A LITTLE NIGHT MUSIC

Serenades at Twilight

Throughout the history of orchestral music there has always been a special niche for works with a lighter touch. In the era before recording, live music served a wider variety of needs. Serenades were originally intended as background music for outdoor events after afternoon tea or supper.  Although past works had multiple movements, in contemporary times, serenades are pieces of one movement that allow a relatively danger-free airspace for young composers testing their wings.

Such was the case with George Walker, who wrote his “Lyric” at age 24.  Years later, in 1996, he would become the first African American to win the Pulitzer Prize in composition.  Lyric, originally a lament dedicated to his grandmother, is similar to “Adagio” by Walker’s classmate, Samuel Barber.  They have in common a melancholy, but soothing, loveliness held aloft by the strings.

Mozart’s renowned Serenade, known delightfully as “A Little Night Music,” clearly identifies its function as an outdoor work, perfect for perambulating through a blooming garden at dusk.  Written at the age of 31, each of its four movements is a charming distillation of Classic era style.  Three of the most iconic forms of the era are found in its movements.

Sonata-allegro is the first-movement form used in works as diverse as Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony and the Tchaikovsky Serenade on this program. Virtually every symphony, string quartet, and piano sonata starts with this movement that is uniquely binary and ternary. The movement is divided into two big sections encompassing three subsections.  The first half, the exposition, presents two themes—one decisive, one diffident. The second half plays, harmonically, with selected bits of the second theme for the development, then returns to the main themes in the recapitulation.  This combination of formal simplicity and harmonic complexity sustains the popularity of this form among composers from the 18^th century to this very day.

As is typical of these multi-movement serenades, Eine kleine contains a slow lyrical movement, its elegant Romanze; a dance, like its noble minuet; and a joyous rondo.  Tchaikovsky’s Serenade, composed at age 40, follows Classic-era tradition while using Tchaikovsky’s signatures of nationalism and internationalism.

The first movement, in sonata-allegro form, has an Italian name. As it occasionally the case, it begins with a slow introduction before the main movement begins, but atypically, it returns to the initial slow tempo at the movement’s end.  Interestingly, he intended this movement to be his homage to Mozartian style. He then replaces Mozart’s minuet with a waltz, whose title is both French and Italian. This waltz reminds listeners of Tchaikovsky’s skill as a composer of ballet music in such emblematic works as Swan Lake and Nutcracker. In fact, Russian-born George Balanchine choreographed this entire serenade in 1934 as his first full-length ballet after he immigrated to the United States.

The slow movement, also entitled in French and Italian, moves from romance to elegy, but the cantabile marking lightens the tension for a while.  The last movement honors Tchaikovsky’s homeland in a bid to nationalism. His Russian theme, tema russo, returns to sonata-allegro form.  Unlike Eine kleine Nachtmusik, scaled back to a string quartet, Tchaikovsky specifically requested as large a string orchestra as possible, making this more of a grand ball or concert piece, than background music.

Ultimately, whether in the USA, Austria, or Russia, serenades satisfy a universal need for lovely, gracious music.  At twilight.

–Dr. Yvonne Kendall, © 2021