In the 1930s and 1940s there was an astonishing blossoming of the symphony: a phenomenon all the more surprising as the genre had markedly waned in significance in the preceding decades. Musicologists have so far paid scant tribute to what was in many respects a heyday of the symphony. The essays presented here examine symphonic works by Hindemith, Pfitzner, Fortner, Messiaen, Stravinsky and others, for the first time considering them in the context of political circumstances and historical events.