Serenades and dawn songs: courtship beneath the window

A young man with an instrument beneath a girl's lighted window: the image of the serenade has belonged to the European imagination for centuries. Singing of love at night, in front of the beloved's house, was a real practice in towns and villages, but also a literary and musical genre that runs through the poetry of the troubadours, Shakespeare's theatre and eighteenth-century opera.

Evening and morning in medieval poetry

The word serenade comes from the Italian sereno, the open sky of the evening, and originally referred to a song performed outdoors at night. Medieval lyric, however, also knew the opposite genre: the dawn song, in Provençal alba, sung by lovers who must part at daybreak. In troubadour poems a watchman or a friend keeps vigil over the couple and warns that the light is about to rise.

The most famous example is Reis glorios by Giraut de Bornelh, a troubadour active in the second half of the twelfth century, in which every stanza ends with the refrain «et ades sera l'alba», and soon it will be dawn. The theme enjoyed great success throughout Europe, from the German Tagelieder to the French poets, and gave shape to an idea destined to last: secret love threatened by the light of day.

Shakespeare and Mozart

Shakespeare took up the dawn motif in one of the most famous scenes in his theatre. In Romeo and Juliet, after the wedding night, Juliet tries to keep her beloved by insisting that the song they hear is the nightingale's, not the lark's that announces morning: «It was the nightingale, and not the lark». Romeo knows he must leave, and the dialogue turns the old Provençal genre into a moment of great drama.

The serenade proper found an ideal stage in opera. In Mozart's Don Giovanni, first performed in Prague in 1787, the protagonist sings «Deh vieni alla finestra» to his own mandolin accompaniment, addressing Donna Elvira's maid. Here the song is an instrument of deceitful seduction, and the scene plays with the conventions of a custom the audience knew very well.

The bride's serenade in Italian tradition

In popular Italian culture the serenade played a precise role in courtship and weddings. In many parts of the south, on the evening before the wedding, the groom went with friends and musicians beneath the bride's house to dedicate love songs to her. The girl, according to custom, might come to the window or show a sign of approval, while her family offered sweets and wine to the company.

Not all serenades were gentle. Local traditions also knew the serenade of scorn, with which a rejected suitor expressed resentment towards the one who had turned him down. In Spain, meanwhile, groups of university students, the tunas, kept alive the custom of singing beneath windows, a practice that, according to tradition, goes back to the medieval universities.

From the troubadours' dawn songs to the grooms' serenades in southern Italy, night singing tells of a courtship made of voice, waiting and distance. The window separates and unites at the same time, and the music becomes the bridge between the one in the street and the one listening indoors. Perhaps that is why the image of the serenade still seems the most romantic of love customs.