A symphony is written for the orchestra and nobody else. A concerto is written for one player set against the orchestra. A sonata is written for one or two players and no orchestra at all.
That is the whole distinction, and it survives every edge case you can throw at it. Count the people on the platform, then look at whether one of them is standing out in front of the rest.
| Symphony | Concerto | Sonata | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Who plays | Full orchestra, roughly 60–100 players | Soloist plus full orchestra | One or two players |
| Anyone out front? | No — only the conductor | Yes, and that is the point | There is no “front” to stand in |
| Movements | Usually four | Usually three | Two to four |
| Typical length | 25–45 minutes | 20–40 minutes | 15–30 minutes |
| Written for | A concert hall | A concert hall | A room, originally |
| One you know | Beethoven’s Fifth | Rachmaninov’s Second Piano Concerto | Beethoven’s Moonlight |
Sonata is two words wearing one coat
The confusion in this subject is almost all in one place. Sonata names a kind of piece, and sonata form names the internal shape of a single movement, and the two are not the same thing.
Sonata form is a plan for one movement. A theme and a contrasting second theme are laid out in the exposition, pulled apart and moved through distant keys in the development, then brought back with the argument settled in the recapitulation. It is the most common way a first movement is built, and it turns up everywhere.
So the first movement of a symphony is usually in sonata form. So is the first movement of a concerto, and of a string quartet, and of a sonata. That is why the older textbooks describe a symphony as a sonata for orchestra: the word once covered any piece played rather than sung, from the Italian sonare, to sound, as against cantata, sung. Concertos and symphonies both grew out of that family.
The narrow modern use is the one on a concert program. There, a sonata is a piece for a soloist, or for one instrument and piano, and it is the small end of the repertoire.
The symphony
The symphony came out of the opera house. The Italian sinfonia was the overture played before the curtain went up, in three sections — fast, slow, fast — and by the middle of the eighteenth century composers had begun writing them as concert pieces with nothing attached. It happened in three places at once: Milan around Sammartini, Mannheim around Johann Stamitz, and Vienna.
What settled was a four-movement scheme, and knowing it is most of what you need to follow one:
- A quick first movement in sonata form, sometimes with a slow introduction bolted on the front.
- A slow movement, the lyrical one, often the part people remember.
- A dance movement — a minuet and trio in the eighteenth century, replaced by the faster and rougher scherzo as the nineteenth went on.
- A fast finale, usually a rondo or another sonata-form movement.
Haydn wrote more than a hundred symphonies, Mozart forty-one, Beethoven nine. The falling count is the story of the form: each one got longer, heavier and more individual, until by Mahler a single symphony could run to an hour and a half and need a choir. A Classical symphony sits at twenty-five to thirty-five minutes. A late Romantic one runs to an hour. Mahler’s Third takes about a hundred minutes on its own.
The orchestra that plays it is four families of instrument — strings, woodwind, brass and percussion — and the strings outnumber everything else put together.
The concerto
A concerto sets a soloist against the band. The Italian word comes from concertare, which carries both senses at once — to agree, and to contend — and both are audible: the soloist and the orchestra trade the same material, interrupt each other, and race for the finish.
Three movements, fast–slow–fast, standard from the early eighteenth century. No dance movement, which is the quickest way to tell a concerto from a symphony on paper: four movements with a minuet or scherzo in third place is a symphony, three movements without one is usually a concerto.
The older form is the concerto grosso, where the soloist is not one player but a small group. Corelli’s set the pattern with a concertino of two violins and cello playing against the full band, the ripieno. Bach’s Brandenburgs are the ones everybody knows, and the third of them has no soloist at all in the usual sense. The solo concerto, one player against everyone, is Vivaldi’s doing, and it is the model that won.
The moment worth waiting for is the cadenza. Near the end of the first movement the orchestra stops on a held chord and the soloist plays alone, unaccompanied and out of time, before a long trill brings everyone back in. It was improvised on the night for most of the eighteenth century. Composers began writing them out in the nineteenth — Beethoven notated the one in the Emperor Concerto rather than leave it to the pianist — and today a soloist normally plays a cadenza somebody else wrote and they have practiced for months.
Anything can be the soloist. Violin and piano dominate the repertoire, but there are concertos for cello, clarinet, trumpet, oboe, harp, organ and tuba, and plenty for two or three players at once.
The sonata
The sonata is the domestic one. It was written for a room with people in it rather than a hall with an audience in it, and that shows in the scale of everything about it.
In the Baroque it came in two kinds. The sonata da chiesa, the church sonata, ran slow–fast–slow–fast with a fugal second movement and kept dance titles off the page. The sonata da camera, the chamber sonata, was a prelude followed by a run of dances in the same key, which makes it a suite in all but name.
The commonest Baroque scoring is the trio sonata, and the name misleads reliably: it has three written parts — two melody instruments and a bass line — but four players, because the bass is realized by a cello or bassoon on the notes and a harpsichord or organ filling in the chords above them. Corelli published four sets of them and half of Europe copied him.
The sonata everyone now means arrived with the piano. Haydn was the first to put the word on a keyboard piece, in 1771, and it became the standard term through that decade. From there it is either a piece for keyboard alone or a piece for keyboard and one other instrument. Beethoven wrote thirty-two piano sonatas across his life, and they are the closest thing the instrument has to a complete map of what it can do.
One thing to get right about the second kind. In a violin sonata the piano is not accompanying the violin; the two parts are equal, and in the Beethoven and Brahms sonatas the piano frequently has the harder job. The old title was “sonata for piano and violin”, in that order, and it meant it.
Telling them apart in the hall
Before a note is played, the stage has already told you:
- Orchestra, conductor, nobody in front. Symphony.
- Orchestra, conductor, and one chair or a piano turned sideways at the front edge. Concerto. The sideways piano is the giveaway — the lid is opened toward the audience and the soloist faces the conductor.
- Two people and a piano, or one person and a piano. Sonata.
By ear it is the texture. A symphony hands its tune around the orchestra and nobody keeps it for long. A concerto is a conversation with two speakers, one of whom is louder than they should be able to be, and it stops dead for the cadenza. A sonata never has more than two voices going and you can hear both of them the whole time.
The rest of the program
A concert rarely holds only these three, and the neighboring words are the ones that catch people out.
| Word | What it is |
|---|---|
| Overture | A single opening movement, originally before an opera. Ten minutes, no soloist. |
| Suite | A set of short movements, usually dances, with no development. The order is a sequence rather than an argument. |
| Symphonic poem | One continuous orchestral movement telling a story or painting a scene. Orchestra of a symphony, structure of nothing in particular. |
| Sinfonietta | A small or light symphony. Shorter, smaller orchestra, same idea. |
| Concertino | Two meanings. A short, light concerto — and the solo group inside a concerto grosso. |
| String quartet | Four string players, four movements, built exactly like a symphony. It is chamber music, not orchestral. |
| Partita | A Baroque suite by another name, most famously Bach’s for solo violin and for keyboard. |
Where to go next if you want to hear it
Reading the definitions is the easy half. Recognizing sonata form while it is happening takes somebody walking you through a piece, and there are two books that do the job from opposite directions.
Aaron Copland — What to Listen for in Music
A working composer explaining what the shapes are for, with chapters on sonata form and the fundamental forms that do more in thirty pages than most course notes manage in a term. It is a small paperback and costs less than a coffee.
Copland wrote it in 1939 and revised it twice, and the prose is of its period — it addresses a reader who owns a gramophone. That is the only thing wrong with it. Nothing since has explained the difference between hearing music and listening to it as plainly, and the chapters on form are the ones this page has been circling.
The Classical Music Book does something different and should not be mistaken for a rival. It is a large illustrated hardback that maps the repertoire — who wrote what, when, and what they were reacting against — in double-page spreads with timelines and diagrams. It will not teach you to follow a development section. It will tell you where the piece you just heard sits among four hundred years of other pieces, which is the question that arrives second. Around $16, and it is 352 pages of paper worth having in print rather than on a screen.
| Book | What it does | Format | Price band |
|---|---|---|---|
| Copland, What to Listen for in Music | Teaches you to hear form as it happens | Paperback, 304 pages | ~$8 |
| DK, The Classical Music Book | Maps the repertoire and the history around it | Illustrated hardback, 352 pages | ~$16 |
Common questions
Is a concerto part of a symphony?
No. They are separate pieces and a concert usually contains one of each, with the concerto before the interval and the symphony after it. Both are played by the same orchestra, which is where the idea comes from.
Can a symphony have a soloist?
Players inside the orchestra take solos constantly — the oboe and the horn especially — but they play from their seats and the piece is still a symphony. A named soloist brought on and placed in front of the orchestra makes it a concerto, whatever the title says. The pieces that sit awkwardly between the two, like Berlioz’s Harold in Italy with its solo viola, tend to be argued about for exactly this reason.
Who invented the sonata?
Nobody. The word was in use by 1600 and the Baroque types were established by Corelli in the 1680s, a century before Beethoven was born. Haydn was the first to apply it to a keyboard piece in 1771. Beethoven inherited the form and pushed it further than anyone, which is a different claim.
Is Clair de Lune a sonata?
No, and neither are most of the piano pieces that turn up on lists of famous sonatas. Clair de Lune is the third movement of Debussy’s Suite bergamasque. Satie’s Gymnopédies are three short standalone pieces, Liszt’s La Campanella is a study, and Chopin’s nocturnes are nocturnes. A sonata is a multi-movement work; a single famous piano piece almost never is one.
How long is each of them?
A symphony runs twenty-five to forty-five minutes, a concerto twenty to forty, a sonata fifteen to thirty. The ranges overlap because the era matters more than the form: an early Haydn symphony is shorter than a late Beethoven sonata.
Why do concertos have three movements and symphonies four?
The concerto kept the three-part shape of the Baroque original. The symphony gained a fourth when composers slotted a minuet in before the finale during the middle of the eighteenth century, and the extra movement stuck.
What is a sonatina?
A small sonata. Shorter, easier, and usually written for students — the Clementi and Kuhlau sets are what most piano pupils meet first. The structure is the same in miniature, which makes a sonatina the cheapest way to see sonata form whole.
Also read
- Orchestra vs. Symphony vs. Philharmonic — why two orchestras in the same city have different words in their names
- Orchestra vs. Band — the instruments each one has and the other does not
- Types of Instruments — the five families, and the ones that sit in the wrong one