[Sidenote:  The Scherzo.]

[Sidenote:  Genesis of the Scherzo.]

[Sidenote:  The Trio.]

The Scherzo is, as the term implies, the playful, jocose movement of a symphony, but in the case of sublime geniuses like Beethoven and Schumann, who blend profound melancholy with wild humor, the playfulness is sometimes of a kind which invites us to thoughtfulness instead of merriment.  This is true also of some Russian composers, whose scherzos have the desperate gayety which speaks from the music of a sad people whose merrymaking is not a spontaneous expression of exuberant spirits but a striving after self-forgetfulness.  The Scherzo is the successor of the Minuet, whose rhythm and form served the composers down to Beethoven.  It was he who substituted the Scherzo, which retains the chief formal characteristics of the courtly old dance in being in triple time and having a second part called the Trio.  With the change there came an increase in speed, but it ought to be remembered that the symphonic minuet was quicker than the dance of the same name.  A tendency toward exaggeration, which is patent among modern conductors, is threatening to rob the symphonic minuet of the vivacity which gave it its place in the scheme of the symphony.  The entrance of the Trio is marked by the introduction of a new idea (a second minuet) which is more sententious than the first part, and sometimes in another key, the commonest change being from minor to major.

[Sidenote:  The Finale.]

[Sidenote:  Rondo form.]

The final movement, technically the Finale, is another piece of large dimensions in which the psychological drama which plays through the four acts of the symphony is brought to a conclusion.  Once the purpose of the Finale was but to bring the symphony to a merry end, but as the expressive capacity of music has been widened, and mere play with aesthetic forms has given place to attempts to convey sentiments and feelings, the purposes of the last movement have been greatly extended and varied.  As a rule the form chosen for the Finale is that called the Rondo.  Borrowed from an artificial verse-form (the French Rondeau), this species of composition illustrates the peculiarity of that form in the reiteration of a strophe ever and anon after a new theme or episode has been exploited.  In modern society verse, which has grown out of an ambition to imitate the ingenious form invented by mediaeval poets, we have the Triolet, which may be said to be a rondeau in miniature.  I choose one of Mr. H.C.  Bunner’s dainty creations to illustrate the musical refrain characteristic of the rondo form because of its compactness.  Here it is: 

[Sidenote:  A Rondo pattern in poetry.]

    “A pitcher of mignonette
      In a tenement’s highest casement: 
    Queer sort of a flower-pot—­yet
      That pitcher of mignonette
    Is a garden in heaven set,
      To the little sick child in the basement—­
    The pitcher of mignonette,
      In the tenement’s highest casement.”