Handel — Music for the Royal Fireworks | Water Music
Published in
3 min readMay 1, 2016
Splendid music for a joyous occasion: Handel’s Music for the Royal Fireworks premiered to an audience of more than 12,000 people celebrating the end of the war with France — and caused London’s first recorded traffic jam!
When?
Composed in 1749, the same year that…
- London magistrate Henry Fielding establishes the city’s first professional police force, a group affectionately known as the Bow Street Runners.
- Liverpool is Britain’s busiest slave-trading port, having overtaken Bristol two years earlier.
- Birth of the German writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, and of Edward Jenner, the English doctor who would invent the smallpox vaccine.
- In the US, Benjamin Franklin points out that lightning and electricity are so similar that they must be the same thing; three years later, he proves it by flying a kite with a metal key attached, during a thunderstorm, and receiving an electric shock.
Fast Facts
- Handel is famous as one of the greatest English composers, but he was actually born in Germany, and although he lived in England for more than 45 years and became an English citizen, he spoke with a strong German accent until his dying day.
- His two most famous works are the oratorio Messiah and the Coronation Anthem Zadok the Priest; all together, he wrote 42 operas, 29 oratorios, and more than 120 other pieces for solo voices and/or choir.
- His most famous instrumental pieces are the Water Music and the Music for the Royal Fireworks. Both are collections, or ‘suites’, of short pieces which are often modelled on popular French dance forms: elegant minuets, bourrées with their quicker steps, and the sprightly hornpipe. These suites would typically begin with an introduction or ‘Ouverture’ — French for ‘opening’.
- The Water Music is one of Handel’s early compositions; he had only been in England for three or four years, but his music was already a great favourite with the king, George I. It was written as entertainment for a royal boating party along the Thames River one summer’s evening in 1717. There were about 50 musicians in the orchestra; it’s still a bit of a mystery how they all fitted on the royal barge!
- Music for the Royal Fireworks was written quite late in Handel’s career, only a year or two before his eyesight began to fail and he stopped being able to compose. More than 12,000 people came to see the fireworks, which were put on to celebrate the end of the war with France — in fact, so many people had turned up to a public rehearsal of Handel’s music the day before, that they had caused London’s first traffic jam!
