A funny thing happened...

Without context or words, can instrumental music really be amusing, as the pianist Alfred Brendel suggested? Of course it can,

- Tom Service

It remains a mystery: not why Alfred Brendel took a tortoise on a lead to a concert at the Musikverein in Vienna in the 1950s - although that is a fact of his life that ought to be better known - but why it's still the case, even after his death, that not enough people have taken the great pianist seriously when he said that Beethoven and Haydn were funny.

There are two problems with what should be one of Brendel's most important legacies. One is the entrenched snobbery of the gatekeepers of classical music, who often demand a pseudo-seriousness at all costs. This was precisely the establishment Brendel was trying to lampoon with his tortoise. The other issue is Brendel's own reputation, because for all his wit, irony and deadpan humour, the idea remains that he was a high priest of the serious instead of a conduit for the comic.