It is one of those unfortunate circumstances of musical commercialism that, in order to help sell Igor Stravinsky's Scherzo fantastique for orchestra, Op. 3, his publisher prefaced the work with a programmatic description that, to this day, is widely considered to have actually been Stravinsky's inspiration to compose the piece. In reality, the Scherzo fantastique is a 12- to 15-minute work of pure music that Stravinsky composed between June 1907 and March 1908 during the final days of his apprenticeship to Nikolay Rimsky-Korsakov. The work occupies an important place in the composer's output for a couple of reasons. It is, to be fair, probably his earliest composition to really bear the unmistakable mark of a consummate craftsman. Perhaps more significantly, it was at a 1909 performance of the work that young Stravinsky first came to the attention of impresario Sergei Diaghilev, the man whose Ballet Russe carried the three theater works that thrust Stravinsky into the musical limelight (The Firebird, Petrushka, and The Rite of Spring) on its shoulders. It is worth noting that Stravinsky, who in later life came to disdain most everything he did before The Firebird, was never ashamed of the Scherzo fantastique.

It was a certain similarity between parts of the Scherzo fantastique and Rimsky-Korsakov's famous Flight of the Bumblebee that led to the Scherzo being used as the music for a 1917 ballet, Les Abeilles (The Bees), quite against the wishes of the composer. To make matters worse, Stravinsky's publisher concocted a program that describes the work as a kind of musical portrait of a day in the life of a beehive. As the program (still to be found at the head of the score) goes, the first part of the Scherzo portrays the buzzing and incessant, workman-like activity of the bees, the slower middle section introduces the queen bee and the rituals of her mating, and the final section shows how, after all is said and done, the life and business of the hive continues unabated. The superimposition of any program at all is ultimately useless, as the work is far better understood as the large-scale fast-slow-fast musical form that it is.

The work begins with a gesture for muted solo trumpet that is strikingly similar to the gesture that opens the Preludium of 1937, after which the essential body of the Scherzo—brightly chromatic triple-meter figurations in the strings and woodwinds—stakes its claim. A little viola solo paves the way for the slower middle section, which features a quietly voluptuous melody that the flute (with oboe countermelody) sings against a gentle horn background. A crescendo builds as the strings take over this new music, only to dissolve away into the kind of rolling cello section accompaniment that Rimsky-Korsakov loved so much. After a rich series of unresolved pedal points that finally make their way to G major, the pace heats up. But this is no immediate reprise of the opening section, listeners have to wait until the clarinet ushers the solo trumpet of the opening back in for that. Before that can happen, the violins take off with wicked ponticello tremolandos and the woodwinds burst into a radiant kaleidoscope of sound. After the reprise, a series of leaping woodwind figures prepare a final cascade of overlapping chromatic gestures and rising arpeggios that, in turn, make way for a final cadence to B major.

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