The genre's top achievement, each of Fryderyk Chopin's scherzos has three movements, the lyrical middle one contrasting with the spontaneous first and last ones. True to the etymology of the word scherzo, they are lively, high-spirited, bouncy and folksy.
The Scherzo in B minor Op. 20 was written in 1931 (though the final version was not completed until 1834-5) while Chopin was in Vienna, spending his first Christmas away from his family home. The letters he then wrote were filled with sadness, sorrow and longing for his homeland, and these are the feelings present in his Scherzo in B minor, of which Robert Schumann would ask:
How should solemnity be dressed if a joke is clad in dark veils?
It must have been the separation from his country and family which made Chopin introduce a Polish note, the tune of the carol Lulajże, Jezuniu, in the middle movement, where the monotonous, rocking movement of the melody and the unchanging bass accompaniment build an image of a baby being brought to sleep.
The technical difficulty of the Scherzo in B minor delayed its publication until 1835, the year when Chopin started to write his Scherzo in B flat minor Op. 31 (which he would finish in 1937). Dedicated to his student, Countess Adele de Fürstenstein, this one is a more playful piece, its moods and sounds as diverse as never before in Chopin's music.
Still lighter is the Scherzo in C sharp major Op. 39, which Chopin started in Marseilles and finished during his stay with Georges Sand in Nohant in 1839 and which has no dark colours which were present in Op. 20 and Op. 31, save for some gloomy notes in the introduction.
And Chopin's fourth scherzo, in E major Op. 54, composed in 1842 and published the following year, is
a crowning of the exciting progression of the subsequent works of the genre - from darkness to light
Tadeusz Zieliński, "Chopin. Życie i droga twórcza", PWM, Kraków 1993
Prepared by the Polish Music Information Center, Polish Composers' Union, April 2004.