The Stories
Classical music can really crack a joke
The Stories
Classical music can really crack a jokes
You think classical music is boring? Think again! Turns out that some of the greatest composers in history had a brilliant knack for humour. Behind the powdered wigs and candlelit manuscripts were captivating, cheeky characters who surprised audiences with abrupt dynamic shifts, poked fun at their own musicians, played with uncomfortable silences and even trolled their peers and critics. Let’s look at humour in music, and which composers really took us for a ride. And when you get to the end, a musical surprise awaits!
Message in a symphony
Take Joseph Haydn’s Surprise Symphony. The Austrian composer wrote a series of 12 new symphonies around the time of two extended stays in London, between 1791 and 1795. Londoners welcomed Joseph Haydn as a real celebrity; he was a frequent guest at private dinner parties and events. It was in the British capital where the symphony first premiered. Originally titled Symphony N° 94, the nickname Surprise Symphony was given to the piece by London audiences because of one loud chord occurring at the end of the second sentence of the Andante movement. An even more accurate title was coined by German audiences: «Mit dem Paukenschlag» (with the timpani stroke). There is still speculation about where the loud chord may have come from. Apparently, Joseph Haydn impulsively altered the dynamics of the second movement. According to one account, Joseph Haydn had given the downbeat to start the second movement when a front-row snorer (some say it was a king) annoyed him. He must’ve cooked up a plan as the orchestra continued playing. When they reached the final chord, Haydn cued an immense loud chord, rattling the drowsy attendee. Surprise!
He also liked sprinkling pranks in other pieces, such as his earlier opus 33 quartets, which were quickly nicknamed Gli scherzi (The Jokes). The second quartet goes furthest, earning the specific nickname «The Joke» for its final movement, which seems to be wrapping up perfectly normally until Haydn starts inserting pauses. It’s unclear where the piece ends. The theme keeps returning in bits and pieces, then trailing off, leaving the audience suspended in uncertainty. Do you know that awkward feeling of not knowing where to clap? That was exactly what Joseph Haydn wanted you to feel.
Joseph Haydn was also a bit of a union representative. Staying at his patron Prince Esterházy’s rural summer palace in the summer of 1792 together with his musicians, the orchestra felt stuck and were desperately missing their wives back home. So instead of knocking on the boss’s door, Joseph Haydn did what any sensible genius would do: he wrote it into a symphony, the «Farewell» Symphony N° 45. One by one, during the finale, each musician blew out their candle and quietly walked off stage, until only two lonely violins remained whimpering in the dark, played by Joseph Haydn and his concertmaster, Luigi Tomasini. Prince Esterházy, to his credit, got the message immediately, and the whole court packed up the very next day. Quite a big effort for a resignation letter, but a musical one, nonetheless!
Between silence and eternity
In 1952, John Cage walked into Harvard’s anechoic chamber (the quietest room ever built, so silent you can hear your own blood moving through your veins) and came out with a revelation: there is no such thing as silence. What we call silence is just sound we haven’t been introduced to yet. So he wrote 4’33’’, which he labelled with a deadpan «for any instrument or combination of instruments». It has three movements, each marked with a single instruction: Tacet, Latin for silent. At its premiere, pianist David Tudor sat at a grand piano, stopwatch in hand, opening and closing the lid to mark each movement, and played absolutely nothing. The audience coughed, shuffled, and exchanged glances.
Precisely that, John Cage would say, was the music. Every rustle, every nervous laugh, every ambient murmur of the world outside. All of it composed by the audience themselves, without rehearsal. 4’33” quietly (very quietly) asks: who decides what counts as music, and why have we been so busy listening to the notes that we forgot to hear everything else?
The American composer also created the longest piece of music in the world: Organ²/ASLSP, subtitled As Slow as Possible. The ongoing performance, which began in 2001 at St. Burchardi Church in Halberstadt, Germany, is scheduled to conclude in 2640 – a modest 639 years from its first note. It’s playing right now as you’re reading this. The last chord change occurred on 5 August 2026 and the next is due on 5 October 2027. You are warmly invited to attend, then pop back in three years for the following one. The truth of the piece is quite unsettling: no single human being can ever hear it in whole. With performer, audience and a lifetime stripped, what remains is music as a concept, humming patiently for the next generations to come.
From as long as possible to as tiny as possible, John Cage also tinkered with limitations on Suite for Toy Piano, composing music for an instrument whose tiny keys make any notion of dynamics and range essentially fictional. It asks for exaggerated dynamics which can’t be produced, and some of the movements only play with five notes. John Cage knew how to literally play music!
Poking fun at singing technique
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was many things: child prodigy, operatic genius and prolific composer. But perhaps his most underrated talent was being quite a funny troll. He created a satirical piece titled A Musical Joke which incorporated simplistic musical ideas, poor orchestration and wrong keys to parody the work of lesser composers. He tested the limits of pianists’ flexibility in a piano sonata with near-impossible crossing arm passages, and he wrote a canon for his friends titled «Leck mich im Arsch» («Lick Me in the…») that was sung at dinner parties.
But it gets even better. When commissioned to write Così fan tutte, a comic opera already built on the absurd premise of two men disguising themselves to seduce each other’s girlfriends, Mozart spotted a golden opportunity hiding in plain sight. The libretto was written by Lorenzo Da Ponte (also known for Don Giovanni), and his mistress, Adriana Ferrase del Bene. Mozart allegedly disliked for her arrogance, but she also happened to be the prima donna cast in the lead role. She had a rather conspicuous habit: she’d lower her head for low notes, and tilt it back for high notes. Mozart filled her showpiece «Come scoglio» with constant leaps from low to high notes and high to low notes to make Ferrarese’s head «bob like a chicken» onstage. Classical music was the real predecessor of headbanging!
The smart pirates of Penzance
For a masterclass in musical comedy, look no further than The Pirates of Penzance. Written by the legendary duo Sir William Schwenck Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan and premiered in 1879, the duo took the patter song to a whole other level. It takes an absurd number of words and sets them to music at a pace that should be physically impossible to sing! The most famous example, «I Am the Very Model of a Modern Major-General», rattles through military incompetence at such breathless speed. Historians may disagree on its influence on modern rap music, but nobody can deny that the Major-General had a real flow!
But Arthur Sullivan wasn’t content with just funny lyrics. The music was embedded with jokes too, pushing the conventions of grand opera. In Act II, a gang of pirates creeps onto the stage singing «With Cat-Like Tread», for which Sullivan marked the dynamic as Fortissimo. It’s hugely entertaining to watch when the policemen hunting them don’t notice anything. It’s a pointed wink at the operatic tradition of characters conveniently ignoring whatever the plot requires them not to hear. Underneath all of this, though, Gilbert and Sullivan were poking fun at the British establishment, class structures and the arrogance of institutions. Throughout the opera, the pirates are more honourable and warm-hearted than the policemen. The Major-General boasts all about his vast knowledge of the classics, politics, maths and science, but admits that he doesn’t really know much about military tactics or weapons. You know, the actual things that would be useful for him to do his job properly!
When music becomes a game of cat and mouse
Do you remember those Sunday mornings watching Tom & Jerry or Bugs Bunny on VHS? Little did we know that might have been our first musical education! During the age of silent films, the man largely responsible for the tremendous success of cartoon music was Carl Stalling, the composer behind Warner Bros.’ Looney Tunes – he produced over 600 scores in under two decades! He intertwined jazz standards with folk songs and improvisation, depending on the mayhem the characters were causing on screen. Like the playful, quick xylophone that follows a character strolling off a cliff, defying gravity mid-air only to realise they are no longer on solid ground. Then comes a descending trombone glissando, capped by a thunderous cymbal crash as they tumble below the television screen.
Even more unusual is a cartoon that leans fully into classical music. What’s Opera, Doc? is a playful reimagining of Richard Wagner’s famous operas, but it’s also carefully constructed: the characters sweep through grand landscapes to the sounds of heavy, galloping brass and soaring strings. While chasing his archenemy Bugs Bunny, hunter Elmer Fudd taunts him to the melody of Wagner’s The Ride of the Valkyries – the dialogue between the two is sung like an opera recitative. There are even visual nods to art history woven into the staging. It’s part of a long tradition of Looney Tunes cartoons parodying classical music, where famous masterpieces are paired with ridiculous cartoon scenes. Over at Tom & Jerry, Scott Bradley was doing something stranger still: smuggling twentieth-century modernism into a cartoon about a cat who never catches the mouse. His scores drew directly on Arnold Schönberg, Igor Stravinsky and Béla Bartók. He deployed atonality (lacking a key or tonal centre) for chase sequences, polytonality for different sections of the orchestra (more than one key simultaneously), and even employed twelve-tone serialism inspired by Schönberg. Despite this theoretical sophistication, it worked perfectly hand-in-hand with the comical chaos of the cartoons. We can hear twelve notes in rapid succession after Tom has set an elaborate cheese trap for Jerry, only for the melody to be inverted when Jerry smartly dismantles the trap and a bucket of water falls onto Tom. Schönberg would’ve approved. In a way, millions of children learned to feel the difference between consonance and dissonance, between resolution and suspension, thanks to Tom & Jerry!
That’s the beauty and depth of classical music: It can evoke so many different emotions, and humour and fun are absolutely not out of bounds. So next time someone tells you classical music is stuffy, send them down this rabbit hole. From Joseph Haydn trolling a snoring king to children absorbing Schönberg via a cartoon cat, the greatest composers teach us that music really comes alive with a good laugh.
