Who invented the Scherzo?

[John H White]

I tried this question with the old Forum some time ago, but, now we have so many new members, each bringing with him or her his or her own expertise, I'd like to pose it again.
  By "Scherzo" I mean a sort of "jazzed up" version of the minuet and trio. On the face of it, this type of movement would seem to have been originated by Haydn in his Op 33 string quartets, where the 3rd movements are marked "Scherzando". I would say  that the so called "minuets" of Haydn's last quartets with their Presto tempos and syncopation ( I'm particularly thinking of Op 77 No 1) are even more Scherzo like. Its interesting to note also that some of Beethoven's earliest chamber works seem to include scherzos as a matter of course. To me this indicates that, in the late 1790's, Scherzos were the latest fashion amongst composers. What I'd like to know is, who started this trend, if it wasn't Haydn himself.

[eschiss1]

I can't say for certain (there are a lot of other sonata-style works from the classical period, though most if not all before 1780 seem to use minuets of one kind or another when they have dance-style movements.) (1780 or so - Haydn C-sharp minor piano sonata - scherzando middle movement; 1781 or 1782 - Haydn op. 33 quartets with scherzo movements.) Grétry's 1760s? op. 3 quartets have fugues or minuets; Ordoñez' op. 1 quartets have minuets (see the table of contents of the Google Books searchable edition); Dittersdorf's 6 string quartets have minuets or no dance movements at all...
Eric

[eschiss1]

Browsing IMSLP I see a Scherzo Campestre (or Picciolo Scherzo Campestre) in two movements by Alessandro Rolla, no date mentioned, that could have been composed as early as the 1770s conceivably? (At least, the composer's dates allow for it. It's possible that better information is available somewhere on the work's date.)   The instrumentation is violin and viola. I'm not sure I'd say it's especially scherzo-like - maybe.
http://imslp.org/wiki/Scherzo_Campestre_for_Violin_and_Viola,_BI_42_(Rolla,_Alessandro)

[Josh]

Jirí Antonin Benda ended a harpsichord concerto with a scherzo before F.J. Haydn used it.  I would bet against him being the "inventor", though... such a thing is probably virtually impossible to discover.  It might have first been employed by an obscure composer in a manuscript that ended up in a landfill somewhere. Or being used to wrap fish.

[JimL]

Haydn composed some works titled "Scherzandos", IIRC.  However, they seem to have been free-standing works.  Can you confirm this, Eric?

[Josh]

Look in Hoboken catalogue, section II, amongst the divertimenti, cassations, and so on.  They were like one-movement divertimenti.

[eschiss1]

Haydn composed some works titled "Scherzandos", IIRC.  However, they seem to have been free-standing works.  Can you confirm this, Eric?

I know of a recording or two (or three) of some of them (there are about 40?)- let me check the dating. I think some of them (they fill Hoboken II) are believed to have been composed in the 1760s.
By the way, I gather from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_variation that there is some opinion- even consensus? - that the Scherzando movement of Haydn's C-sharp minor sonata was written earlier, in the 1770s. (Still, it couldn't have influenced others until it was published.) An earlier example still of the use of the term- not the feeling of the movement- is the finale of symphony 42 by Haydn ("Scherzando e presto"), written probably in 1771.

Obviously wrote "earlier example still" when I thought the scherzandi Hob II were late works. I need to edit. (Edit)
Eric

[chill319]

If a composer of Singspielen composes Ein musikalischer Spaß, does that count as a scherzo? (Not asked rhetorically.  I suspect there is a similar impulse but more than a linguistic distinction...)

[eschiss1]

(Notetoself Do not bring up Monteverdi's Scherzi musicali. Do not bring up Monteverdi's Scherzi musicali. ... for one thing, they're irrelephant, and how did...)

[chill319]

You're right, of course, Eric. And there were certainly plenty of other baroque scherzos between Monteverdi and Bach's Partita 3, which includes both a Burlesca in triple time and a Scherzo in duple.

When one considers the longevity and fluidity of the term 'Partita', which Haydn used for so many of his early sonatas, it's not much of a stretch to imagine a later one with a scherzo. Yet we all know that it was a French dance, the minuet, which first insinuated itself into Partitas/Sonatas as the final movement.

The substitution of scherzo for minuet, which may comprise the essence of John's question, seems most likely to have happened after the minuet was demoted to an internal movement in a four-movement scheme. This seems due to the Austrians. According to Michael Talbot ("The finale in western instrumental music") C P E Bach resisted it, as did the Italians, until Haydn showed that the minuet/trio can be treated with the same seriousness as binary and rondo movements. _Some_ composer must has been the first to make this substitution, and I suggest the best places to look would be at courts where the influence of the French court as a model was in obvious decline.