Serenade No. 1 in D major, Op. 11

Program notes

About the Work

In the autumn of 1857 the 24-year-old Johannes Brahms took up a post at the small court of Detmold, obtained on the recommendation of Clara Schumann. He taught the piano to a princess, conducted the choir and, most usefully, had the run of a court orchestra. It was his first regular contact with one. The ensemble played Haydn and Mozart as well as newer music, and Brahms used his time to study their symphonies, serenades and divertimenti closely.

The Serenade in D major came out of that study. Brahms began it in 1858 as a piece for nine players, a mixed group of winds and strings in the spirit of an eighteenth-century divertimento. It then grew: first he enlarged it for chamber orchestra, and finally, with advice from his friend the violinist Joseph Joachim, he rescored it for full orchestra, finishing in December 1859. Joachim conducted the first performance of that version in Hanover on 3 March 1860. By Brahms’s own account the large audience applauded warmly, a happier reception than the First Piano Concerto, written in the same years, had met at its first hearings.

Brahms would not complete a symphony until 1876, when he was 43, weighed down as he felt by the example of Beethoven. The two serenades were his way of learning to write for orchestra without yet claiming that title. The First is nevertheless a large piece: six movements lasting about three quarters of an hour, with a first movement in full sonata form and a long slow movement that would not be out of place in a symphony. Around them Brahms keeps the older serenade tradition alive with two scherzos and a pair of minuets.

What to Listen For

I. Allegro molto. Low strings set up a drone, like a bagpipe, and a horn plays a cheerful, rustic tune over it. The opening closely resembles the finale of Haydn’s last symphony, No. 104, which is in the same key and begins over the same kind of drone. The movement is broad and sunny, and the horns stay prominent throughout.

II. Scherzo: Allegro non troppo. A shadowy movement in D minor, quiet and restless, with a warmer middle section in B flat major.

III. Adagio non troppo. The longest movement and the centre of the work, in B flat major. It unfolds slowly, with long melodies for the woodwinds and horn over murmuring strings.

IV. Menuetto I and II. Two tiny minuets, the first in G major and the second in G minor, scored for only a few instruments. This is the movement where the serenade’s origin as chamber music is easiest to hear.

V. Scherzo: Allegro. A short, boisterous movement led by the horns.

VI. Rondo: Allegro. The finale is built on a bouncing, dotted rhythm that keeps returning between contrasting episodes, and it ends the work in high spirits.