Benjamin Britten’s Serenade for Tenor, Horn and Strings, Op. 31, was composed in 1943 for tenor, solo horn, and string orchestra and it is one of his most distinctive early wartime works.

The work was written for Peter Pears and Dennis Brain, and its first performance took place at Wigmore Hall, London, on 15 October 1943, with Walter Goehr conducting. Britten originally called the piece Nocturnes, but changed the title to Serenade before the premiere.

The Serenade is built as a cycle of six songs framed by a horn Prologue and Epilogue, with the horn played alone and instructed to use natural harmonics. Its texts are drawn from English poetry and are united by Britten’s interest in night, darkness, and the uneasy boundary between calm and threat. That contrast gives the work a form that is at once lyrical, concentrated, and slightly unsettling.