The Most Underrated Movement: Scherzos, Jokes, and “Jokes”

But this movement has grown up over the years. At the beginning, it wasn't even included at all, with pieces going directly from the slow movement to the finale. Then it was included as a light, simple dance, a minuet. Then it added more and more substance, until it transformed into a faster, more vigorous scherzo, meaning “joke”. But the scherzo became something that could be as dark and intense as any other movement of the piece, many of them hardly joking anymore.

Here is a bit of the scherzo from Kevin Puts' Contact for the “Time for Three” trio—not a joke, but somehow still pure fun to play and listen to.

Why do program notes tend not to care about scherzos so much? It could be their historical baggage as less weighty. Maybe they're not as memorable since they're short, light, and in the middle of the work. But I also think that part of it is that they're so immediately accessible—perhaps they just need less “explaining,” almost like an encore.

In this chapter we're going to use the Scherzo in all its forms to talk about humor in music more generally. But first, it's been a long time since there's been a whirlwind tour in this book, and I think it's the perfect way to experience the scherzo. Here are some pieces along the spectrum from light minuet to intense drama that could almost stand alone.

Whirlwind Tour

Unlike slow movements, which can be difficult to listen to back-to-back, scherzos are pure fun. And it very quickly gives you a sense of the commonalities between all the scherzos as well as the range.

We start with the scherzo's origins as a minuet—a ballroom dance. In the Baroque era, it was a part of a suite, even before the 4-movement sonata form came. Here is the opening Minuet from Bach's B-Flat Major Partita.

I say the opening minuet because there are two minuets in most Baroque suites. The first one is played and repeated, then the second one is played, and then the first one again. Just like the “song form” we saw in slow movements, minuet form is also a ternary or ABA form. The difference is that in a slow movement, usually the outer A sections are slower and the B section might be a little more dramatic. In a minuet or scherzo, usually the outer sections are faster, and the middle section is slower and more lyrical.

In most sonatas, the middle section of a minuet is instead called a trio, leading minuet form to sometimes be called Minuet-Trio form.

Here's a minuet from classical music's premier practical jokester, Franz Joseph Haydn. This is from his Symphony No. 65—start tapping your foot on the beat.

Later, the Minuet is sometimes swapped for a different kind of dance more fitting to the particular symphony. In Florence Price's 1st Symphony, the Juba—not a joke, but it still fits with the character:

In Dvořák's 7th Symphony, the minuet is called a Scherzo, but this one actually comes from a Czech folk dance:

And already at this point in the spectrum, you can start to hear how the form is beginning to transform a bit. At the end of that excerpt, Dvořák uses the same rhythmic trick as Haydn, changing the beat, but it's no longer for comedic effect. It still has a light, dance-y feel, but is starting to become more emotionally complex.

In the quartets of Debussy and Ravel, the Scherzo takes on a sort of light magic, as in Dvořák. Not laugh-out-loud funny, but good-natured. Still dance-inspired but not its primary quality.

Let's continue across the spectrum from light to intense with the hard-rocking scherzo from Lera Auerbach's cello sonata:

And now some Beethoven. There is still some wit in the way the “Harp” quartet parodies the fifth symphony. But there is also no lack of drive and intensity:

And as we arrive at the massive scherzo from Bruckner 9, we are now far removed from the minuets of Haydn:

But even Bruckner still finds some moments of the scherzo's original light-dancey quality towards the end of that excerpt. We'll finish with Brahms' 2nd Piano Concerto, what he called a “little wisp of a scherzo” (spoiler… it's not):

Jeremy Denk writes about this movement, “The dances have been given steroids. The act of play gets heavy.”

Humor

As we said, scherzo means joke. But lots of pieces called jokes are not funny. Many of Dvořák's Humoresques are so beautiful they'll make you cry, but not laugh. Alfred Brendel wrote,

I own a cartoon from Czechoslovakia. In it a pianist is shown sitting on a concert platform. But instead of performing the piece on the music stand in front of him, he is helpless with laughter. The composition that provokes his amusement bears the title 'A. Dvořák—Humoresk'. In the cartoon the faces of the audience are all completely serious; they appear quite unmoved by the mirth of the pianist, who must surely have been the first to discover that Dvořák's Humoresque should be a matter of laughter.

I think that's gorgeous. But it's not funny, and here I want to talk about the pieces that are funnier. As I'm sure many writers before me have discovered, it's pretty hard to write about humor without ending up explaining the joke and then killing it. But perhaps I can talk more broadly about a few categories of humor—punch lines, wit, and sarcasm.

And as in other chapters, we'll take a look at pieces not dubbed "scherzo" that can be viewed through the lens of comedy.

Punch Lines

Haydn's biographer Griesinger wrote that Haydn intends “to lure the listener into the highest degree of the comical by frivolous twists and turns of the seemingly serious.” In this way, Haydn's humor most resembles a regular joke. He sets up an expectation for a certain type of music, and then he breaks it with a punch line.

And it is easy with Haydn to view non-scherzo music as comedic—his humor could never be contained to just the scherzo movement. Take the finale of his “Jack-in-the-Box” string quartet, Op. 76 No. 1, whose carnival-esque music winds up like a jack-in-the-box before hitting a sort of jump scare:

Haydn did this type of musical slapstick in all genres of his music. And his gimmicks got way wilder than this.

Musicians tuning their instruments in the middle of the piece, bassoon fart jokes, false endings and sudden silences, and even musicians walking offstage to say they wanted to finish their summer retreat and go home now.

Nobody quite wrote jokes quite like Haydn in the years since, but occasionally you'll get something like Ligeti's absurdist Symphonic Poem for 100 Metronomes, or Nouvelles Aventures, theatrical comedy as musical comedy in which Ligeti invents a grammelot-esque gibberish language like something you'd see in a Cirque du Soleil circus act.

It would be a mistake to think that just because a piece of music contains some jokes that there's all there is in the music. Many of these pieces include sturm und drang (Storm and Stress) alongside their humor. More often, the humor isn't restricted to specific jokes, but begins to spread out.

I've heard many masterclasses on the opening of Haydn's C Major Sonata Hob. 50. Every single one has started, “it should be funnier.” And there are funny moments. But nobody's really expecting the audience to laugh. It's like watching a cartoon in the moments in between the jokes when you're still smiling even though there's not a one-liner.

Here András Schiff plays it on the fortepiano—a forebear of the modern piano that was used in Haydn's time.

Schiff's one-finger technique to start reminds me of Kit Armstrong's delightful playing of "The Buffoons" by Renaissance composer John Bull. And Schiff's mock-serious facial expressions always remind me of this classic recording of Leonard Bernstein conducting Haydn's Symphony No. 88 with only his face, revealing all the different characters that Haydn writes.

As Bernstein says, “All humor doesn't necessarily have to be funny, of course; there's such a thing as just plain good humor which means simply being in a good mood.” And so we arrive at “wit” as more of a through-line, not a joke.

Wit

What does it mean to be “witty”?

A joke has a setup and a punchline. You can point to it. But wit is harder to pin down — it's not a moment, it's a manner. A witty person doesn't just tell jokes; they have a way of seeing the world that's slightly sideways, full of unexpected connections that feel, in retrospect, obvious. Wit is the quality of being consistently, effortlessly clever.

A witty piece doesn't need the audience to laugh at any particular bar. Instead, it sustains a kind of playful intelligence across its entire length — in the way phrases turn unexpectedly, in harmonic surprises that feel both inevitable and fresh, in rhythms that wink at you. It's the difference between a comedian who tells jokes and a comedian whose whole worldview is funny.

The simplest examples come from interplay between instruments toying with each other. Here the wit comes as much from the musician as the composer.

Jokes can be found throughout classical music, but wit is inescapable, especially in the classical era music of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven.

Here's a bit of Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 22 played by Yunchan Lim. The third movement starts by giving us the main tune for the dance:

A whistle-as-you-work kind of a jaunt, lighthearted, written with a smile.

But wit doesn't work unless the pianist plays along. This is a rondo form, meaning the tune will come back over and over again. And each time the theme is just about to come back, Lim (and Mozart) take our expectations and give us little surprises. They know that we're ready to hear that tune and do just enough to play with it—not exactly a practical joke a la Haydn, just a bit of wit, changing a few notes here and there, and not letting us guess when we're going to hear the theme start again:

This happens a little differently every time—in fact if you don't know the piece, you might wonder if all the little embellishments on the theme were made up by Lim or by Mozart. When Mozart first performed it, surely he would have improvised them all on the spot.

And in the end, we have a cadenza—a feature of a concerto where the soloist plays by themselves without the orchestra, in Mozart's time, fully improvised. But the orchestra has to know when to come back in, and the audience sees the orchestra waiting and ready. And so Lim uses this opportunity for a little more play since we all know what's coming next, we just don't know when:

As we discussed in the opera chapter, Mozart's music is always operatic. Mozart's wit is theatrical in a sense—you can imagine a silly Papageno-esque character as the protagonist interacting with the other cast members. And comedy permeates all of the music.

Beethoven does it without the theatricality, just by laughing in the music. Audiences tend to know Beethoven for his intensity, but music teachers can't stop talking about how his witty side is just as—if not more—prominent in his oeuvre as a whole, from his early Haydn-esque scherzi (Haydn was Beethoven's teacher, after all) to music that no one else could have written.

Here's a bit of the second movement of his Op. 78 Sonata, from his middle period after he had begun to take his own path from Haydn:

I love playing this piece—partly because that alternating-hand two-note technique is super fun and many times easier to play than some of Beethoven's other most wit-filled piano pieces, like the Eroica Variations and Diabelli Variations—but also partly because it feels like laughing in music. It's not onomatopoeic exactly—I don't think Beethoven was trying to mimic laughter. But his classic contrasts between soft and loud, emphatic and lyrical, that are used in the more “stereotypical angry Beethoven” music for dramatic effect, are still used here, but somehow achieve comedy instead of tragedy. The rapid changes in character and mood are less scary and more just funny.

Most audiences don't laugh through these movements of Beethoven, but that doesn't mean the humor can't be the core of the piece. The jocular quality (Brahms even called one scherzo an Allegro giocoso, fast and jocular) is the point. Charles Ives said that if wit is “of the material and stays there, while humor is of the emotional, and the approaching spiritual.” I'm not sure if I buy it, but it gets at the potential for the music to transcend wit and get to something more healing (“laughter is the best medicine for the soul,” or something like that).

But as we get further away from straight-up jokes, we move more towards storytelling, not unlike the storytelling we've seen in previous chapters. Take for instance, the scherzo from the Quartet Op. 130. The scherzo is still under 2 minutes long, but it offers enough contrast to create a world of its own. Here is one artist's imagination which reconciles Beethoven's rapid mood-shifts into a story:

This interpretation shows us that even if we hear a storm in the music, it doesn't mean that it's some existential conflict. It could also be a storm in a cute cartoon about bugs where they invent umbrellas to keep dry. The stormy music can be both honest and also not that big a deal. Of course, this same music can be interpreted many different ways—the LA Philharmonic's program notes call it “a fleet whisper of a ghost dance.” And does it change anything to find that it's followed by another movement, labelled poco scherzoso, “kinda joking,” contrasting in its simple charm.

When you're trying to decide for yourself what the story is, one of the hard things to do is figure out where exactly it lies on the spectrum of joke from slapstick-style prank to refined wit. Strauss is kind enough to give us a title for his tone poem, "Till Eulenspiegel's Merry Pranks," alerting everyone that it's a comical piece about a prankster. And it might work as a cartoon soundtrack—but I've never heard anyone laugh in a concert hall—it's more concerned with its throughline of storytelling that is as thrilling as it is funny.

There is definitely a line to what feels like going too far in one direction or another. I once played at a masterclass, where the previous performer played an over-the-top piece by the American composer Louis Moreau Gottschalk called “The Union,” in which the pianist plays an absurd arrangement of pieces like “Yankee Doodle” and “The Star-Spangled Banner”—sometimes one in each hand at the same time.

Then I was to play Schubert's Wanderer Fantasy, a 20-minute long masterpiece of the repertoire that fits all four movements of a standard sonata form into one piece, played without breaks. It's a bit of a sacred piece to many pianists. But—it, too, has a scherzo movement. Over the summer, my teacher had asked me to play the left hand a bit dryer (less pedal) in order to give it a lighter, more upbeat feeling, and I had gotten some laughs, which made me feel like I was doing something right. But I guess I took it a little far, because this time as I played and the room started laughing, the teacher cried out, “It's still Schubert, not Gottschalk!” Turns out there's a difference between slapstick and a more refined sense of humor.

Sarcasm

There is even more room for ambiguity of interpretation when it comes to sarcasm in music. And like the “stretching a rubber band” style of slow movement, the sarcastic scherzo is a specialty of the Russian composers Prokofiev and Shostakovich.

Much of it is innocent enough by today's standards—Prokofiev's first symphony in the style of Haydn but with some wrong notes, for instance, or a jump scare of wrong notes in the Shostakovich piano concerto while the strings bounced their bows on the wood side of the bow (teenage me loved this part, in which my goal was to blow off the ear-drums of the first violins, even though I could barely play the rest of the piece). Honestly, things Haydn might have done himself if he were born a couple centuries later.

But especially for Prokofiev, these wrong notes got wronger and intentionally more provocative, and he leaned in to his reputation as the bad boy of classical music. He titled early pieces “Sarcasms” and “Diabolic Suggestion” and started to approach grotesquerie, clusters of indiscernible notes becoming subservient to raw rhythms. Beauty of sound was traded in for energy. From these programmatic pieces, we can see exactly what “wit” meant to him:

And we can see that same quality in his non-programmatic pieces, both scherzos and otherwise. Prokofiev's second piano concerto (scherzo here) even incited an uproar (“To hell with this futuristic music! The cats on the roof make better music!”) which was reminiscent of the riot at Stravinsky's Rite of Spring premiere just a few months earlier. But it's actually the third movement “Intermezzo” which would typically be a slow movement that has the most sarcastic sense of humor. The pianist's glissandi (sliding the hand over the keyboard in imitation of the flutes) turn into little sneers and jabs. It's up to the pianist and listener to decide if these little sneers and jabs are done with a mock seriousness, true maliciousness, or a lightly teasing smile.

Then as the fourth movement starts with his signature raw intensity, there are still moments when you doubt whether he's completely serious.

Even in the stormiest of movements, there are bits of playful irony. But also these bits do not take away from the overall impression of the Allegro tempestoso that Prokofiev asked for—fast and tempestuous. One of the most memorable performances I've seen was with piano student Jiaqing Luo at the PianoTexas festival, in which the power went out completely and thunder cracked right overhead competing with the orchestra at these stormiest of passages.

People who just write off Prokofiev as ugly aren't actually asking what he's trying to say. The music is often ugly! The mistake is assuming that ugly means it's bad art.

But beyond Prokofiev's modernist proclivity which Shostakovich shared, Soviet politics also forced some irony and satire, often hidden, into their works. After Shostakovich received a bad review from Stalin's official newspaper, Pravda (meaning “Truth”), Shostakovich became a marked man. The review, titled “Muddle Instead of Music,” called Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, “coarse, primitive and vulgar,” and “chaos instead of music.” He was declared “formalist,” for music that was too complex for mass audiences, and started sleeping in the hallway with a packed suitcase so that when the secret police came, they wouldn't wake his family.

Two years later, his Fifth Symphony premiered, subtitled “a Soviet artist's creative response to just criticism.”

The question that is always asked is whether the finale is triumphant or is it satirically triumphant, a sort of forced rejoicing. This is a question posed both to the conductor and to the listener, both of whom must make up their minds for themselves.

Below is the finale, in two versions, at vastly different tempi (speeds). You'll see differences even at the beginning, but the end is even more controversial, where the tempos are off by literally 2x. ^💬

As you know, I don't usually like to delve into the history of a piece because I find that it usually strips out ambiguity; here, though, I feel like this little peek at the history highlights the choices for the listener—even if historians feel like this particular debate is largely solved.

I want to close this section though by moving from Shostakovich's 5th symphony back to Prokofiev's. Here's a bit without any context at all. And we can decide for ourselves what is satire or anger, what is good-spirited or mean-spirited, and ultimately, what Prokofiev's message is. Here are actually two segments, one from the scherzo and one from the finale, an Allegro giocoso, fast and jocular. It's interesting to me that Prokofiev gives us two different movements in similar styles—we have to assume he has a purpose and they won't just be identical. ^💬 But let's give it a listen:

First, the scherzo:

And now the finale:

There is enough similarity between them that I'm glad the actual piece has a contrasting slow movement in between (the scherzo and slow movements are usually the middle movements, but can be in any order). Aside from the finale's Hollywood-esque melodies, though, I find the sarcasm to be much more biting in the finale than in the scherzo.

In classic fashion, as Ted Gioia details in Music: A Subversive History, the composers that were once derided as too countercultural, too ugly, too “formalist” were later co-opted by the government, and this symphony was awarded the Stalin Prize.

Was Prokofiev just ahead of his time? Today the dissonance of this music remains difficult, but in different ways. Prokofiev might be pleased to find that listeners still find it sounds too modern, distasteful, barely “art”—his punches still land. On the other hand, he might find that modern sensibilities have caught up to him—some listeners have become desensitized to sounds that were once ugly and provocative are now everywhere, especially in TV and movie soundtracks, and are now eminently listenable. Regardless, the way we relate to his music will continue to change as the years do, but many of us find that his music still speaks to us today, even without the same dangerous totalitarian in place.

In an irony fit for one of his scherzos, Prokofiev met his own end on March 5, 1953, but it went unreported for days, and no flowers were available at his funeral. Stalin had died the same day.

Scherzo Magic: The Pocket Concert

I think we've progressed successfully to the other end of the scherzo spectrum—music that isn't funny at all. Let's look no further at the tragic, though, and instead turn our ears to the magical.

Why do we even call these non-funny pieces scherzos anymore? Mainly their form. They're found as a middle movement of a multi-movement work. They're very fast. Mostly very soft, with short high notes, making them feel light. They're somewhere in the middle of a multi-movement piece. They are roughly in an ABA form, where the A sections are faster and the B section is a slower “trio.” And they have a lightness and a feeling of being in 3 beats per bar that evokes the feeling of dance. Very few of them are actually dance-able, but that's a bit beside the point.

The first scherzo we'll see is from Chopin. It's one of the shortest, which will let us see the full form with a contrasting trio in the middle—just a couple minutes out of a full 25-minute piece.

In my hours of practicing these devilishly difficult three minutes I've asked myself if the only reason he stuck this little movement in here was to mess with pianists. ^💬 But Chopin loved the scherzo form so much that he even wrote four standalone scherzos that aren't even parts of larger works—they are by and large unfunny, some combining a Prokofiev-esque grotesquerie with the storytelling you'd find in Chopin's Ballades. Still, they have the same scurrying outer sections and lyrical inner sections, adhering to a standard scherzo form.

At some point this sort of scurrying—almost like a fast tip-toe-ing dance—took on the programmatic “topic” of magic. It's honestly hard for me to say why or when, but it is now unmistakably linked by centuries of tradition that we can't un-hear. Mozart did it in the Magic Flute, the first time I can think of an association. Then Weber did it in Oberon, and Mendelssohn did it in A Midsummer Night's Dream, likely a callback to Mozart. Berlioz marks his Romeo and Juliet scherzo “Mendelssohnian,” and then Tchaikovsky uses the same texture in Nutcracker. Even today, John Williams uses the same sort of texture in a more contemporary setting in Harry Potter. The upside of such consistency is that audiences at any point in the last few centuries would have shared and internalized this same cultural association.

Is it because of some literal representation of fairy wings and light-on-their-feet elves? Of flying? We've also seen plenty of the demonic/grotesque scherzo in Prokofiev which takes the same type of music but makes it louder, lower, heavier, and intentionally uglier. But most scherzos, like Chopin's above, are absolute music, not trying to represent an extra-musical magic. This struggle to escape the programmatic bounds of music follows us even here.

The scherzo from Mendelssohn's Octet fits squarely in the magic style of scherzo, marked Allegro leggierissimo—fast and very very light. In fact, Mendelssohn even had in mind a scene from A Midsummer Night's Dream when he wrote the scherzo. I'm not sure this context takes anything away from the piece—it's pretty clear what he's going for. I also don't think it adds anything—it's pretty clear what he's going for.

Either way, the music remains equally delightful—it doesn't make you laugh, but it does make you smile. I'll follow the Scherzo-Trio form again in the commentary.

My first reaction was that it's so cool, it makes me want to go live in whatever world they're creating. My second thought is that—was that actually a mini-sonata form with a scherzo character? Two themes, repeated, a brief development, and then a recapitulation that brings back the original material but changed. In fact, it was—but all these forms are close enough to an “ABA”—some music, different music, the first music—that you can kinda fit it into any box if you squint hard enough.

The Purely Dramatic

I want to just touch on one more class of scherzo. There are the truly “wispy” scherzos like the Chopin scherzo we just saw from the third sonata. But then there are the scherzos that have overgrown their form, that take up more space and drama in a four-movement work than was ever anticipated.

This includes Brahms's “little wisp of a scherzo” from the end of the Whirlwind Tour, for instance, and with it, the “hard rock” scherzos of Shostakovich (like the 10th symphony from the book's very first pocket concert) and Bartók that seem to have traded in sarcasm for screamo.

These scherzi-in-name-only can be the most memorable part of a full piece. They don't require a new type of listening—and they don't particularly offer a new lens—you can make sense of them as a film score, or a ballade, or a tone poem. But as they grow, they also contribute more and more to the gestalt of the whole work. In some pieces, the scherzo is even the finale.

Here, it starts like a nice, fleet-of-foot, classic scherzo with just a hint of a march in the distance:

But ends in true finale style, the march having arrived:

Oh, what, the piece isn't over? Audiences always think this is the ending and applaud, but Tchaikovsky 6 actually has another movement—a slow movement—for a finale.

In the next and final chapter of this section on Symphony and Sonata form, we're going to look at what it means to form—and listen to—a “whole” multi-movement work that becomes more than the sum of its parts.

As always, the rabbit hole is below.