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, Joseph Martin Kraus and Luigi Boccherini, showing how they added substantially to the genre. His analyses are lucid and highly engaging, and the reader should appreciate such advocacy for this music. Equally apt is his concluding statement that, in light of the diversity of means employed, ‘nothing about the evolution of the early symphony was inevitable’ (p. 152). The other eighteenth-century chapter is Simon P. Keefe’s ‘Harmonies and effects: Haydn and Mozart in parallel’. Keefe examines the two composers’ harmonic and instrumental crafts, the extent to which they were shaped by listeners’ expectations, and their symphonies’ enthusiastic critical reception. He illuminates some of how and why Haydn’s and Mozart’s symphonies became so highly regarded by critics, which offers contemporary listeners much valuable insight.

The chapters covering nineteenth-century topics present a colourful array of content. The elephant in the room is, of course, Beethoven, whose enormous influence upon the course of the genre is undeniable. The pitfall for historians, however, is to craft historical narratives around him and his symphonic practices to the exclusion of much else. Carl Dahlhaus’s account of the symphony in the nineteenth century, which downplays symphonies by multiple non-German composers and claims that the genre transitioned historically to the symphonic poem, is a case in point.Footnote ³ How pleasing, therefore, to see David Brodbeck offer the latest challenge it in his chapter entitled ‘The symphony after Beethoven after Dahlhaus’. Examining works composed in major performance centres (Leipzig, Vienna and Russia) at various points throughout the nineteenth century, Brodbeck demonstrates that, although Beethoven remained a model for many composers, they and their audiences did not always prioritize the ‘sublimity’ or formal principles associated with him. Additionally, Brodbeck devotes much attention to nationalist symphonic politics, writing that ‘the highly charged question of who counted as German was never far from the surface in any critical account of that most “German of genres”’ (p. 88). In stark contrast is Steven Vande Moortele’s ‘“Two-dimensional” symphonic forms: Schoenberg’s Chamber-Symphony, before, and after’. Embracing the Dahlhausian narrative that Brodbeck critiques, this chapter single-mindedly focuses upon its theoretical model. Defining two-dimensional sonata form as ‘the combination of the three or four movements of a sonata form within an overarching single-movement sonata cycle’ (p. 268), Vande Moortele then suggests that it occupies ‘a crucial position in the history of large-scale instrumental form in the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries’ (p. 272). He argues that such integrations were ‘deeply problematic’ (p. 273), that they were attempted in particularly ‘progressive’ large-scale works, and that successful attempts tended to occur in symphonic poems (and works resembling them) rather than in ‘the symphony proper’ (pp. 275, 277). Vande Moortele considers Schoenberg’s Chamber Symphony to be a rarity, holding it to ‘solve the problem of symphonic form’ yet costing ‘a significant loss in monumentality, and thus, symphonicity’ (p. 279). Perhaps the author should re-examine his assumptions concerning ‘progress’ and ‘symphonicity’, and ask why a form realized in so few symphonies ‘proper’ merits sustained consideration in this volume.

Two chapters deal directly with Beethoven. First, in ‘Beethoven’s shadow: the nineteenth century’, Mark Evan Bonds addresses the former’s power over the imaginations of nineteenth-century composers and critics, writing that the latter ‘found it far more reasonable (and straightforward) to ascribe monumental change to a dominant individual than to amorphous, discontinuous and gradual changes in aesthetics and social practices’ (p. 333). He continues: ‘However we may feel about hero-worship nowadays, we cannot ignore the fact that nineteenth-century culture venerated its Great Men’ (p. 334). Granting the author’s considerable expertise, his chapter nonetheless prompts some questions. First, what were the perspectives of people who were not critics and composers? Second, and in light of Brodbeck’s chapter, what of the symphonists who were less inclined to agonize over Beethoven? Third, have twentieth- and twenty-first-century commentators really been more resistant than their predecessors to Beethovenian and other forms of ‘hero worship’, as Bonds seems to imply? (In addition to Beethoven-associated values continuing to colour histories and textbooks, perhaps ‘hero-worship’ comes close to describing the recent musicological enthusiasm for Theodor W. Adorno.) Mark Anson-Cartwright’s chapter, ‘Beethoven: structural principles and narrative strategies’, explores under-examined formal agents of Beethoven’s symphonies – rhythmic placement, chromatic gambits, additive schemes, etc. – that create senses of suspense and forward propulsion. His fresh perspective is encapsulated in one particular sentence: ‘While analysts generally favour a retrospective mode of listening (or understanding) over a prospective or phenomenological one, Beethoven’s symphonies invite, and even compel, listeners to adopt the latter mode’ (p. 188).

Rounding out the nineteenth-century material, editor Julian Horton’s chapters on cyclic thematic processes and tonal strategies in the era’s symphonies are both rich surveys of their topics. In the former, Horton limits himself to ‘overt thematic recurrence[s]’ (p. 192). He discusses symphonies by Berlioz, Schumann, Liszt, Tchaikovsky and Mahler, focusing upon degrees of integration and showing that tonal cohesion had diminished as a priority by the latter composer’s career. In his tracing of tonal practices, Horton’s eloquent outlining of challenges is again praiseworthy: ‘… approaches to tonal planning have to accommodate a degree of generic fluidity: expansions of the tonal system travel between genres, in a way that expressive, formal or thematic devices do not. And here the tracking of transmission and influence becomes problematic at best’ (p. 233). Focusing upon inter- and intra-movement relationships, Horton deftly traces the expansion of tonal means in nineteenth-century symphonic works, noting the increasing presence of chromaticism and other post-Classical stylistic trends. His extensive table listing cyclical tonal schemes of 163 symphonies composed between 1800 and 1911 is an excellent supporting feature. Substantially in the nineteenth-century category is John Williamson’s ‘The symphony as programme music’. With impressive clarity, Williamson addresses the knotty issue of extra-musical associations, and the often-nebulous boundaries between the ‘characteristic symphony’, the ‘programme symphony’, and the ‘symphonic poem’. Among his considerations is the notion that associative allusions may occur in symphonies beyond accompanying descriptive labels, and that the distinction between ‘absolute’ and ‘programme’ music is murkier on second glance.

Surveying the symphony in the twentieth century presents its own difficulties, not the least of which is negotiating the sheer volume of works and perspectives. In ‘The symphony since Mahler: national and international trends’, David Fanning offers generously wide coverage of work types, as well as the aesthetic priorities informing them. When naming single compositions, however, he sometimes resorts to brusque value judgments. For example, he uses the words ‘well-constructed, workmanlike but musically dilute’ to describe ‘dozens’ of neo-classical symphonies commissioned for the English Cheltenham Festival between the late 1940s and the 1960s (p. 119), naming William Alwyn as one of multiple contributors. However, Fanning fails to mention the Englishman’s exceptional Third Symphony which, though not Cheltenham-commissioned, is anything but ‘musically dilute’ and would have nicely counterbalanced the negative reference to his First Symphony.

Daniel M. Grimley’s chapter, ‘Symphony/antiphony: formal strategies in the twentieth-century symphony’, exhibits more fundamental values. He first writes that the symphony ‘carries into the twentieth century perhaps the greatest ideological baggage of any large-scale musical form’, and that ‘the single defining feature of the twentieth-century symphony is the extent to which … categories of time and space have become increasingly contested and contingent’ (p. 285). Grimley then explores five contrasting works (Sibelius’s Symphony No. 4, Stravinsky’s Symphony of Psalms, Berio’s Sinfonia, Carter’s Symphony of Three Orchestras, and Gudmundsen-Holmgreen’s Symphony, Antiphony), writing that each ‘challenges the temptation to regard the symphony as a conservative or retrospective form’ (p. 288). For this reviewer, such a statement is a bit of a letdown. After aptly discussing some significant developments, the author turns out to be interested in the twentieth-century symphony here largely insofar as he can proselytize for perceived ‘progressive’ (p. 287) or ‘modernist’ (p. 286) examples. Increasing numbers of contemporary scholars are especially fond of these terms for validating composers and compositions they admire, and which may have been academically slighted in the past (as in the case of Sibelius). The result is that these words have become elastic to the point of diluting much of the recognizable meaning they once had.Footnote ⁴ This is particularly noticeable with Grimley’s and other authors’ continued use of the word ‘modernist’ in connection with Sibelius’s Fourth Symphony, both here (p. 288) and elsewhere.Footnote ⁵ Perhaps it is fair to point out that in deliberately avoiding notions of the symphony as ‘conservative’ and ‘retrospective’, Grimley is tacitly agreeing that these descriptors are unflattering. To the extent that he connects their antonyms with his counter-examples, it feels as much like political prescription as it does descriptive analysis. (On a related note, this Companion could have better covered many twentieth-century symphonists who, though likely to be deemed by some scholars too ‘conservative’ for sustained attention, nonetheless reached sizable audiences and accounted for considerable symphonic activity.)

Of the three remaining chapters, two offer excellent regional accounts of the twentieth-century symphony. Alain Frogley’s ‘The symphony in Britain; guardianship and renewal’ charts the fortunes of the symphony in a nation that ‘went from the lowly status of poor dependent of a rich German symphonic tradition, to becoming arguably the most important guardian of that inheritance’ (p. 376). In the course of doing so, the chapter touches upon many of the names and musical approaches in this abundant tradition, including the genre’s ‘strong connections to the cinema’ around mid-century (pp. 390–91), something Grimley touches upon as well (p. 286). Pauline Fairclough’s ‘“Symphonies of the free spirit”: the Austro-German symphony in early Soviet Russia’ presents a well-researched survey of early Soviet attitudes toward major nineteenth-century symphonists. The manners in which the biographies and symphonies of these composers were positioned to reflect communist propaganda makes for fascinating reading. Finally, Alan Street’s chapter, ‘The symphony, the modern orchestra and the performing canon’, addresses some of the cultural and economic factors influencing the repertoires symphony orchestras perform.

One could discuss these chapters at considerable length, but sustained commentary is not possible here. Notwithstanding my occasional criticisms, each is in its own way worthwhile reading for anyone wishing to learn more about the symphony. Returning to The Cambridge Companion to the Symphony’s goals, and those of the series to which it belongs, one must admit that it provides the reader with sufficiently lucid and inclusive coverage of its subject, however unevenly so at times. Moreover, it reveals much about the genre’s current state of research. I have already cited its contents multiple times in my own work, and I am certain that others will find it similarly useful.