The Serenade for Tenor, Horn and Strings, Op. 31, is a song cycle written in 1943 by Benjamin Britten for tenor, solo horn and a string orchestra. Composed during the Second World War at the request of the horn player Dennis Brain, it is a setting of a selection of six poems by English poets on the subject of night, including both its calm and its sinister aspects. The poets Britten chose to set for the Serenade range from an anonymous 15th-century writer to poets from the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries.
Britten's domestic partner – the tenor Peter Pears – and Brain were the soloists at the first performance. They later recorded the work, which has received subsequent recordings by tenors, horn players, orchestras and conductors from Britain, continental Europe, America and Australia.
Background and first performance
Britten and his partner, Peter Pears, returned to Britain in April 1942 after three years in the United States. A few weeks later Britten was commissioned by the BBC to write incidental music for a documentary series on life in England to be broadcast to the US. The score was played by the RAF Orchestra, in which Dennis Brain was first horn. Britten was struck by Brain's skill and needed little persuasion to write a concert piece for him.
Brain may have been expecting a concerto, There, while also working on his opera Peter Grimes, he composed most of the Serenade. In April 1943 he wrote to a friend, "I've practically completed a new work (6 Nocturnes) for Peter and a lovely young horn player Dennis Brain, & Strings ... It is not important stuff, but quite pleasant, I think".
The Serenade contains Britten's first settings of English poems since On This Island in 1937. In selecting them Britten had advice from Edward Sackville-West, to whom he dedicated the work. Sackville-West wrote of the Serenade:
Britten acknowledged the help Brain had given him with the horn part: