Serenade in E flat for 13 wind instruments, Op.7

Richard Strauss (1864-1949)

Serenade in E flat for 13 wind instruments, Op.7

The earliest Strauss work with a regular place in the present-day repertoire, the Serenade in E flat was written in 1881 or 1882 when the composer was still at school or just out of it. He later dismissed it as the “respectable work of a music student” but he was being unduly modest. Few music students know how to score for wind instruments as well as he did - thanks to his privileged position as son of the principal hornist of the Munich Court Orchestra - and that is not all that is remarkable about the piece. For Hans von Bülow, one of the great conductors of the day, to declare on the strength of it that Strauss was “by far the most striking personality since Brahms” it must have been conspicuously promising in other ways too. Certainly, as soon as he got to know the Serenade in E flat, von Bülow commissioned another work for the same combination of instruments - two each of flutes, oboes, clarinets and bassoons, a double bassoon and four horns - and Strauss promptly obliged with his no less promising Suite in B flat.

One of the more attractive apects of the Serenade is the quality of its thematic material - the chorale-like first subject introduced in the opening bars with the melodic line in the oboe part and the charmingly syncopated second subject heard a little later on clarinet. Although momentum seems to be failing at the end of the exposition, an eloquent solo oboe retrieves the situation and leads the ensemble into a dramatic minor-key development which, though it avoids the main themes, is motivated by a variety of subsidiary ideas associated with the second subject. After an abbreviated recapitulation, with the first subject now on the horns, a solo flute nostalgically recalls one of those subsidiary ideas in the closing bars. So, ingeniously but with every sign of spontaneity, the young composer makes sure there are no loose ends.