Haydn's Viennese Serenades
The Viennese serenade was not, as in Latin countries, a love song under a lady's window. It was a performance by a trio or quartet of instruments, sometimes with voices - of folk music, current popular tunes or numbers written specially for some occasion by aspiring young composers like Haydn. Particularly on the eves of common name days, the streets would be filled with strolling serenade parties. A journalist of the time described such a Viennese evening: "However late it is, even at an hour when most people are hurrying home to bed, heads soon appear at the window and a crowd gathers around the players, clapping, applauding, demanding encores, and seldom dispersing until the serenade is over, when they will often troop after the players to another district." Robert Wernick