A Musical Joke K. 522

This Henle edition is full of mistakes! We can freely admit this, because the odd notes here all come from Mozart himself – he consciously inserted them into his Musical Joke. In this amusing and mischievous piece, Mozart does not chiefly parody musicians who play wrong notes (the later title “Village Musicians” was not his). Rather, in this chamber music joke he aims an angry side-swipe at dilettante composer-colleagues of his time, whose lack of imagination and artless compositional technique are here mercilessly demonstrated. A musical and intellectual delight for today’s performers and audiences alike, now performable for the first time using a genuine Urtext quality edition based on the autograph in Berlin. With the present edition for chamber orchestra, the “joke” is not limited in terms of the scoring – ensembles made up of soloists can play from the sextet edition HN 1281.