Notes researched & written by Joan Olsson
GEORG F. HANDEL
1685 — 1893
WATER MUSIC 1715, 1717, 1736
Water Music is a collection of orchestral movements commissioned by newly crowned King George to be performed on the River Thames. Fifty musicians playing on a barge floating next to the royal barge provided the music while the King listened with royal friends and associates. George I was said to have enjoyed the music and ordered the exhausted musicians to play the suite music before and after dinner in the course of an outing. In recognition of the composer’s music, the pleased king bestowed on Handel a life pension of two hundred pounds.
Examination of the three separate suites reveals that the whole of Water Music consists of 22 separate numbers written at different times. All kinds of instruments were used: trumpets, hunting horns, oboes, bassoons, German flutes, French fluts a bec, violins and basses. Perhaps because neither an authorized first edition or complete autograph-extant exists, the movements of the three suites are often intermingled for each performance. In their original presentation it is thought that slow, soft music was performed when the King’s barge and the orchestral barge were close together. Louder, brisk numbers were played when the barges drifted apart.
Water Music incorporates elements of Arcangelo Corelli’s music for strings, combined with the more fashionable features of the high Baroque French dance suite.