The second of Felix Mendelssohn's Three Pieces, Op. 16, for piano (actually Trois Fantasies ou Caprices) is an E minor item that goes by either Scherzo or Capriccio, depending upon the edition you're looking at. Its genesis makes for a cute story, described in detail by Mendelssohn himself in a letter to his parents. Mendelssohn was in England during the summer and autumn of 1828, and during early September was staying at a friend of a friend of a cousin's house in Wales. One day, as Mendelssohn sat working at the piano, one of the girls in the family came to him wearing a bunch of yellow flowers, proclaimed them, charmingly, to be little trumpets and asked if Mendelssohn would write some music for them. He sat down, churned out a suitable little piano piece, and added it to a pair of piano pieces that he had written for the other two sisters in the family. Thus came the three pieces of Opus 16 together.

The Scherzo is a lively five-page thing. It starts off with a fanfare idea that might as well have actually been scored for trumpets; then the body of the piece—with its quiet, Midsummer's Dream-like staccato-filled ideas and contrasting outbursts of vigorous "brass section" gestures—takes off, and we can just sit back and enjoy the innocent ride from E minor through to the E major close.

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