Although he had been a fixture of Parisian musical life since his early thirties—maitre de chapelle at the fashionable Madeleine, professor of composition at the Paris Conservatoire and, later, its director—Fauré's best music before the Great War was the exclusive preserve of a small elite. Some, like Marcel Proust or John Singer Sargent, were aesthetes, some—the Princesse de Polignac and the Countess de Greffuhle—were patrons, but most were musicians; even among musicians, though their stature was stellar, their number was small. One thinks of the old Liszt (an early fan whose library was well-stocked with Fauré), Saint-Saëns, d'Indy, Duparc, Dukas, Reynaldo Hahn, the Belgian violinist Eugène Ysaÿe, and, among the generation coming of age at the turn of the century, violinist Jacques Thibaud, pianist Alfred Cortot, and the cellist Pablo Casals, who was already acclaimed when he made his Paris début in 1901 with a program which included Fauré's Élégie. The famed trio of the latter three artists, formed in 1905, did much to secure wider recognition for Fauré, and it seems a matter of course that he should have composed and dedicated one of his finest pieces to Casals about 1908—the Sérénade for cello and piano in B minor.

Though brief—playing under three minutes—its ironic charm suggests an affected lover punctuating his effusive phrases with peremptory strumming (the frequent sudden piano chords), and taking a pedantic turn in a "learned" pseudo-Baroque central section before returning to the material of the opening in an exquisite elaboration. If the melody recalls the "La Fileuse" section of his music for Pelléas et Mélisande of a decade before, the geste of the whole suggests the world of the five Mélodies de Venise of 1891 viewed with a sardonic squint. Despite its fetching melody and its wit—or because of it—the Sérénade has never found the popular favor accorded Fauré's other cello pieces (the Romance, the Sicilienne, or Papillon). His best music remains the preserve of a small but ardent elite.

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