Serenade no. 1 in D major, op. 11

Brahms wrote his two serenades between 1857 and 1859, while employed at the small court of Detmold, and used them to work his way towards orchestral writing before attempting a symphony. The First, in D major, began as a chamber piece for a small group of winds and strings and was afterwards expanded for full orchestra; Joachim conducted that version in Hanover in March 1860. Six movements, two of them minuets and one a scherzo, place it closer to the eighteenth-century divertimento than to anything Brahms wrote later.