finale, in music, the last and, as a rule, lively movement of a multimovement instrumental work, or the culminating section of an operatic act or scene, usually involving a vocal ensemble rather than a single singer. During the musical era dominated by Viennese Classicism (c. 1770–1820), solo concerti tended to end with movements in rondo form, while the finales of symphonic and chamber works, eventually solo sonatas as well, increasingly complied with the sonata-allegro principle. Beginning with Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s last two symphonies (Nos. 40 and 41, 1788) and reaching its highest expression in numerous works of Ludwig van Beethoven, the finale attained a structural significance that had previously been reserved for the opening movement, to the extent that, instead of providing merely an agreeable conclusion, it contained the ultimate thematic resolution of a large-scale instrumental drama.
At times the finale’s formal patterning was bound to deviate from that of the Classical sonata-allegro. Beethoven’s Third (Eroica) Symphony and Johannes Brahms’s Fourth Symphony end with variation sets, while Beethoven’s Piano Sonata Opus 106 ends with a monumental fugue. The finale of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, based on Friedrich Schiller’s “Ode to Joy,” requires a chorus and a solo vocal quartet as well as an expanded orchestra, an array inspired no doubt by the rousing choral finales of French Revolutionary opera. Felix Mendelssohn, Franz Liszt, and Gustav Mahler were among 19th-century composers who emulated Beethoven’s example not only with respect to the structural importance they attached to some of their finales but also in their repeated reliance on literary texts and the requisite vocal forces.