Scherzi & Menuetti

No. 378 of the ongoing ITYWLTMT series of audio montages is this week's Friday Blog and Podcast. It can be found in our archives at https://archive.org/details/pcast378

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Blogger’s Note: As we review our many musical shares from our musical forum activities under our ongoing “222 Day Binge Challenge”, the Friday Blog and Podcast will revisit some themes from past Tuesday Blogs. Today’s montage is part of that exercise. The Tuesday post in question was issued on September 10, 2013. The below commentary is taken almost verbatim from the original post.

Minuets and scehrzi are close cousins both in their form and their use in classical music. The scherzo, as in the dance-like, musical joke has come to replace the minuet in three or four-movement works. The transition from the minuet (espooused by Haydn in particular) to the scherzo is a key step in the evolution from the classical period to the early romantic.

I don't now if we can call this the first instance of a scherzo, but certainly the third movement of Beethoven's First symphony (deceptively marked Menuetto. Allegro molto e vivace) is really a scherzo:



The playlist I assembled proposes a set of scherzos (and minuets) for different combinations of instruments - going from the solo piano to the full orchestra - from Haydn and Mozart to Maurice Ravel.  The playlist has few selections from the original 2013 set. We note Litoff's Scherzo and less-heard works by Borodin and Lalo.

Enjoy!