Elizabeth Serenade

Elizabethan Serenade was composed in 1951 by Ronald (Ronnie) Binge. When Walter Eastman at publishers Ascherberg, Hopwood & Crew (who had given Ronnie much encouragement following his return to the music industry after the war) heard the piece he said it sounded like an Elizabethan serenade and with the accession of Queen Elizabeth II in February 1952 and the advent of a second ‘Elizabethan age’ the piece was re-titled to that with which we are now familiar.
The tune was used as the theme for the popular 1950s radio series Music Tapestry, Music in Miniature on the BBC and as the play-out for the British Forces Network radio station. It won an Ivor Novello award in 1957 and had chart successes in Germany and South Africa.
Lyrics by poet Christopher Hassall were added later, along with those in German, Czech, Norwegian, Swedish, Finnish, Dutch, Danish and French. There was even a reggae version.
In 2012, the year of the Queen’s Jubilee, one website put it: “The song of the day is Ronald Binge’s Elizabethan Serenade” and, accordingly, it was played at the official Jubilee concert and The Last Night of the Proms.

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