Carl Nielsen

Born: June 9, 1865, Sortelung, Denmark
Died: October 3, 1931, Copenhagen, Denmark

Serenata in vano, CNW 69

• Composed: 1914
  
• Premiere: unknown
  
• Duration: approx. 8 minutes

Carl Nielsen, Denmark’s greatest composer, was fascinated by wind instruments all his life. As a boy, he received instruction on the cornet and trombone, and he demonstrated such early proficiency that he was able to perform as a military trumpeter in Odense by the age of 14. Among his earliest compositional ventures during those teenage years were some dance pieces for the Odense band and a quartet for cornet, trumpet and two trombones. In the six symphonies of his maturity that form the heart of his creative output, Nielsen always took special care with the scoring for the wind and brass instruments. He not only exulted in writing passages deliberately intended to challenge the technique of the individual instruments, but also tried to capture something of their distinctive characteristics in his music. The best-known of Nielsen’s wind pieces is the sunny Quintet, Op. 43, composed in 1921 for the Copenhagen Wind Quintet. But he had shown his interest in using wind instruments in a chamber setting several years earlier, when bassist Anton Hegner asked him to compose something in a lighter vein for a concert at which he and some of his Royal Danish Orchestra colleagues were to offer Beethoven’s Septet for clarinet, bassoon, horn, violin, viola, cello and double bass. For Hegner, Nielsen created a delightful work — a Serenade in Vain — for Beethoven’s trio of winds supplemented by cello and bass. The Serenata in Vano, written quickly during a few days in May 1914, grew from the revival of interest in the old 18th-century genre that had also spawned the serenades of Brahms, Dvořák, Elgar, Strauss, Tchaikovsky and others a few years earlier, and, like those compositions, borrowed its mood and forms from the same Mozartian models.

The Serenata in Vano is arranged in three continuous movements — a gently flowing Allegro with extended solo passages, a tender Adagio and a chipper closing March — to which Nielsen applied this tongue-in-cheek program: “Serenata in Vano is a humorous trifle. First the gentlemen play in a somewhat chivalrous and showy manner to lure the fair one out onto the balcony, but she does not appear. Then they play a slightly languorous strain (Poco adagio), but that doesn’t have any effect either. Since they have played in vain (in vano), they don’t care a straw, and shuffle off home to the strains of the little final march, which they play for their own amusement.” Despite its charm and immediate appeal, the Serenata was regarded by Nielsen as a minor work, and he did not offer the score for publication during his lifetime; it finally appeared in print in 1942, a decade after his death.

—©Dr. Richard E. Rodda