Instruct: Given a question, retrieve relevant documents that can help answer the question.
Query: When did Handel write his Water Music Suite?
The Water Music is a collection of orchestral movements, often published as three suites, composed by George Frideric Handel. It premiered on 17 July 1717, in response to King George I's request for a concert on the River Thames.
Early in his life Handel is reported to have attended the gymnasium in Halle,[21] where the headmaster, Johann Praetorius, was reputed to be an ardent musician.[22] Whether Handel remained there or for how long is unknown, but many biographers suggest that he was withdrawn from school by his father, based on the characterization of him by Handel's first biographer, John Mainwaring. Mainwaring is the source for almost all information (little as it is) of Handel's childhood, and much of that information came from J.C. Smith, Jr., Handel's confidant and copyist.[23] Whether it came from Smith or elsewhere, Mainwaring frequently relates misinformation.[lower-alpha 7] It is from Mainwaring that the portrait comes of Handel's father as implacably opposed to any musical education. Mainwaring writes that Georg Händel was "alarmed" at Handel's very early propensity for music,[lower-alpha 8] "took every measure to oppose it", including forbidding any musical instrument in the house and preventing Handel from going to any house where they might be found.[25] This did nothing to dampen young Handel's inclination; in fact, it did the reverse. Mainwaring tells the story of Handel's secret attic spinet: Handel "found means to get a little clavichord privately convey'd to a room at the top of the house. To this room he constantly stole when the family was asleep".[26] Although both John Hawkins and Charles Burney credited this tale, Schoelcher found it nearly "incredible" and a feat of "poetic imagination"[27] and Lang considers it one of the unproven "romantic stories" that surrounded Handel's childhood.[28] But Handel had to have had some experience with the keyboard to have made the impression in Weissenfels that resulted in his receiving formal musical training.[29]
Opera seria, the form of Italian opera that Handel composed for London, focused overwhelmingly on solo arias and recitatives for the star singers and contained very little else; they did not feature separate choruses. With the English oratorios Handel had the opportunity to mix operatic arias in English for the soloists with large choruses of the type that he used in the Coronation anthems. Jennens provided a text with well-rounded characters and dramatic effects. The collaboration with Jennens was not without tension; Jennens referred in a letter to the "maggots" in Handel's head and complained that Handel wanted to end the work with a chorus of "Hallelujahs" that the librettist did not feel was appropriate as at the end of the piece Israel has been defeated in battle and the King and Crown Prince both killed, whereas the Hallelujahs would be suited to the celebrations at the opening of the work when David has killed Goliath. Jennens got his way; in the completed version "Saul" does not end with a chorus of "Hallelujahs" but there is such a chorus where Jennens had wanted one.
After Handel's death in 1759, his musical instruments passed to John Christopher Smith and his son of the same name: the father had been summoned from the continent by Handel to act as his copyist when Handel first arrived in London; and his son had acted as amanuensis and assistant when Handel's blindness prevented him from writing and conducting in his later years. The tenancy of the house and Handel's clothing passed to his servant John Du Burk. The detailed inventory, a transcript of which is now stored in the British Library, gives a clear guide as to how the house was decorated and used. Apart from the conversion of the garrets into a fourth storey in the 1830s, the house remained largely unchanged until 1905, when C. J. Charles converted the house into a shop, removing the original façade and the internal dividing walls. It was subsequently occupied by interior decorators and antiques dealers. In 1971 it was acquired by the Co-operative Insurance Society and the Handel House Trust has leased the upper storeys of the property since 2000.
By the 18th century, composers wrote airs for instrumental ensembles without voice. These were song-like, lyrical pieces, often movements in a larger composition. Johann Sebastian Bach composed two of the best known airs: the second movement of his "Suite No. 3 in D major", BWV 1068, which August Wilhelmj arranged for violin and piano as "Air on the G String"; and the theme of his "Goldberg Variations", BWV 988, the Air present also in Partitas BWV 825–830 harpsichord. The fifth movement of George Frideric Handel's "Suite in F Major", HWV 348, part of Handel's "Water Music" collection, is another frequently performed air.
In 1735 Handel received the text for a new oratorio named "Saul" from its librettist Charles Jennens, a wealthy landowner with musical and literary interests. Because Handel's main creative concern was still with opera, he did not write the music for "Saul" until 1738, in preparation for his 1738–39 theatrical season. The work, after opening at the King's Theatre in January 1739 to a warm reception, was quickly followed by the less successful oratorio "Israel in Egypt" (which may also have come from Jennens). Although Handel continued to write operas, the trend towards English-language productions became irresistible as the decade ended. After three performances of his last Italian opera "Deidamia" in January and February 1741, he abandoned the genre. In July 1741 Jennens sent him a new libretto for an oratorio; in a letter dated 10 July to his friend Edward Holdsworth, Jennens wrote: "I hope [Handel] will lay out his whole Genius & Skill upon it, that the Composition may excell all his former Compositions, as the Subject excells every other subject. The Subject is Messiah".
John Christopher Smith Jr. had a few lessons from Handel and Johann Christoph Pepusch but studied mostly with Thomas Roseingrave. He later became Handel's secretary, musical assistant and amanuensis, when blindness prevented Handel from writing or conducting in his later years. The last year when Handel conducted performances of his oratorios was 1752.
The earliest composer whose music Beecham regularly performed was Handel, whom he called, "the great international master of all time. ... He wrote Italian music better than any Italian; French music better than any Frenchman; English music better than any Englishman; and, with the exception of Bach, outrivalled all other Germans." In his performances of Handel, Beecham ignored what he called the "professors, pedants, pedagogues". He followed Mendelssohn and Mozart in editing and reorchestrating Handel's scores to suit contemporary tastes. At a time when Handel's operas were scarcely known, Beecham knew them so well that he was able to arrange three ballets, two other suites and a piano concerto from them. He gave Handel's oratorio "Solomon" its first performance since the 18th century, with a text edited by the conductor.
As with "Nero", it is possible that music from "Florindo" or "Daphne" was recycled by Handel for use in later works. The overture to the opera "Rodrigo" consists of eight French-style dances, which Cudworth believes might have begun life as ballet music in one or other of the lost Hamburg operas. In 1709–10 Handel composed the cantata "Apollo e Dafne", which has common ground with the earlier operas. Harris makes the point that when writing the cantata, Handel would have recalled his earlier setting, and perhaps borrowed from it. Dean and Knapp provide further example of works in which the "Florinda" and "Daphne" music may have re-emerged: the oratorio "Il trionfo del Tempo e del Disinganno" (1707); the opera "Radamisto" (1720); and the overture in B flat, HWV336, which Baselt conjectures might have been written as the overture to "Florindo". This last-named has been combined with HWV352–354 and HWV356 to form the "Suite from the operas Florindo and Daphne", which in 2012 was adapted and recorded by The Parley of Instruments under Peter Holman.
Beecham's last suite from Handel was arranged for a projected ballet, to be entitled "The Great Elopement". The scenario, conceived and written by Beecham, is loosely based on real events. Set in 18th-century Bath, it depicts the love affair and elopement of the playwright Richard Brinsley Sheridan and Elizabeth Linley (daughter of the composer Thomas Linley), in the elite society of Bath, presided over by the dandy Beau Nash. For financial reasons, the production of the ballet did not materialise, and Beecham instead incorporated the music into his concert programmes and recordings.
The Water Music composed by George Frideric Handel premiered on 17 July 1717, when King George I requested a concert on the River Thames. The concert was performed for King George I on his barge and he is said to have enjoyed it so much that he ordered the 50 exhausted musicians to play the suites three times on the trip.
Like "Switched-On Bach", the album was recorded on an 8-track Ampex tape recorder using numerous takes and overdubs. Carlos chose pieces from Handel's "Water Music" suites as the music contained passages that suited to the limitations of the Moog synthesizer.
Few of the letters and writings of George Frideric Handel remain today—certainly far fewer than remain for other major composers. Handel wrote relatively few letters and kept no diary, yet those letters that do remain provide insight into the various aspects of Handel's life. One reason for the small number of surviving letters is that Handel did not hold any office that would require the collecting and saving of his records and writings.
After Handel's death, many composers wrote works based on or inspired by his music. The first movement from Louis Spohr's Symphony No. 6, Op. 116, "The Age of Bach and Handel", resembles two melodies from Handel's Messiah. In 1797 Ludwig van Beethoven published the 12 Variations in G major on ‘See the conqu’ring hero comes’ from Judas Maccabaeus by Handel, for cello and piano. In 1822 Beethoven composed The Consecration of the House overture, which also bears the influence of Handel. Guitar virtuoso Mauro Giuliani composed his Variations on a Theme by Handel, Op. 107 for guitar, based on Handel's Suite No. 5 in E major, HWV 430, for harpsichord.
Among the eight suites published for harpsichord in 1720, G. F. Handel published his Suite no. 5 in E Major, HWV 430. This suite consists of four movements: The Prelude, Allemande, Courante and Air and Variations; the first three movements having stylized dance rhythms. This suite was promulgated a year after Handel became Master of the Orchestra at the Royal Academy of Music, also known as the first Italian opera company in London. Handel lived the remainder of his life in London after leaving Germany to work as resident composer for Earl of Carnarvon.
The theme of the "Handel Variations" is taken from an aria in the third movement of Handel's Harpsichord Suite No. 1 in B Major, HWV 434 ("Suites de pièces pour le clavecin," published by J. Walsh, London 1733 with five variations). Brahms himself owned a copy of the 1733 First Edition. The appeal of the aria for Brahms might have been its simplicity: its range is restricted to one octave; the harmony is plain, with every note taken from the B-flat major scale; it "made an admirably neutral starting-place". While Handel had written only five variations on his theme, Brahms, with the piano as his instrument rather than the more limited harpsichord, enlarged the scope of his opus to 25 variations ending with an extended fugue. Brahms's use of Handel exemplifies his love of the music of the past and his tendency to incorporate it and transform it in his own compositions.
Greenaway was one of the composers commissioned to write music for the Thames Diamond Jubilee Pageant in 2012 in honour of the Diamond Jubilee of Elizabeth II. The piece, entitled "The New Water Music", was inspired by the George Frederic Handel's Water Music and contained movements by several modern British composers working under the direction of Greenaway. After the pageant, Greenaway was critical of the BBC coverage of the pageant as the live broadcast did not feature the performance at all. In his personal blog, he expressed the view that the presenters had focused on interviewing celebrities while ignoring the musicians completely.
Although there is no extant music that can be positively identified with "Nero", there is a possibility that some of it may have been used in later works. John E. Sawyer, in his analysis of "Agrippina", reveals that this work, composed five years after "Nero" with similar characters, "contains the highest proportion of borrowed material of any of the composer's major dramatic works", and Dean and Knapp speculate as to whether it also incorporates borrowings from "Nero". According to the Handel scholar Charles Cudworth, the suite of dances that follows the overture to Handel's 1707 opera "Rodrigo" (his first after leaving Hamburg), could very well have begun as ballet music in "Nero" or another of the lost Hamburg operas. The musicologist Bernd Baselt has raised the possibility that Handel's Harpsichord Suite in G Minor, HWV 453, is an arrangement of the overture to "Nero". A version of this suite, reconstructed for orchestra by Peter Holman, is included in a selection of Handel's Hamburg music, issued by Hyperion Records in January 2012.
Handel also seemed to use and understand "notes inégales" in many of his works. However, like often in the French literature, there are also inconsistencies which have never been fully explained where dots start and then stop for no clear reason, but as Newman has observed, mostly this happens towards the approach to cadences. But in general, in many of his suites, and even his orchestral music, the application of "notes inégales" finds a solid home in Handel. Most obvious are in some of the Ouvertures, but there are many movements where a subtle "notes inégales" works well, such as in the Sarabande of the E Minor suite (from the set of Eight Great Suites; his earliest compilation); and numerous Menuets throughout his keyboard and even some of his orchestral works. Even in his orchestral music, and vocal music, Handel can have some very "French" moments – some of the menuets in particular, keyboard as well as orchestral, can work well with a subtle "notes inégales", despite Handel's very intercontinental lineage. Whether in Germany or England, he was clearly a master at the French "notes inégales" as well as the Ouverture style. He was strongly influenced by Georg Muffat's nephew, who will be discussed below, and perhaps that is a part of Handel's reception of the French Style of playing. And occasionally one finds movements that don't seem necessarily "French", as over the years, Handel did develop a very strong "English" style that was unique to him, but nonetheless, sound very much more "revealed" when subjected to "notes inégales" aka inequality procedure.
The later addition of an overture to make up an "overture-suite" was extremely popular with German composers; Telemann claimed to have written over 200 overture-suites, J. S. Bach had his four orchestral suites along with other suites, and Handel put his "Water Music" and "Music for the Royal Fireworks" in this form.
Handel wrote several bourrées in his solo chamber sonatas (for example the fourth movement of his Oboe sonata in C minor); however, perhaps his best-known is the seventh movement of the "Water Music" (Handel) suite.
To a large extent, Bach's musical style fits in the conventions of his day, which is the final stage of the baroque style. When his contemporaries such as Handel, Telemann and Vivaldi wrote concertos he did so too. When they wrote suites, he did so too. Similar with recitatives followed by da capo arias, four-part choral music, use of basso continuo etc. The specifics of his style lie with characteristics such as his skill in contrapuntal invention and motivic control and his talent for writing tightly woven music of powerful sonority. From an early age, he imbued himself with the compositions of his contemporaries and of prior generations, all of what was available from European composers, such as the French, the Italian, and those from all parts of Germany, and there is little of it that didn't appear in his own music.
Beecham was among the few who were familiar with Handel's operatic works. He owned scores of thirty-seven of the forty-two surviving operas, and annotated them extensively. He frequently programmed individual arias from them in his concerts. In addition to this, he believed that another effective way of bringing Handel's forgotten operatic music before the public was to arrange the best of it into concert or ballet suites for large modern orchestras. Like Mozart before him, he had no hesitation in reorchestrating Handel's music to match the available orchestral forces and current musical tastes:
Beecham, maintaining that Handel "revelled in great demonstrations of sound", said he feared that "without some effort along these lines, the greater portion of his magnificent output will remain unplayed, possibly to the satisfaction of drowsy armchair purists, but hardly to the advantage of the keenly alive and enquiring concertgoer." 
Burney was aware of George III's preference for Handel when in 1785 he wrote in his account of the 1784 Handel Commemoration that "in his full, masterly and excellent organ-"fugues", upon the most natural and pleasing subjects, he has surpassed Frescobaldi, and even Sebastian Bach, and others of his countrymen, the most renowned for abilities in this difficult and elaborate species of composition." His account was translated into German by Hiller. Writing anonymously in the "Allgemeine Deutsche Bibliothek" in 1788, C.P.E. Bach angrily responded that "there is nothing to be seen but partiality, and of any close acquaintance with the principal works of J.S. Bach for organ we find in Dr. Burney's writings no trace." Undeterred by such comments in 1789, a year after C.P.E. Bach's death, Burney echoed Scheibe's earlier comparison of Bach and Handel when he wrote in his "General History of Music":
At the end of his manuscript Handel wrote the letters "SDG"—', "To God alone the glory". This inscription, taken with the speed of composition, has encouraged belief in the apocryphal story that Handel wrote the music in a fervour of divine inspiration in which, as he wrote the "Hallelujah" chorus, "he saw all heaven before him". Burrows points out that many of Handel's operas, of comparable length and structure to "Messiah", were composed within similar timescales between theatrical seasons. The effort of writing so much music in so short a time was not unusual for Handel and his contemporaries; Handel commenced his next oratorio, "Samson", within a week of finishing "Messiah", and completed his draft of this new work in a month. In accordance with his frequent practice when writing new works, Handel adapted existing compositions for use in "Messiah", in this case drawing on two recently completed Italian duets and one written twenty years previously. Thus, ' from 1722 became the basis of "O Death, where is thy sting?"; "His yoke is easy" and "And he shall purify" were drawn from ' (July 1741), "Unto us a child is born" and "All we like sheep" from ' (July 1741). Handel's instrumentation in the score is often imprecise, again in line with contemporary convention, where the use of certain instruments and combinations was assumed and did not need to be written down by the composer; later copyists would fill in the details.