The Development Of Scherzo Before Romanticism

As a secular genre of music,scherzo is popular among composers for its dramatic and humorous characteristics.Under the influence of different social development and artistic trends,scherzo gradually developed from a short poetic genre of the Renaissance Period to an instrumental music with fixed structural program and musical rhetoric characteristics of the Classical Period,and finally became an independent dramatic instrumental music genre that can express rich ideological connotation absolutely,and lyricism and narrativity are equally emphasized on it.There is no doubt that the development of scherzo benefited from the deepening of Beethoven and the innovation of Chopin.Especially there are a large number of literature analyze and study Chopin's scherzo compositions,but research literature and achievements of the early development of scherzo genre are relatively scarce.Consequently,this paper aims to discuss the early development of scherzo genre(the time is defined as before the Romantic Period),through the analysis of compositions combined with the study of historical theory,it expounds the changing characteristics of the scherzo genre under different social backgrounds and artistic trends.Research methods of different disciplines such as music analysis,music historiography,music rhetoric and music aesthetics are integrated in this paper,attempting to illustrate the origin of scherzo genre,presenting the context of its early development and showing the clues of its development features.