String Quartets

Serenade for Strings : Antonin Dvorak

Dvorak wrote his Serenade for Stirngs Op. 22 between May 3-14, 1875. There is no evidence that he had a specific reason for composing it, although the scoring for string orchestra, which it shares with the Nocturne in B Major Op. 40 written only weeks earlier in January 1875, might suggest that Dvorak intended it for a string ensemble in contemporary Prague, a suggestion that receives additional support from the fact that he was making a strenuous effort at this time to have his works performed and to make a name for himself as a composer in the Bohemian capital.

Dvorak wrote his Serenade for Strings at a time when he was rethinking his style as a composer. Whereas his earlier works of the years between 1861-1865 had been modeled on the music of Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Mendelssohn and Schumann, by the late 1860s it was above all the works of Liszt and Wagner that influenced his style. Between 1868-1870 he wrote three string quartets which melodically, harmonically and formally transcend the medium’s traditional limits; and in 1871 he composed his first opera, Alfred, a work about which the Dvorak scholar Jarmil Burghauser noted that ‘never before […] in the whole history of Czech music were such Wagnerian pages written. The same is true of Dvorak’s second opera, King and Charcoal Burner, which similarly dates from 1871 but whose planned first performance at Prague’s Provisional Theatre fell victim to the work’s vocal and technical difficulties:

‘But with one assent all complained that the music was too difficult. It was infinitely worse than Wagner. It was original, clever, they said, but unsingable.’ Dvorak refused to be discouraged by this debacle but revisited his existing output and destroyed many of the works from the years between 1868-1871, a period he later described as ‘insane.’ In 1872, in the wake of this critical rethinking, he began to break free from the trammels of the New German school, his melodic invention once again preferring traditional periodic four-bar structure and his formal language becoming more balanced in its proportions and architecture. And for the first in Dvorak’s music, we find elements of Slav folk music, which he had been studying independently with the help of anthologies of Bohemian and Moravian folk songs.

Within this process of a compositional rethinking, the Serenade for Strings Op. 22 enjoys a special place, a status that it owes in part to Dvorak’s choice of the medium is the serenade, with its historical associations. Here he abandons the four-movement form of the earlier String Quintet in G Major Op. 77 and the Piano Trio Op. 21 and opts instead for five movements. And yet even here he eschews the traditional classical norm of first movement, slow movement, menuetto/scherzo and finale, preferring to juxtapose five movements that range freely over a wide expressive field: a lyrical opening movement, a Menuetto as a melancholy dance, the boisterous playfulness of a Scherzo, the inward-looking cantabilita of a Larghetto and the ‘high-spirited joviality’ of the final movement. Dvorak ensures a sense of cyclical cohesion by quoting the slow movement’s first subject in the middle of the finale and the opening movement’s first subject towards the end of the final movement. But there is a second point that needs to be stressed here: even if there are passages in the final movement that recall the later Slavonic Dances Op. 46, Bohemian folk music is less musically present than it is in such earlier works as the String Quartets Op. 9 and 16 or the Piano Trio Op. 21. And yet the themes of the Serenade for Strings are so carefree, simple and instantly comprehensible that they are clearly indebted to the formative principles of folk music.

It seems from a letter that Dvorak wrote on November 4, 1875 that he toyed briefly with the idea of having the Serenade premiered in Vienna under Hans Richter, who held the Czech composer’s music in high regard and who had been principal conductor of the Court Opera and music director of the Vienna Philharmonic since 1875. But his plan came to nothing, with the result that his Serenade received its first performance in Prague on December 10th, 1876 under the direction of Adolf Cech. In fact, his serenade had already played an important role in Vienna by this date, albeit in a different context, for he had included it in his application for a grant - the grant that first introduced Brahms to Dvorak’s work and that was ultimately to lead to the international breakthrough of which he could still only dream in 1876: ‘But I still hope to make a name for myself in Germany, something that is bound to happen sooner or later in pursuit of my interests.’

Klaus Döge

Publishing company: Ernst Eulenburg Ltd