It's April Fools' Day.: a day of (hopefully harmless) pranks. Musicians and composers have been known to play pranks on the piano. Probably the most famous playful piano perforrmer was the Danish-American pianist and comic Victor Borge.
One piece that Borge liked to perform was a version of Liszt's Second Hungarian Rhapsody (especially the friska section), which is considered a musical comedic classic and has been featured in animated cartoons.
Mozart once wrote an aria for a soprano who tended raise her head for high notes and tuck in her chin for low notes. Mozart hated her, so the nicknamed piece, “The Chicken Dance” in Cosi fan Tutte, featured dramatic fluctuating low and high notes; Mozart took delight in watching the soprano bob her head repeatedly.
More recently, Leroy Anderson is known for his lighthearted compositions, such as The Syncopated Clock. His pieces sometimes featured unlikely instruments such as a typewriter.
Debussy's Carnival of Animals is charming, but how many people realize that his “Tortoises” is actually a very slow version of Offenbach's “Can-Can”?
P. D. Q. Bach is a comedic alias for contemporary composer Peter Schickele. He creates parodies of baroque and classical music, which often employ unusual instruments such as kazoo and slide whistles and even fictional instruments such as the left-handed sewer flute and pastaphone. His humor often draws from odd key changes and inserts of popular music into classical sections.
Violinist Fritz Kreisler played “lost” classical pieces, which she later admitted writing himself. Another violinist, Henri Gustave Casadesus, also wrote faked compositions, supposedly created by Handel and Boccherini.
Some musicians also played practical jokes. For instance, Brahms sketched a fake Beethoven manuscript, and had a street vendor wrap it around a sausage to sell to one of Brahms' friend, who thought he had discovered a lost composition.
Who says composers don't have a sense of humor?
