A Musical Joke K. 522, (divertimento for two horns in F, and string quartet) is a composition by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart; he entered it in his German: Verzeichnis aller meiner Werke (Catalogue of All My Works) on June 14, 1787. Commentators have opined that the piece's purpose is satirical – that "[its] harmonic and rhythmic gaffes serve to parody the work of incompetent composers"[1] – though Mozart himself is not known to have revealed his actual intentions.
The beginning of the fourth movement is well-known in Britain as the theme tune to the BBC's television coverage of the Horse of the Year Show.[2] [3]
The title A Musical Joke might be a poor rendering of the German original: Spaß does not necessarily connote the jocular, for which the word Scherz would more likely be used. In Fritz Spiegl's view, a more accurate translation would be Some Musical Fun.[4] The sometimes-mentioned nicknames German: Dorfmusikantensextett ("village musicians' sextet") and German: Bauernsinfonie ("farmers' symphony") were added after Mozart's death; these names ridicule the players more than inept composers.[5]
The piece consists of four movements and takes about 20 minutes to perform.
Compositorial comedic devices include:
The piece is notable for one of the earliest known uses of polytonality (though not the earliest, being predated by Heinrich Ignaz Franz Biber's Battalia), creating the gesture of complete collapse at the finale. This may be intended to produce the impression of grossly out-of-tune string playing, since the horns alone conclude in the tonic key. The lower strings behave as if the tonic has become B, while the violins and violas switch to G major, A major and E major, respectively.