With the rise in popularity of the sport in the late-19th century, tennis and music soon began to make a match. Johann Strauss II, for example, included a “Lawn-Tennis Chorus” in his penultimate operetta, Waldmeister (1895). If you didn’t know the title of Swedish composer Wilhelm Peterson-Berger’s Lawn Tennis, you might be hard pressed to make any connection to the game, though does the busy interplay between the two hands suggest an exchange of strokes?
Jean Sibelius: Tennis at Trianon (1899)
In Sibelius’s song Tennis at Trianon, aristocrats are enjoying a tennis party among the trees, outfitted as shepherds and shepherdesses.