A composition generally of humorous or satirical intent in which turns of phrase or other features characteristic of another composer or type of composition are employed and made to appear ridiculous, especially through their application to ludicrously inappropriate subjects. Parody, in the non-technical sense of the word, has been a frequent source of humour in music, often aimed at the correction of stylistic idiosyncrasies or exaggeration. Some composers have even been prepared to parody their own work: Cesti, himself the author of many cantatas, parodied the genre in Aspettate, adesso canto, and the humour of Così fan tutte and Der Schauspieldirektor owes a good deal to Mozart's treatment of the coloratura style in arias like ‘Come scoglio’.
Opera, as the most extravagant kind of musical entertainment, has invited parody throughout its history, but such parodies, meaningless without a knowledge of the original, are often an indication of the success the original achieved. Lully's operas were parodied in performances at the Ancien Théâtre Italien, initially merely spoken, later with pointedly humorous texts allied to Lully's music or with his texts set to popular vaudeville melodies. A rash of parodies was provoked by the Querelle des Bouffons and the Gluck–Piccinni controversy, and many works now regarded as significant in the operatic repertory were at one time given a similar distinction; Mozart's Die Zauberflöte, for example, was parodied by Wenzel Müller in 1818, and J.N. Nestroy dealt suitably with the heroics and posturings of Wagner's Tannhäuser and Lohengrin. Popular theatre and puppet theatre in Vienna provided natural outlets for this kind of satire, and from the time of The Beggar's Opera the popular theatre in London produced a spate of healthy antidotes to what were considered to be the unnatural features and excesses of serious opera, culminating perhaps in the commonplace words of Captain Corcoran set to high-flown recitative in Sullivan's HMS Pinafore. Parody of Italian opera lends dramatic point to the scene in Britten’s Midsummer Night's Dream where the play within the play becomes a mock-Italian opera within the opera.
The more sophisticated and ‘artificial’ kinds of composition have naturally provided a target for humorous imitation in popular or lighter forms. Einstein pointed out how the affectation and ‘super-sensitivity’ of the madrigal were mocked in frottolas, villanellas and canzoni, and how Andrea Gabrieli parodied a famous piece, Rore's Ancor che col partire, by having it sung as a three-voice giustiniana by three trembling and stuttering old men.
Bach's ‘Peasant’ Cantata Mer hahn en neue Oberkeet (bwv212) is subtitled ‘Cantate burlesque’ and satirizes among other things the italianate da capo aria so readily adopted by German composers (including Bach himself) at the time. Mozart, too, parodied the incompetent lesser composers of his day, their mechanical constructions and short-breathed paragraphs, in the sextet Ein musikalischer Spass k522 (1787), and Wagner presented Beckmesser in a similar light in Die Meistersinger.
There is an element of parody in the appropriation of features of popular music in serious works, though pastoral effects like that of simulated bagpipe drones in 18th-century music generally serve to remind the listener that the rustic idiom was merely assumed for the moment: a pleasant conceit like the rustic life depicted in so many paintings of the fêtes champêtres, when picnic baskets concealed an excellent bottle of champagne and other necessary appurtenances of civilization. This veneer and artificiality has gone in Beethoven's humorous view of the village band in the scherzo of the Pastoral Symphony; Mahler's street bands are not so much parodies as realities in his all-embracing symphonic world.
Towards the close of the 19th century, parody, especially in French music, became a tool, often sharp-edged, to overthrow the inflated idioms of late Romanticism. The pleasantries of Chabrier's quadrilles on themes from Wagner's Tristan und Isolde and similar pieces by Fauré and Messager based on the Ring were followed by works of more acid intent such as Debussy's ‘Golliwogg's Cake-Walk’ with its quotation from Tristan und Isolde and the satires and caricatures of Satie. Ravel's piano pieces in the manner of Borodin and Chabrier (the latter once described as a parody of Chabrier parodying Gounod) are comparatively innocent, but Bartók's parody of Shostakovich in the interruption to the intermezzo of the Concerto for Orchestra is more vitriolic in intent. The neo-classical movement saw the production of many works by Stravinsky, Hindemith, Prokofiev and others which imitate certain features of earlier styles, but they were not often primarily intended to display the models in a maliciously humorous light: the urbanity and wit of Haydn and his contemporaries are what Prokofiev sought to mirror in his Classical Symphony.
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C. Sallier: ‘Discours sur la Parodie’, Histoire de l'Académie royale des inscriptions et belles lettres, vii (Paris, 1733), 398
A. Font: Favart, l'opéra-comique et la comédie-vaudeville aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles (Paris, 1894)
A. Arnheim: ‘Le devin du village von Jean-Jacques Rousseau und die Parodie “Les amours de Bastien et Bastienne”’, SIMG, iv (1902–3), 686–727
G. Calmus: Zwei Opernburlesken aus der Rokokozeit (Berlin, 1912)
A. Einstein: ‘Die Parodie in der Villanella’, ZMw, ii (1919–20), 212–24; [Eng. trans. in EinsteinIM
P.A. Merbach: ‘Parodien und Nachwirkungen von Webers “Freischütz”’, ZMw, ii (1919–20), 642–55
G. Cucuel: ‘Les opéras de Gluck dans les parodies du XVIIIe siècle’, ReM, iii/5 (1922), 201–21; iii/6 (1922), 51–68
R. Haas: ‘Wiener deutsche Parodieopern um 1730’, ZMw, viii (1925–6), 201–25
M. Chat: Studien zur Technik der Parodie und des Komischen an Parodien Favarts (diss., U. of Vienna, 1930)
V.B. Grannis: Dramatic Parody in 18th-Century France (New York, 1931)
M. Bührmann: J.N. Nestroys Parodien (diss., U. of Kiel, 1933)
R. Rüschka: Wiener literarische Parodien von den Anfängen bis auf Nestroy (diss., U. of Vienna, 1935)
F. Brukner: ‘Die Alt-Wiener Parodie’, Jb deutscher Bibliophilen und Literaturfreunde, xxi–xxii (1937)
D.J. Grout: ‘Seventeenth-Century Parodies of French Opera’, MQ, xxvii (1941), 211–19, 514–26
L. Frank: Dramatic Parody by Marionettes in 18th-Century Paris (New York, 1946)
S. Dörffelt: Die musikalische Parodie bei Offenbach (diss., U. of Frankfurt, 1954)
K. Hortschansky: Parodie und Entlehnung im Schaffen Chr.W. Glucks (diss., U. of Kiel, 1966)
D.J. Keahey: ‘Così fan tutte: Parody or Irony?’, Paul A. Pisk: Essays in his Honor, ed. J. Glowacki (Austin, 1966), 116–30
M. See: ‘Opernparodie und Parodieoper’, NZM, Jg.127 (1966), 372–88
F. Moureau: ‘Lully en visite chez l'Arlequin: parodies italiennes avant 1697’, Jean-Baptiste Lully: St Germain-en-Laye and Heidelberg 1987, 235–50
M. Hunter: ‘Some Representations of opera seria in opera buffa’, COJ, iii (1991), 89–108
MICHAEL TILMOUTH