55, is a four-movement orchestral composition by the Finnish composer Leevi Madetoja, who wrote the piece from 1925–26 while vacationing in Paris, before returning to Helsinki, Finland to complete the work.

Although technically his penultimate symphonic composition (a fourth symphony was lost and thus never completed), the Third is nonetheless—due to its successor's fate—Madetoja's final addition to the repertoire.

After the success of The Ostrobothnians, Madetoja departed for France, staying for six months in Houilles, a small town just outside of Paris.

[1] The new symphony received its premiere in Helsinki on 8 April 1926, and although Madetoja received the usual praise, the audience and critics found the new work somewhat perplexing: with the monumental, elegiac Second Symphony having set expectations, the optimism and restraint of the Third came as a surprise, its (subsequent) significance eluding nearly everyone.

Some years later, the French music writer, Henri-Claude Fantapié, described the cheerful, pastorale Third Symphony as a "sinfonia Gallica" in spirit and explained the premiere as thus: "The listeners expected the opera [The Ostrobothnians] to be followed by a nationalistic anthem and were disappointed to hear something that seemed to them to be hermetic and that, to crown it all, was lacking in pomposity and solemnity … the properties the majority of Finnish music-lovers always expect in a new work.