Britten originally thought of using the designation ‘First Symphony’ for his first large-scale, purely orchestral score – the composition, sketched and completed in the spring of 1940, that would instead carry the final title Sinfonia da Requiem. But within seven years the momentous premieres of Peter Grimes and The Rape of Lucretia and subsequent formation of the English Opera Group channelled his energies in different and ostensibly non-symphonic directions. The variety of music that followed, most of it involving text and the voice, shows a composer consistently ambivalent about those ideas central to symphonic traditions – tonal hierarchies, authorship and genre writ large, the grand and universal statement, and the classicist and folklorist ideas that spawned a symphonic renewal in the decades after the First World War. Perhaps it was to be expected, then, that Britten's symphonic works would be few and undoctrinaire: the Sinfonietta (a student composition written in 1932), Sinfonia da Requiem (1940), Spring Symphony (1949), and Cello Symphony (1963) differ extremely in tone, instrumentation, structure and symphonic morphology. Like the contrasting ‘symphonies’ and symphonic attempts by those who influenced Britten's early development most directly – Mahler, Schoenberg, Berg and Stravinsky – his four symphonic scores define the post-tonal symphony, and things post-tonally ‘symphonic’, in at least four different ways.

The variances to Britten's essays in this most generic of forms – that is, the form saddled since Beethoven with the heaviest conventions of structure, instrumentation, and manner of performance and reception – also point to a non-generic and non-serial quality to this composer's output that goes beyond issues of genre and structure. Even Mahler's symphonies, which invite a collective hearing in series as some kind of autobiographical meta-symphony, obey certain laws of genre that Britten's symphonies and operas and canticles do not.