Making a Splash with Handel's Water Music
The Backstory

Living in a very nice house

In 1717, I was living a very comfortable life in London as a guest at Burlington House, thanks to the kindness of Richard Boyle, the 3rd Earl of Burlington. Later that same year, I would move on to Cannons in Middlesex to write music for James Brydges, the Earl of Carnarvon and future 1st Duke of Chandos, so I was certainly keeping busy. Before I left London, however, King George I decided he wanted a grand evening concert right out on the River Thames. When a monarch asks for floating music, you do not ask how you will keep your sheet music dry; you simply pick up your pen and start writing.

The royal party planner

The man who put the whole evening together was Baron Johann Adolf von Kielmansegg, who served as the King's Master of the Horse and was married to the King's half-sister, Sophia Charlotte. You might think a man in charge of royal horses would stick to dry land, but the Baron proved himself an admirable admiral for a night. He arranged for a large City barge to carry my players right alongside the royal barge so the King would not miss a single note. On the evening of 17 July 1717, King George I and several aristocrats stepped aboard at Whitehall Palace to set off toward Chelsea and back.

Leaving the furniture ashore

We packed about 50 musicians onto that boat, which made for a tighter squeeze than a London stagecoach in the rain. Because open water swallows up quiet sounds, I brought along two horns, two trumpets, two oboes, a bassoon, strings, a transverse flute, and a recorder or piccolo. Some people later claimed I had a harpsichord on board, but I left that behind because nobody could have heard its gentle plucking out in the night breeze anyway. Instead, my lower strings and bass wind instruments carried the foundation of the music all by themselves, and they never once complained about the damp air.

A long night for tired lungs

We learn from The Daily Courant and a report sent to Berlin by the Prussian envoy Friedrich Bonet that the King was thoroughly delighted with what we played. In fact, he enjoyed it so much that he ordered us to play the entire programme three times over, twice before supper and once more after. While the royal party dined and relaxed, my poor horn and trumpet players probably wondered if their lips would survive until sunrise. We did not finish our journey back until past 4:30 in the morning, which is a very late bedtime for fifty people holding wooden and brass instruments on a river.

A multi-course banquet on a boat

Since a whole evening of music needs variety, I built my Water Music out of many shorter sections called movements, which are really just like the separate courses of a big dinner where each dish has its own flavour. After the opening Overture sets a grand mood with its slow Largo and brisk Allegro, the rest of the feast brings out lively dances and tunes like minuets, bourrées, rigaudons, a sarabande, and gigues. Everyone always perks up for the warm, song-like Air, and also for my two energetic Hornpipe pieces—one in F major and the famous Alla Hornpipe in D major—where the strings and brass toss jaunty melodies back and forth. Across all these pieces, I moved between the keys of F major, D minor, D major, G major, and G minor, marking the pages with instructions like Adagio e staccato, Andante, Presto, Lentement, and Pomposo so the players knew just how to serve each course.

Sorting out the musical laundry

My original handwritten score for the complete work was eventually lost, so nobody knows the exact order we played those pieces on the river in 1717. In the early manuscripts and the first complete score from 1788, the pieces in F, D, and G major were all mingled together rather than kept apart by key. Later on, modern editors tidied everything up into three separate collections under the catalogue numbers HWV 348–350, like someone sorting a drawer of mixed socks by colour. Today you know them as the Suite in F major (the Horn Suite), the Suite in D major (the Trumpet Suite), and the Suite in G major (the Flute Suite), and all the instruments never actually play together in the same suite.

Rumours of a royal sulk

Years after I died, my biographer John Mainwaring wrote in 1760 that I composed this music as a secret peace offering because the King was angry with me for overstaying my leave from Hanover. It makes for a wonderfully dramatic tale, like sneaking a fresh pie onto the windowsill of a grumpy neighbour, but there is not a drop of truth in it. In reality, King George I and I were already on splendid terms long before we ever set foot near those barges in 1717. He had already welcomed me warmly at court, doubled my royal pension, and hired me to teach music to the royal princesses, although scholars still debate whether I wrote some of the F major pieces back in 1715 for an earlier river trip.

Taking my time with the printer

You could not simply walk into a London shop the next morning and buy the sheet music from our river trip, because it was not printed right away. It was not until around 1733 that the London publisher John Walsh printed the first partial orchestral edition, giving it the grand title The Celebrated Water Musick. Ten years after that, in 1743, an arrangement came out for the harpsichord, so people could finally play my river tunes in their own parlours where a keyboard actually belonged. As for the complete full score, the world had to wait until Samuel Arnold published it in 1788, long after I had played my final note.

New clothes for the twentieth century

Two hundred years after our night on the water, orchestra halls had grown much larger and the instruments inside them had changed quite a bit. In the early 1920s, the Irish conductor and composer Sir Hamilton Harty took six of my movements and dressed them up for a modern symphony orchestra. It was a bit like trading a comfortable eighteenth-century coat for a sleek modern suit, and for decades that was the version nearly everyone heard in concert halls. Eventually, musicians grew curious about how we actually sounded back in 1717, leading to a wonderful revival of performances on period instruments like the ones we carried onto the barge.

From royal barges to television sets

I never imagined my river tunes would travel through the air without any boats at all, yet they found some amusing new jobs in the twentieth century. From 1959 to 1988, British regional broadcaster Anglia Television used an abridged version of my Alla Hornpipe, arranged by Sir Malcolm Sargent, as its startup theme. Even further from London, since 1971, movements from the work have been lighting up the night in Walt Disney World's Electrical Water Pageant. I think King George I would be very pleased to know that the music he asked to hear three times in one night is still floating on the water centuries later.