Mendelssohn's Scherzo in B minor for piano is a little two-page wisp of a piece that he composed in one day during the early summer of 1829 while on one of his many visits to Britain; it was published that year in the German music journal Berliner allgemeine musikalische Zeitung.

The scherzo is a delicate, transparent piece whose persistent hand-against-hand offbeats are anything but easy to bring off successfully—therein lies the curse of so much Mendelssohn solo piano music: it is very difficult to play, yet sounds unimpressively easy to most laymen and seems trifling and unimportant to many musicians. But this B minor scherzo is a well-crafted two pages. It starts pianissimo and builds, slowly and surely, to a mighty climax at which the hands are spread a full five octaves apart from one another, and then slides down into a most curious final half-dozen bars—bars during which the offbeats at last dissolve and a surprisingly loud, almost ill-mannered, idea in octaves (the realization of a gesture hinted at earlier in the piece but always broken off before actually materializing) makes its one and only appearance.

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