Classical music doesn’t have a particularly lighthearted reputation despite centuries of composers writing with their tongue-in-cheek, although only on rare occasions.  Here are a few to whet your funny bone.

Joseph Haydn put musical jokes into several of his symphonies, including his “Surprise” Symphony which had audiences literally jumping out of their seats. Mozart wrote a piece he actually called A Musical Joke satirizing the conventions of his contemporaries. Brahms was known for his dry and sometimes acidic wit which is readily apparent in his Academic Festival Overture – composed for the solemn occasion of his being awarded an honorary doctorate.  When a university official had the cheek to suggest that he should write a stately and dignified work for the ceremony, Brahms wrote what he described as a “very boisterous potpourri of student drinking songs.” The 19^th century closed with the composition of one of my favorite pieces of orchestral storytelling, the humorous (and somewhat rude) Till Eulenspiegel’s Merry Pranks by Richard Strauss.

In the 20^th century, Prokofiev’s music for Lt. Kijé is a fun, satirical piece – if you’ve ever seen the episode of M*A*S*H where Hawkeye invents the exploits of “Captain Tuttle,” that takes its inspiration from Lt. Kijé. Shostakovich’s opera The Nose is about a disembodied nose and its owner trying to re-unite with each other. In the 1940s American composer Don Gillis wrote his delightful Symphony Number 5 ½. In the mid-1950s British cartoonist and amateur tuba player Gerard Hoffnung presented a series of humorous concerts that featured contributions from major composers such as William Walton, who conducted a one-note excerpt from his cantata Belshazzar’s Feast; an overture called “Orchestral Switch” by Frank Butterworth which is a mash-up of forty-eight quotations from other works; and Franz Reizenstein’s Concerto Popolare which featured a battle between the soloist, playing the Grieg Piano Concerto, and the orchestra, playing Tchaikovsky. Also written for the Hoffnung Festival is one of my favorite pieces of humorous classical music, Malcolm Arnold’s “A Grand, Grand Overture” scored for full symphony orchestra and organ – as well as three vacuum cleaners and a floor polisher which interrupt the performance, four rifles which take out the vacuum cleaners at the climax of the piece à la the 1812 Overture, and in which almost the entire second half is a seemingly endless coda satirizing just about every clichéd orchestral conclusion in music history.

Finally, I can’t present an article about humor in classical music without mentioning P.D.Q. Bach, the alter ego of composer Peter Schickele who unfortunately passed away at the beginning of the year. A graduate of The Juilliard School, he was so successful as a parodist that his humorous music overshadowed his work as a serious composer of concert and film music. Professor Schickele’s “home establishment” was the fictitious University of Southern North Dakota at Hoople, where he was tenured as “Very Full Professor of Musicolology” and from where he “discovered” works by P.D.Q. Bach like The Abduction of Figaro and the “Unbegun” Symphony, and presented the absolutely hysterical “New Horizons in Music Appreciation,” a piece in which Schickele and Robert Dennis do a play-by-play on a performance of the first movement of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony as if it were a baseball game!

As April Fool’s Day approaches, I invite you to seek out some of these works that show the lighter side of classical music and hope you can join me for some fun with a special Morning Matinee at 9am on April 1st followed by Richard Strauss’s Till Eulenspiegel.