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Programme note

Programme note

Johannes Brahms (1833-1897)
Serenade No 1 in D major, Op 11 (1858)

Allegro molto
Scherzo:  Allegro non troppo
Adagio non troppo
Menuet I & II
Scherzo:  Allegro
Rondo: Allegro

Young Brahms originally intended the first of his two orchestral serenades to be a nonet for wind and strings in the vein of Beethoven’s Septet or Schubert’s Octet - which may explain why, even in its more symphonic final version, its fourth and fifth movements seem to retain their chamber music affinities, with prominent, often pungent, wind parts.

Yet the effect of the work can also seem curiously suggestive of a Mahler symphony, or at least the sort of symphony Mahler might have written if he had been a 25-year-old genius living in Detmold in the year 1858. The bucolic drone of its opening bars provides a foretaste of the start of Mahler’s Symphony No 1 (in the same key), and the jovial horn theme has a distinctively Mahlerish stamp. Pastoral the serenade certainly is. No other big-scale work by Brahms, other than the Second Symphony in the same key, speaks quite so refreshingly of the open air. Why he eventually chose to inflate such intimate music into an orchestral work was perhaps typical of the uncertainty from which he persistently suffered. His Piano Concerto No 1, completed in the same year, had begun as a symphony before being transformed into the work we know. But the serenade, so long as it is played by a chamber orchestra rather than something weightier, retains much of its original lightness of touch, while gaining the extra richness of string tone that justified Brahms’s revision.

What gives the work its considerable length is not only its quantity of movements but also the large-scale symphonic processes required by the first movement, slow movement, and finale, as well as the sheer size of some of the themes. In contrast, the second movement, a shadowy minor-key scherzo prophetic of the equivalent movement in the Second Piano Concerto, is more concise, as are the pair of tiny, comical minuets and the second scherzo, clearly a joke inspired by Beethoven, and all the better for coming from a composer as supposedly serious as Brahms.

The larger movements, on the other hand, give the work the Brahmsian ballast it needs. The way the introductory drone bass keeps harmonically shifting ground as the horn theme moves towards the movement's first climax defines not only the symphonic scale of the music but also its al fresco serenade-like nature. The shape of the themes, their way of melting from four beats to three beats in the bar, is unmistakably Brahmsian, even at this early stage in his career.

But if the first movement is large, the adagio, with its gently rocking rhythm, is even larger. It is laid out in grandly unshortened sonata-form, with a rich array of themes, a full-scale development section, recapitulation and coda, as if it were a symphonic first movement played in slow motion.

Sir Donald Tovey, Edinburgh’s distinguished musical essayist, famously devoted one and a half pages of a programme note to this adagio, claiming in the process that the music owed much of its quality of tone to the brook in Beethoven’s Pastoral symphony, which here "flows into a wide river, passing through a remote key into a peaceful lake."

The rondo finale, though considerably shorter, is nevertheless far from perfunctory. The remarkable length of the springy main theme and its rollicking offshoots immediately suggests that the music will last just as long as it needs to, and so it does.  The coda, said Tovey, is "triumphant," though to call it radiant and exhilarating might be even more apt.

© Conrad Wilson