Sunday Classics: Glorious outdoor music -- Handel's "Royal Fireworks Music" and "Water Music"

Fabio Biondi conducts (and plays his fiddle with) Norway's Stavanger Symphony -- they're currently making a debut tour of North America -- in a zippy performance of the Allegro and Andante from the Allegro-Andante-Allegro of the F major Suite of the Water Music -- from which Hamilton Harty derived both the opening Allegro and the Andante espressivo of his Water Music Suite.

by Ken

It's just about all fun this week, as we've been poking around Handel's glorious suites for outdoor royal festivities, starting with the Music for the Royal Fireworks Friday night and continuing with the Water Music last night.

Luckily for you, dear readers, preparing the audio files for the previews took so much out of me that I'm prepared to devote this post as much as possible to music.

As I noted last night, we've already done the "history" of the Fireworks Music in Friday's preview but we've left the Water Music for today. Just as the exact makeup of the total suite is subject to wildly different interpretation -- beyond the general understanding that there are 20-some movements grouped by key into suites in F major, D major, and G major -- there's a certain amount of disagreement about the history, starting with the connection between Handel and King George I, whom the composer had known in his native Germany when the future English king was still the Elector of Hanover. For example, you will find people saying that the new king had a grudge against the composer for abandoning him for England, and others who say that the elector had in effect sent Handel ahead to England as a sort of advance scout.

Wikipedia tells the simplest story:

The Water Music is a collection of orchestral movements, often considered three suites, composed by George Frideric Handel. It premiered on 17 July 1717 after King George I had requested a concert on the River Thames. The concert was performed by 50 musicians playing on a barge near the royal barge from which the King listened with close friends, including the Duchess of Bolton, the Duchess of Newcastle, the Countess of Godolphin, Madam Kilmarnock, and the Earl of Orkney. George I was said to have enjoyed the suites so much that he made the exhausted musicians play them three times over the course of the outing.

Well, that's part of the story. Clearly, there were multiple occasions for which music was written, which somehow eventually came together into a published version that almost raised more questions than it answered.

Handel and King George I on the Thames River for the premiere of the Water Music, July 17, 1717, as painted by Edouard Jean Conrad Hamman (1819–88).


TO TOUR HANDEL'S ROYAL FIREWORKS
MUSIC AND WATER MUSIC, CLICK HERE

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