Overtures

An overture is an orchestral piece that serves as an introduction to a larger musical work, most commonly an opera, but also to ballet or other stage productions. The term comes from the French ouverture, meaning opening. In the Baroque and Classical periods, overtures often introduced the drama and presented motifs that would appear later in the score. In the Romantic era, overtures frequently became independent concert works, performed in concert halls without the accompanying stage piece, and were sometimes called concert overtures or symphonic overtures.

There are two main kinds of overtures. Opera overtures precede the action of an opera and may incorporate themes from the opera’s music. Concert or symphonic overtures are standalone works intended for concert performance, often evoking a mood, a scene, or a literary idea without being tied to a specific opera. Over time, the distinction between the two blurred, as some composers used the form to hint at narrative or programmatic content while remaining independent pieces.

Famous examples include Rossini’s William Tell Overture (the overture to the opera Guillaume Tell), Beethoven’s Egmont Overture (to Goethe’s play), Mendelssohn’s Fingal’s Cave Overture (also known as The Hebrides, a concert overture), Berlioz’s Roman Carnival Overture, and Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture (a festival or programmatic overture not connected to a single stage work). Today, overtures continue to appear both as preludes to longer works and as standalone orchestral pieces, often exploring dramatic or programmatic ideas in a concise, self-contained form.