Serenade for Strings (Tchaikovsky)

The Serenade for Strings in C Major, Opus 48 by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky is a 1880 composition premiered late romantic music.

Form

The Serenade for Strings Tchaikovsky has four movements:

Tchaikovsky wanted to imitate with the first set of Mozart's style, which had composed himself many serenades and thus was regarded as a model: The sentence is written in the form of a classic Sonatina, with a slow introduction. The 36 -bar introduction, Andante non troppo, is semper marcatissimo overwritten with the instruction, and littered with double breaks in the violins and violas, which lead to dense chord structures. The beginning of the Serenade is repeated in the last part of the sentence, and appears again ( in a transformed shape) in the final part of the fourth set. In this way the whole is kept together.

On the second sheet of music the composer wrote: " The larger the string orchestra, the better! This is exactly my intentions. "

The second movement, a waltz, has become very popular and has become " independent".

Others

• The music was based on a 1934 ballet by George Balanchine, Serenade.
• The waltz in the second set, arranged for soprano and orchestra, was used for the 1945 MGM film Anchors Aweigh, performed by Kathryn Grayson, José Iturbials conductor of the MGM Studioorchesers.
• Sections of the music used in 2005 choreographed by Boris Eifman ballet Anna Karenina, based on the novel by Leo Tolstoy.