A Musical Joke K522

As a consummate and conscientious professional, Mozart must have been appalled by some of the stuff he heard from less accomplished composers and performers during the course of his working life. Fortunately, however, he had a sense of humour. When he had a go at bungling musicians in his Musical Joke - just a few months before he completed Don Giovanni in 1787 - he could see the funny side of their transgressions and make an entertaining piece out of them.

Scored for two horns and strings, Ein musikalischer Spass (as he called it) is a satirical assault on several different targets. The opening Allegro is directed at bad composers: it is melodically sterile, rhythmically stupid, harmonically ignorant, texturally clumsy, and structurally inept. It takes no ordinary skill to achieve all that in one movement. In the Menuetto, while not sparing composers, he lampoons hornists who cannot play in tune and, in the disproportionately long trio section, violinists who indulge themselves in brainless display passages. The Adagio cantabile is an object lesson in how not to write for strings in slow movement, how not to shape an expressive melodic line and how not to modulate the harmonies. The ambitious violinist again comes in for parodistic treatment here, above all in the cadenza with its perilous ascent into the highest positions on the E-string and its absurd descent onto an isolated pizzicato on the open G-string. The inadequate composer Mozart had in mind in the closing Presto seems at first not quite as bad as the object of his derision in the opening Allegro. He is useless at counterpoint and awkward in rondo form, however, and the painfully dissonant closing bars, in four different keys, are the last word in incompetence.