scherzo
scherzo
Italian
“The word for one of the symphony's most energetic movements means, in Italian, simply 'a joke' — and some of the most earnest and violent music ever written has been labeled with this comic word.”
Scherzo comes from Italian scherzare, 'to joke, to jest, to play,' from a Germanic root related to Old High German scerzen ('to leap about, to be playful') and to English 'shirk' through a different semantic path. The word names something playful, light, not to be taken too seriously — and this was indeed the character of early scherzos in music. Monteverdi published his Scherzi musicali (Musical Jokes) in 1607 and 1632, light vocal pieces in a playful style. The word appeared in various Baroque contexts as a label for short, cheerful, not-too-demanding pieces. It had no specific formal definition; it simply named a particular spirit.
Beethoven transformed the scherzo into one of the symphony's defining movements, replacing the traditional minuet with something faster, wilder, more unpredictable, and considerably louder. His scherzos — the third movement of his Second Symphony (1802) and the more extreme third movements of his Fifth, Seventh, and Ninth — are not jokes in any ordinary sense. They are turbulent, energetic, sometimes ferocious. The scherzo of the Ninth Symphony is marked to go as fast as possible (Molto vivace) and is among the most rhythmically disorienting pieces Beethoven ever wrote, the triple meter constantly threatening to collapse into something else. The joke had become a vehicle for extreme intensity.
Chopin wrote four standalone piano scherzos, and they are among the most misleadingly titled works in the repertoire. The First Scherzo in B minor opens with two savage, dissonant chords that announce something far from playful; the Second Scherzo in B-flat minor contains one of the most lyrical and heartbreaking slow sections in all Chopin. These pieces are scherzos in name and in formal characteristics — the three-part ABA structure, the quick tempo, the contrast between turbulent outer sections and a more lyrical middle — but the spirit of joking is largely absent. The word had detached from its etymological meaning and become a formal label.
The gap between what 'scherzo' means and what Beethoven and Chopin's scherzos actually sound like has become one of music's most instructive ironies. The movements labeled as jokes include some of the most serious music ever composed. This is partly because 'joke' in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries had a broader range of playful senses than modern English 'joke' implies — the playful, the energetic, the light and quick were all scherzando. But it is also because Beethoven specifically chose the word for its contrast with the minuet's formality, not for its comic content. The scherzo was a joke aimed at the minuet — at courtly stiffness, at the assumption that symphony movements should be elegant and well-behaved.
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Today
The word scherzo illustrates how formal labels in art can become detached from their descriptive origins and acquire purely structural meanings. Today, calling a movement a scherzo tells a musician almost nothing about whether it is joking but almost everything about its formal structure: fast, usually in triple meter, with a contrasting middle section (trio) before returning to the opening material. The content can be tragic, comic, violent, or lyrical — the label is structural, not expressive. This formalization is characteristic of musical terminology generally: terms that began as character descriptions (forte, piano, largo) became dynamic or tempo instructions; terms that began as genre descriptions became formal categories.
The irony of the scherzo's history — that the 'joke' movements of Beethoven and Chopin contain some of the most intense and serious music of their era — points to something real about humor's relationship to art. The best jokes are often the most precise observations; the playful mode can be the vehicle for serious content precisely because it relaxes the audience's defenses. Beethoven's scherzos unsettle and destabilize the listener in ways that a movement marked 'disturbing' or 'turbulent' could not. The joke label invites the listener in, and then the music does something unexpected. The word scherzo may have been more accurate than it first appears.
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