A Musical Joke
A Musical Joke (in German: Ein musikalischer Spaß) K. 522, (Divertimento for two horns and string quartet) is a composition by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart; the composer entered it in his Verzeichnis aller meiner Werke (Catalogue of All My Works) on June 14, 1787. Commentators have opined that the piece's purpose is satirical – that "[its] harmonic and rhythmic gaffes serve to parody the work of incompetent composers" – though Mozart himself is not known to have revealed his actual intentions.
Structure and compositorial elements
The piece comprises four movements, using forms shared with many classical divertimenti:
Compositorial comedic devices include:
- asymmetrical phrasing, not phrasing by groups of four measures, at the beginning of the first movement;
- secondary dominants where subdominant chords are required;
- discords in the horns;
- whole tone scales in the violin's high register;
- a pathetic attempt at a fugato, in the last movement.
The piece is notable for one of the earliest known uses of polytonality (though not the earliest, as Heinrich Ignaz Franz Biber's Battalia used Polytonality), creating the gesture of complete collapse at the finale. This may be intended to produce the impression of grossly out-of-tune string playing, since the horns alone conclude in the tonic key. The lower strings behave as if the tonic has become B-flat, while the violins and violas switch to G major, A major and E-flat major, respectively.
Asymmetrical phrasing, whole-tone scales, and polytonality are foreign to music of the classical era. However, these became common for early 20th-century composers like Claude Debussy and Igor Stravinsky, who were searching for a new musical language. In this later context, these were legitimate new techniques in serious music. In Mozart's time, however, these non-classical elements gave the piece its comedy, expressing the composer's humor.
The title A Musical Joke is a poor rendering of the German original: spaß does not strongly connote the jocular, for which the word scherz would normally be used. In Fritz Spiegl's view, a more accurate translation would be Some Musical Fun.
- Ein musikalischer Spaß: Score and critical report (German) in the Neue Mozart-Ausgabe
- A Musical Joke at the Mutopia Project
- Recording of A Musical Joke
- Ein musikalischer Spaß: Free scores at the International Music Score Library Project