A Musical Joke (Ein musikalischer Spaß) K. 522, is a divertimento by W.A. Mozart, finished in 1787. Parodic in nature, it is sprinkled with clumsy repetitive figures, toghether with passages designed to mimic the effects of inaccurate notation and poor performance. Comedic devices include the use of asymmetrical phrasing, the use of secondary dominants where subdominants are required, discord in horns, whole tone scales, polytonality (in a very early use). The English title A Musical Joke is believed to be a poor rendering of the German original: spaß does not strongly connote the jocular, for which the word scherz would normally be used. In Fritz Spiegl's view, a more accurate translation would be Some Musical Fun.
