Serenade in E minor, Op.20

By the time Elgar completed his Serenade in 1892 many other composers had followed the lead of Dvorak, Tchaikovsky and Grieg in writing works for string orchestra. There was still so little demand for that kind of thing, however, that a young and scarcely known composer like Elgar had no chance of getting such a score published. Novellos immediately rejected the Serenade as “unsaleable.” It was shortsighted of them not to see that here was a composer who was not only accomplished in the fashionable idiom of the day - resourceful in melody, deft in orchestration, subtle in structural integration - but who was also motivated by deeper thoughts and feelings than most other musicians with similar abilities.

The little rhythmic motif heard on the violas in the opening bars is not just an attractive accompaniment figure for the wistful first theme as it rises in E minor on first violins. It appears in the middle section too, after each of the first two statements of a radiant new melody in E major on violins, and it returns to lead the way into the reprise of the opening section. Its function does not end with the Allegro piacevole. But in the meantime there is the Larghetto, a self-contained structure in C major designed as a palindrome in five sections. If there is something faintly reminiscent of Grieg in the short episode at the centre, the nostalgically yearning upward intervals of the outer sections and the intimately confiding tone of the melodiously inspired inner layers, on either side of the central episode, are touchingly prophetic of the mature Elgar.

While reverting to the E minor tonality and something like the metre of the Allegro piacevole, the Allegretto third movement has its own melodic identity and its own sound but not, it seems, its own structural purpose – as is duly confirmed when, with exquisite timing, the rhythmic motif from the opening bars of the work reappears to recall the radiant E major material from the middle section of the first movement and to negotiate the terms of a modest coda in the same key.

Although it took professional and public opinion a long time to appreciate the fact - it wasn’t heard in London until 1905, thirteen years after it was written - the Serenade in E minor is a small masterpiece. Novellos, the publishers who were to make handsome profits out of Elgar’s more mature compositions from the Enigma Variations onwards, might have been right, from a strictly short-term commercial point of view, to reject the Serenade in 1892 as “unsaleable.” But from any other point of view it was shortsighted not to see that here was a composer who was not only accomplished in the fashionable idiom of the day, resourceful in melody and deft in orchestration, but who was also motivated by deeper thoughts and feelings than most other musicians with similar abilities. How much of the Serenade is derived from the Three Pieces for strings (Spring Song, Elegy and Finale) that Elgar wrote in 1888 we will probably never know, since the score has disappeared, but even if the material is the same it is doubtful that the movements were as neatly and as thoughtfully integrated as they are here.

The little rhythmic motif heard on the violas in the opening bars is not just an attractive accompaniment figure for the wistful first theme as it rises in E minor on first violins. It appears in the middle section too, after each of the first two statements of a radiant new melody in E major on violins, and it returns to lead the way into the reprise of the opening section. Its function does not end with the Allegro piacevole. But in the meantime there is the Larghetto, a self-contained structure in C major designed as a palindrome in five sections. If there is something faintly reminiscent of Grieg in the short episode at the centre, the nostalgically yearning upward intervals of the outer sections and the intimately confiding tone of the melodiously inspired inner layers, on either side of the central episode, are touchingly prophetic of the mature Elgar.

While reverting to the E minor tonality and something like the metre of the Allegro piacevole, the Allegretto third movement has its own melodic identity and its own sound but not, it seems, its own structural purpose - as is duly confirmed when, with exquisite timing, the rhythmic motif from the opening bars of the work reappears to recall the radiant E major material from the middle section of the first movement and to negotiate the terms of a modest coda in the same key.