Categories of genre in nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century music engage with many levels of musical interpretation. Placed in their historical context, generic conventions define our understanding of musical works and serve, above all, to inform our sense of musical meaning. Nevertheless, identifying the precise boundaries between individual genres such as the tone poem and the symphony can be problematic. Despite the hybrid construction of the term ‘symphonic poem’ (Synfonische Dichtung), first coined by Liszt in the 1840s, the tone poem often seems generically opposed, rather than closely related, to the symphony. Throughout the nineteenth century, after Beethoven, the symphony was principally concerned with notions of breadth and monumentality. Regarded as the highest form of absolute music, the symphony aspired to high levels of motivic unity, formal abstraction and goal-directed (teleological) musical form. Symphonies consciously and powerfully engaged in a dialogue with canonical works of the past. Tone poems, by contrast, are concerned at a fundamental level with the evocation of a particular mood or atmosphere, or with the articulation of an extra-musical narrative or programme. In response to such literary or pictorial subject matter, tone poems are characterised by their freer, innovative approach to musical form, particularly the tendency towards structures that telescope the traditional four-movement scheme of a symphony into a single musical span. Such forms often sacrifice dynamic motivic or harmonic development in favour of radically static moments of sonorous or poetic contemplation, intended as musical depictions of the (super-) natural world.