Exactly what triggered King George I’s decision to mount a royal boat trip on the Thames in the summer of 1717 is uncertain.
Was it a desire to upstage his son, the Prince of Wales, a more charismatic and popular figure with whom he frequently argued? Or an attempt to bolster his social and constitutional standing at a period of considerable political unrest in the country? Perhaps he simply hankered for a pleasantly stress-free evening on the river, accompanied by his two mistresses and assorted ‘Persons of Quality’.
When was Handel’s Water Music first performed?
Whatever his precise motivation, on the evening of Wednesday 17 July 1717 a grand flotilla of boats assembled at Whitehall, headed by the King ‘in an open barge’. Beside him, in another barge, was clustered an orchestra of some 50 musicians, tuned and ready to play.
Presiding over them was the 32-year-old German composer George Frideric Handel, who for the previous five years had lived in England. A sequence of instrumental movements by Handel, later entitled the Water Music, was scheduled to provide the entertainment for the evening.
It was not the King’s first encounter with Handel’s music. Seven years previously Handel had briefly served as George’s Kapellmeister (director of music) at his electoral court in Hanover. George’s undiminished enthusiasm for Handel’s music made his former employee a natural choice for the boat trip commission.
In the event, Handel produced a total of 22 movements to be performed on the evening – ‘the finest Symphonies’, as a contemporary news report put it. Most are assumed to have been newly written by the composer, though some may have been recycled from earlier pieces.
What instruments are called for?
To match the splendour of the occasion, Handel truly pushed the boat out in terms of orchestral colouring and spectacle for his Water Music. A pair of horns was included – a novelty at that period in England – and they ring out imperiously in several of the movements.
Two trumpets were also present, adding their gleaming triumphal brightness to the mix. A dazzling sequence of dance movements – minuets, bourrées, rigaudons, gigues – kept the energy levels high. And, as a cap-doff to his country of residence, Handel even slotted in a pair of perky English hornpipes.
Quite what order the 22 movements were played in is not recorded, though they were subsequently arranged into three key-related suites for publishing purposes. What we know for sure is that King George was enraptured by the music he was hearing, as his barge headed the three miles upstream on a rising tide to Chelsea. ‘His Majesty’s approval of it was so great that he caused it to be played three times in all,’ wrote Friedrich Bonet, a contemporary observer, ‘even though each performance lasted an hour’.
How many performances did the Water Music get on that first river trip?
For the musicians, it was a long evening. The royal barge left Whitehall at 8pm, and two complete performances of the Water Music were given before the King disembarked for ‘a choice supper’ at Chelsea. Another run-through was demanded on the journey home, which began as late as two or three o’clock in the morning – ‘the Musick continuing to play’ until the King landed, as one newspaper reported.
The players were, it seems, decently remunerated for their efforts. £150 in total was spent on paying them, the equivalent of roughly £500 for each player in today’s money. What Handel himself was paid for writing the Water Music is not known, although the PR value of the occasion as a whole was undoubted. ‘The evening was as fine as could be desired,’ Bonet noted, ‘and the number of barges and boats full of people wanting to listen was beyond counting.’