The Serenade in C for violin, viola, and cello, which took shape during the first year of the twentieth century, is widely considered to be Dohnányi's finest early chamber work. It seems unusual that it was with an essay in this underrepresented genre that Dohnányi first made his mark as a composer of chamber music, since historically examples of truly "great" string trios are few and far between. In this work, Dohnányi devised a novel reinterpretation of Classical serenade form in a work of five movements. Unlike Beethoven's Serenade, Op. 8, Dohnányi does not end the work with a reprise of its opening march section. Instead, this is a brilliant curtain-raiser, providing the players ample opportunity to capture the listener's attention for what is to come. There follows a contrasting Romance, in which the lyrical subject matter is equally shared amongst the ensemble. The subtlety of the scoring also permits each instrument to exploit its most sonorous register. The central movement is a Scherzo, imposing strenuous demands on the players and affording little respite from fast-moving passagework, despite the equality of instrumental dialogue. As both Mozart (in his Divertimento in E flat (K. 563)) and Beethoven demonstrated, no work in this form is complete without a variation movement, and although this is much the longest in Dohnányi's example, the many harmonic and thematic twists attest to the composer's imagination and craftsmanship. In a final concession to the world of Classicism, the Serenade ends with a movement in Rondo form. There, however, any real similarity between Dohnányi's Op. 10 and its Viennese forbears must end. With its highly charged thematic language and distinctly modernistic harmonies, the Rondo brings to a close one of the few examples of string trio to have become popular during the twentieth century.

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