Serenade for strings in E flat major Op.6 (1892)

Josef Suk had the good fortune to graduate from the Prague Conservatoire at just the same time, in 1891, as Dvorák joined the teaching staff. Staying on for an extra year for special tuition from Dvorák, he was advised by his distinguished teacher to lighten up a bit and write something more immediately engaging than the very serious stuff he had composed as an undergraduate. Dvorák might even have recommended his own Serenade for strings in E major as a model.

However that may be, Suk wrote a similarly charming Serenade for strings in the same key but by no means in the same manner. The Andante con moto first movement is a beautifully scored and delightfully melodious piece but, like the rest of the work, it shows little or no sign of the folk-music influence that was such an essential element of Dvorák’s style. Perhaps because of this demonstration of his individuality Suk became Dvorák’s favourite pupil. In 1898, two years after the Serenade was published on Brahms’s recommendation by Simmrock in Berlin, Suk also became Dvorák’s son in law. It is said that the Serenade in E is a portrait of Dvorák’s daughter Otilke whom he had just met when he wrote the work.

Josef Suk had the good fortune to graduate from the Prague Conservatoire at just the same time, in 1891, as Dvorák joined the teaching staff. Staying on for an extra year for special tuition from Dvorák, he was advised by his distinguished teacher to lighten up a bit and write something more immediately engaging than the very serious stuff he had composed as an undergraduate. Dvorák might even have recommended him to take own Serenade for strings in E major as a model. However that may be, while certainly not ignoring that masterly example, the young composer wrote a Serenade which not only equals Dvorák’s in charm but also has its own distinctive personality: the harmonies are more adventurous, the rhythms and melodies less inclined to echo the Czech-national idiom.

Begnning at a rather more leisurely pace than the first movement of the Dvorák, the Andante con moto is based on the melody gently introduced by violins in the opening bars. Although that melody is to have long-term importance, it scarcely has time to establish itself before it is deflected by the cellos into alien key areas. Only after a climax of Wagnerian textural and harmonic complexity is it restored, emphatically, to its rightful E flat major. A rather quicker episode in the middle of the movement takes up a theme already anticipated in the opening section and, after developing it with some passion, subsides into inactivity – which is an opportunity for a solo violin to recall the main theme, even if it is in the wrong harmonies again. The strings as a whole put them unmistakably right before the lingering ending.

Suk’s answer to Dvorák’s waltz-time second movement is another graceful dance in triple time. In this case, however, the prettily articulated main theme is subtly related to that of the first movement. After the slower middle section, which generates more than a little emotional excitement, and after the surprisingly dramatic approach to the reprise of the first section, a solo violin and a solo viola make rather more obvious allusions to the opening theme of the work. It appears again, on second violins, in the delicately scored coda.

That theme has no part to play in the slow movement, which is in an enchanted world of its own. If any part of this work supports the notion that it is a portrait of of Dvoráks’ daughter Otilke, whom he had just met and was to marry six years later, it is this Adagio in G major. A study in rapture both in the outer sections, devoted to the melody so lovingly introduced by a solo cello, and in the quicker, more passionately expressive episode in the middle, it has little interest in structural strategy.

The recurring theme does, however, make a significant reappearance in the concluding Allegro giocoso, a finale of such extraordinarily rhythmic vitality that Suk can three times afford to slow it down without losing momentum – the last time to accommodate a climactic molto espressivo recall of that opening melody. Dvorák had made a similar unifying gesture, referring back to the beginning of the work, in the last movement of his Serenade in E major but rather less spectacularly.