Who invented the scherzo?

[John H White]

I think I asked this one before on the old forum but, since so many new members have joined the present forum bringing with them so much expertise, I thought I'd have another try at elucidating the origins of the movement that gradually took the place of the minuet in symphonies and various chamber works. On the face of it, Haydn would seem responsible, as in his Op33 string quartets and even more so in his very last quartets after he had reverted to calling them minuets. However, I have a sort of gut feeling that other lesser known contemporaries of Haydn were also experimenting on the same lines around that time. I'd also be interested to hear if anyone else beat Beethoven in the race to be the first to introduce the Scherzo into the symphony.
   Cheers,
        John

[Hovite]

I thought I'd have another try at elucidating the origins of the movement that gradually took the place of the minuet in symphonies and various chamber works.

Claudio Monteverdi (1567-1643)

"It is to him that the term scherzi in the present context may be attributed, signifying a work that might grace a light-hearted courtly entertainment."

http://www.naxos.com/mainsite/blurbs_reviews.asp?item_code=8.553317&catNum=553317&filetype=About%20this%20Recording&language=English#

[John H White]

I'm sure you are right about Montverdi, but words, including musical terms, tend to change their meaning over the centuries. What I am after is who first thought of replacing a minuet and trio with a much faster scherzo and trio?
   Cheers,
       John.

[mbhaub]

Does this help?

"...before Beethoven's time, indeed before this particular Symphony, the Scherzo, in its full sense, was unknown to music."

That's from Sir George Grove's Beethoven and His Nine Symphonies in the chapter on the 3rd symphony.

[John H White]

If the 3rd movement of Haydn's string quartet Op 76 No 1 isn't a scherzo in all but name I'll eat my hat! Sorry Sir George, but you shouldn't make such sweeping statements!
       

[Gareth Vaughan]

Yes John, but did Haydn think of it as a scherzo? Did he call it a scherzo? No. These developments are gradual, but if we, rather than the composer, decide what is a scherzo and what isn't, anything goes, and musicologists could confidently argue that the symphonic scherzo began with any "minuet and trio" that an individual commentator decides is a scherzo "in all but name". Sir George was not making a sweeping statement - he was being pragmatic.

[John H White]

I take your point Gareth, but in the Op 33 quartets, Haydn actually describes the 3rd movements as such.

[JimL]

Well what about the 3rd movements of Beethoven's first two symphonies?  The "Menuetto" of the 1st is certainly more "scherzando" than any Haydn minuet, and the 3rd movement of the 2nd, is called a "scherzo" right there in the score, which kind of puts the lie to Grove, doesn't it?

[Gareth Vaughan]

Not at all, Jim. Read what Grove says: "... the Scherzo in its full sense..." Does Grove go on to expand on what he means by that? I don't know - I'd have to read the entire entry. But Grove was no fool (he was a highly erudite musician) - so why should we treat him as if he were some ignorant scribbler? He didn't arrive at his opinion without a great deal of research. Give the man some intellectual credit.

[John H White]

A hundred years ago, brilliant scholars like Grove had to rely entirely on what information they could find in libraries accessible to them or on time consuming travel to foreign libraries together with equally time consuming correspondance with other scholars in other countries. Hence, Grove would probably not even have heard of people like Rufinatscha etc. Nowadays, air travel to foreign countries is relatively easy most people in the Western World have phones and use of the Internet is widespread. I'm sure that far more information is now available on any topic than Grove or his contemporaries could ever have dreamed of!

[Gareth Vaughan]

Agreed, John. But it depends on what we understand by "Scherzo". Grove would have known the Haydn quartets, so the point I was making to Jim was that, although Haydn may have called a movement a scherzo it was not what Grove understood the scherzo to be in the development of symphonic music with which he was concerned. Nor would I underestimate the resources available to people like Grove in the musical collections in the UK - nor, to be fair, will you find contemporary scholars jetting all over the world to check whether some relatively obscure composer used a musical title earlier than a mainstream one. Even with what we know today, I find the purely musical evidence for saying that the 3rd movt of Beethoven's "Eroica" is the first true scherzo compelling... in symphonic terms.

[Josh]

What about Jirí Antonin Benda's Harpsichord Concerto in G Major? That certainly predates Beethoven's 3rd Symphony by a large number of years. I'm not sure Beethoven was even born when that was composed, or at least he was fairly young at the time.

Grove also apparently said Beethoven wrote the first symphony that employed trombones, so I definitely am not going to consider trusting his word to be a requirement. Oh, and didn't he also write that Saint-Saëns wrote the first French piano concerto?! Even as I type this, I started up Boïeldieu's Piano Concerto, written before Saint-Saëns was even born. To be fair, I don't recall if it was Grove himself that wrote that, but I have seen that stated repeatedly by experts; one who e-mailed me back when I tried to correct his website cited Grove's as his source.

I once came up with a guideline, a formula of sorts:

For any statement "(x) was the first composer to do (y)", where (x) is the name of a famous composer, the statement is sure to be false.


I know that can't be 100% true, but I'm just trying to make a point.

[Gareth Vaughan]

Everything you say is true, but you are missing my point. Grove says: "the Scherzo in its full sense". Until we know precisely what Grove meant by that phrase we cannot criticise him knowledgeably.

Anyhow John says:

What I am after is who first thought of replacing a minuet and trio with a much faster scherzo and trio?

To answer that I suspect we may need to look further back than Haydn, but the classical period is not one about which I know very much, so I'm afraid I can't offer much help. It's an intriguing question though.

[mbhaub]

Grove also apparently said Beethoven wrote the first symphony that employed trombones, so I definitely am not going to consider trusting his word to be a requirement.

But that's true, isn't it? Wasn't the Fifth Symphony the first to use not only trombones, but piccolo and contrabassoon? Maybe it should be that Beethoven was the first well-known composer to use these instruments in this way. Maybe some obscure composer id employ them, but did anyone know about it? So who did use trombones first if it wasn't Beethoven? My old college orchestration text (by J Wagner) says "This noble instrument did not become established in symphonic instrumentation until Beethoven's time (Fifth Symphony); yet it was used by opera composers dating back to 1565."

[JimL]

Joachim Eggert first used trombones in his 3rd Symphony in 1807.  I got that off the old Forum.  But I believe that Beethoven's 5th is the first to use trombones, piccolo and contrabassoon together in a symphony.