seated on a cask, playing the only tones that can be gotten out of his dilapidated instrument, while the village rustics join in a clumsy dance. Then, too, there is that unmistakable bray which Mendelssohn associates (a good word in this case) with "Bottom" in his "Midsummer Night's Dream" music, and there are also the antics of the music to accompany the entrance of the clowns in the same composition.
We would hardly expect to find anything humorous coming from that old periwig, Sebastian Bach. Yet Bach has left us two cantatas, entitled "The Peasant's Cantata" and "The Coffee Party," in which he is supposed to be very funny. But the humor is so artistically concealed—shall we say—in florid counterpoint that to our non-appreciative ears it would sound more like a fugue from the "Well-Tempered Clavichord" than a side-splitting farce. But then perhaps the humor of that day had to have its canti fermi, counter subjects and episodes.
Haydn's humor was more pointed and sudden, especially in the "Surprise" symphony, when an explosive sfz—fortissimo occurs in a pianissimo passage. The "Toy" symphony, too, has a decided humorous side. Then there is a composition for instruments called "A Musical Joke," wherein he parodies the attempt of an uneducated composer to write a symphony.
We may once find even Beethoven writing a comic song. He must then have been in a thoroughly "unbuttoned" mood, as he used to express it, especially as the song had fourteen verses. In his Op., 129, Beethoven vents his "fury over a lost groschen" in a beautiful rondo.
Wagner used many a comic touch in his "Mastersingers of Nuremburg," but it is done with the most artistic musical means and the deftest of touch, forming some of the most delicious musical humor ever written. He also wrote a burlesque work entitled "A Capitulation."
An instance of neat humor is Gounod's popular little
