Barber completed this work in August 1933, and Werner Janssen led the first performance with the New York Philharmonic Symphony on March 24, 1935. It is scored for triple winds, trumpets and trombones, four horns, tuba, timpani plus one percussionist, harp, and strings. Barber wrote the School for Scandal Overture, his first work for orchestra, in 1931 while still a student at the Curtis Institute of Music. Despite Fritz Reiner's refusal to conduct it with the Curtis Orchestra, the music won a prize that enabled the composer to revisit Europe in 1933 for 18 months. At the home of Gian-Carlo Menotti in Cadegliano, Italy, he created his second orchestral work—Music for a Scene From Shelley. Barber would later write: "In the summer of 1933, I was reading Prometheus Unbound. The lines in Act II, Scene V, where Shelley indicates music (quoted on the title page of the score), suggested the composition. It is really incidental music for this scene, and has nothing at all to do with the figure of Prometheus...." However, to his beloved uncle and father-like champion, Sidney Homer, "the new piece sounds like Prometheus struggling against his bonds. Not like Shelley but still like Prometheus."

Barbara B. Heyman, the composer's foremost biographer and critic, has written that Barber "moved away from Brahms and toward Debussy" in search of an orchestral style. She calls Shelley a "tone poem...in an AB form with a coda," adding that "what is striking is the way Barber has supported tone painting through orchestral color."

The music begins very softly with muted strings, horns, and trumpets, Adagio, ma non troppo in triple meter (9/8 time). The first subject is a four-note theme that descends chromatically. The second is marked "a little less slowly," to be played "exultantly" at triple-forte level by violins and violas. There is a memorable trumpet solo further on, followed by an increase in speed and intensity that prepares the way for a "pesante, fortissimo" climax. What Heyman identifies as a coda recalls the spirit of the opening, if not the letter. Music for a Scene From Shelley concludes softly on a muted brass chord.

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