scherzo

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A scherzo (plural scherzi) is a piece of music or a movement, in a certain style, that forms part of a larger piece such as a symphony, and the scherzo is often the third movement of a symphony, sonata, or string quartet^[1]. The word "scherzo" means "joke" in Italian. Sometimes the word scherzando (joking) is used in musical notation to indicate that a passage should be executed in a playful manner.

Until around the end of the Baroque period (ca. 1750) the term was also occasionally used for both vocal and instrumental compositions, such as Claudio Monteverdi's Scherzi musicali (1607), Antonio Brunelli's Scherzi, Arie, Canzonette e Madrigale (1616) for voices and instruments, Johann Schenk's Scherzi musicale (fourteen suites for gamba and continuo) or the scherzo of Johann Sebastian Bach's Partita No. 3 for harpsichord^[2].

The scherzo developed from the minuet, and gradually came to replace it as the third (or sometimes second) movement in symphonies, string quartets, sonatas and similar works. It traditionally retains the triple meter time signature and ternary form of the minuet, but is considerably quicker. It is often, but not always, of a light-hearted nature.

The scherzo itself is a rounded binary form; but, like the minuet, is usually played with the accompanying Trio followed by a repeat of the Scherzo, creating the ABA or ternary form. This is sometimes done twice or more (ABABA). The "B" theme is a trio, a contrasting section not necessarily for only three instruments, as was often the case with the second minuet of baroque suites (the first Brandenburg concerto has a famous example).

A technique that exists in some, but not all, scherzi is transposition of a repeated phrase. For example, in the second movement of Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata, the first four measures are played in the dominant key. The four measures following that are a repeat of the first four, but transposed up a perfect fourth to the tonic key. This effect creates the illusion of starting on the 'wrong' key, which corrects itself after the phrase is transposed.

Scherzi are occasionally found which differ from this traditional structure in various ways. For example, a few examples exist which are not in the customary triple meter, such as in Beethoven's Piano Sonata No. 18. This example is also unusual in being written in orthodox sonata form rather than the usual ternary form for such a movement, and thus it lacks a Trio section. This sonata is also unusual in that the Scherzo is followed by a Minuet and Trio movement, whereas most sonatas have either a Scherzo movement or a Minuet movement, but not both. Some analysts have attempted to account for these irregularities by analyzing the Scherzo as the sonata's slow movement, which just happens to be rather fast, which would keep the traditional structure for a four-movement sonata that Beethoven usually followed, especially in the first half or so of his piano sonatas.

Joseph Haydn wrote minuets which are very close to scherzi in tone, but it was Ludwig van Beethoven and Franz Schubert who first used the form widely, with Beethoven in particular turning the polite rhythm of the minuet into a much more intense — and sometimes even savage — dance.

Most of the scherzi of Beethoven's symphonies (but not of his sonatas), such as that of Beethoven's Pastoral symphony (No. 6) contain two appearances of the trio, in which the second is sometimes varied and after the second of which the scherzo material often returns much foreshortened by way of a coda. Schumann, as noted by Cedric Thorpe-Davie would very often use two trios also, but different trios.

The scherzo remained a standard movement in the symphony and related forms through the 19th century. Composers also began to write scherzi as pieces in themselves, stretching the boundaries of the form. Out of Frédéric Chopin's four well-known scherzi for the piano, the first three are especially dark and dramatic, and hardly come off as jokes. Robert Schumann remarked of them, "How is gravity to clothe itself if jest goes about in dark veils?" In addition, Brahms regarded the scherzo from his Second Piano Concerto in B-flat, Op. 83 as a "tiny wisp of a scherzo," but it is extremely heavy, dark, and passionate.

An unrelated use of the word in music is in light-hearted madrigals of the Renaissance period, which were often called scherzi musicali. Claudio Monteverdi, for example, wrote two sets of works with this title, the first in 1607, the second in 1632.

References

1. ^ Britannica Online - scherzo
2. ^ Sir Jack Westrup & F. Ll. Harrison, Collins Encyclopedia of Music (1976 revised edition, Chancellor Press, London, ISBN 0 907486 49 5), p.483