Handel’s Water Music and Music for the Royal Fireworks: A Cambridge Handbook Review
The Cambridge Music Handbooks series has expanded to more than forty volumes, each focused on a single celebrated work—from Monteverdi’s Vespers to the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. The series aims to provide accessible introductions to major compositions, written by leading experts, and to serve concert-goers, performers, and students alike. A typical volume blends historical context with musical analysis. The series’ popularity is borne out by an informal survey that found more than half the copies in one university library checked out mid-semester.
This particular handbook benefits from an author uniquely able to speak with authority to a varied audience. Christopher Hogwood founded and long directed the Academy of Ancient Music, placing him among the first generation of musicians committed to Historically Informed Performance. He was also an accomplished conductor of opera and twentieth-century repertoire, maintained scholarly pursuits through several books (including the wide-ranging social history Music at Court), and edited numerous editions of eighteenth-century music. His earlier work on Handel includes a full biography translated into multiple languages, plus many performing editions.
Both Water Music and Music for the Royal Fireworks stand as orchestral exceptions within Handel’s predominantly vocal output of operas and oratorios. Each consists of a suite of small movements derived from traditional dance forms, and both were created for outdoor performances that tied the composer directly to the English court. Water Music accompanied a royal boat trip on the Thames during the reign of George I, while Music for the Royal Fireworks marked the grand celebration in Green Park for the end of the War of the Austrian Succession and the signing of the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle. Treating the two works together makes perfect sense, although Hogwood handles them separately.
The book’s core consists of detailed musical analysis focusing on thematic connections, formal structures, and discrepancies among manuscript and printed sources. For Water Music there is also substantial consideration of which movement order to adopt in performance. Preceding these analytical chapters are excellent summaries of the social and political context for each work, covering the circumstances of composition, first performances, and intended audiences. Hogwood includes brief chapters on Handel as a person, questions of performance practice, and the ongoing debate about Handel’s borrowings from other composers. One additional chapter—discussing the concertos for two choirs of wind instruments—struck this reviewer as somewhat tangential to the volume’s focus.
The book’s great strength lies in Hogwood’s practical and original observations on performance issues, which will most benefit those studying and performing the works. Much of the content is directed at performers, extending well beyond the designated chapter on “performance parameters” near the end. Readers will find it useful to have a full score of the works on hand while reading. General readers and eighteenth-century specialists in fields other than music will be drawn to the two chapters synthesizing recent research on the intersection of politics and the arts. These discussions are cogently written and incorporate much interesting scholarship from the last two decades. By contrast, Hogwood’s full biography of Handel devoted only one page to each of these works. Here, the complete story of their connections to the social milieu and political intrigues of the day is explored in depth, drawing heavily on primary sources.
Despite its strengths, the volume would have benefited from more careful and imaginative editing. The dense material on provenance, the primacy of sources, and the ordering of movements across various manuscripts and early printed editions could have been presented with clearer graphics to clarify relationships and help the reader follow the explanatory text. It is also high time the series considered adding an audio CD to each volume, containing a full performance and recorded examples. Such an addition would greatly reinforce the points made for those not expert at reading scores. On the whole, though, this book offers extremely rich insights from a master musician for conductors and performers interested in these works, as well as an informative account of their historical circumstances for the broader readership.