Handel: Water Music/Royal Fireworks Music

I recently acquired this

These are two of the most brilliant pieces of light music ever written, and are particular favourites of mine. I'm a big devotee of Pinnock's 1983 Water Music and my favourite Fireworks goes back to the old Jean-François Paillard all-wind version of about a million years ago. So now along comes something to challenge them both.

This recording is about 15 years old, but has been remastered and issued on hybrid CD-SACD. It really is rather good, nicely played and crisply recorded, the original instruments caught very nicely.

The Water Music will take some getting used to for me. Why? Because it is quite a different arrangement. For a long time, only Sir Hamilton Harty's (shortened) arrangement was played, and then, with the upsurge in interest in baroque music in the 1960s, this was filled out with other bits, until there emerged a new "standard" version (the one used by Pinnock). This is the one I'm used to, and to hear the bits I think of as "the end" coming at the beginning is odd. Of course, nobody knows exactly what was played on that day, and it is likely that different suites (sharing some material) were played at different parts of the King's aquatic excursion. So, this version is as "correct" as any other. And of course the individual bits are marvellous, no matter what the order.

The order for the Fireworks is well known, the only problem being, strings or no strings? The original was all "military" instruments (the King's express wish), but Handel added strings to later performing versions. It all bounces along nicely, with the centrepiece, La Réjouissance, being particularly effective.

Highly recommended.

 

Hello, Tones.

I don't know Savall's version, but I somewhat doubt his style is adequate to so brilliant and energetic pieces.

Instrumentation apart, what do you think? Let's say how does he compare to Gardiner's version?

 

I think you might be surprised, Rodrigo. His treatment is often more energetic than Pinnock's, and that's saying something. I am somewhat of a fan of Gardiner, yet I found his version lacking in comparison with Pinnock, which has to this point remained my reference. I've just got to get my head around this rearrangement of Savall's! Somehow, to me, the usually accepted arrangement of the individual pieces has a nice symmetry about it.

The other slightly disconcerting thing about Savall, which I forgot to mention, is his use of timpani, something I've heard in no other version, and which, while completely at home in the Fireworks Music, seems somehow wrong for a leisurely royal cruise on the river with a suite based on the bourrées, hornpipes and gavottes of the day.

 

Thank you! I will try and listen to it: I always felt that timpani were indeed required. I am in a money saving mood, though... But then what is a few euros?

 

Interesting. Drums of any kind were martial instruments and I never saw them as fitting into the dance movements of the Water Music. (Although I've a feeling that Sir Hamilton Harty used timpani in his Water Music suite). But then, I guess, so were trumpets, and they're used in the Water Music.

 

As I do not associate drums with the military I never thought of it that way. I see drums in the same context as the 32' stops in the organ: impressive. Also, they do make the music jump forward.

As far as I know, trumpets, in the baroque, were associated with royalty (in Schütz, for instance). Royalty was martial, of course, aristocracy being the remnant of the power though the sword. So in that sense, both trumpets and drums are martial. However, Bach gives us many examples of the dignity that can be extracted from these 'noble' instruments. Just think of the Dona Nobis Pacem (which, of course, is another kind of music from the Water and Fireworks, but I use it as an example that drums and trumpets can be used for expressing deep and non martial feelings).

 

Trumpets started life as a military signalling instrument - the high, clear tone could pierce the noise of battle, when battlefields were relatively small in area. As kings led in war, the association with royalty followed. The trick of playing in the clarino register, apparently discovered by the town trumpeters of Bologna in the 15th century, meant that they could play music, but only if played in this very high register. As "royal" instruments, I believe that trumpeters and drummers were seated slightly higher than the rest of the orchestra and in baroque music scores, their lines are at the top, rather than the violins, as is the modern custom. Bach's trumpet and drum use seemed to try to echo the glory of God - the Donna Nobis Pacem of the B Minor is a good example of this. One of the best is the triple Gloria of the Magnificat, where the Holy Spirit gets the musical equivalent of three cheers as the trumpets rise out of the orchestra and soar into the stratosphere. Truly a spine-chilling moment.

 

Nice clarification - typical of your knowledge of everything!

We once discussed the Magnificat. I very seldom listen to it because I cannot stand the: Sícut erát in princípio; In principío, ... et in saeculá saeculorúm, etc. The e'rat, the princi'pio, the saecu'la and saeculo'rum sound worse to me than bad notes!

I often wonder why no one ever corrected the monstrosity. If I could type music here, I'd give the correct version.

You told me that as a non native neo-latinate speaker it doesn't bother you, and probably that happened with Bach himself, but for me it sounds something like: 'this is how it was at the begi'ning; and so for cen'toories and cen'toories...' Horrible, and I cannot take it seriously.

The very sound of 'Per saecula saeculorum' (as indeed the sound of the word Ewigkeit in Schütz's Schwanengesang) is spine chilling to me. Saeculá, saeculoroom seems almost blasphemous...

I'm straying, of course. But then it's late...

 

Your straying is always interesting, Rodrigo. Alas, I'm not such a linguist as yourself, so I am immune to this particular barbarity. But sticking to trumpets and drums and returning to Handel, have you ever heard his "Ode to St. Cecelia's Day"? One of the most exciting (and simultaneously corny) parts is the militaristic "The trumpet's loud clangour", for tenor and chorus:

The trumpet's loud clangour excites us to arms,
With shrill notes of anger and mortal alarms,
The double-double-double beat,
Of the thund'ring drum,
Cries hark! Hark! Cries hark the foes come!
Charge! Charge! Charge! Charge!
'Tis too late, 'tis too late to retreat!
Charge 'tis too late, too late to retreat!

I think it's hilarious. But the music makes it really exciting, with Handel, the born dramatist, really strutting his stuff. The relentless timpani strokes under those cries of "Hark!" really add excitment and tension, a sort of

Hark!
(Boom-boom-boom-boom-boom-boom-boom-boom)
Hark!
(Boom-boom-boom-boom-boom-boom-boom-boom)

with each Hark! rising in pitch while the drum thunders relentlessly beneath and the trumpets soaring behind. Brilliant stuff. Ol' George Frideric certainly knew how to write a chorus.

 

Yes, splendid! The Xerxes Largo is also something. The music is sublime, one of the most marvelous tunes I ever heard, but the words are just incredible:

Ombra mai fù/ di vegetabile,/ cara ed amabile,/ soave più.

Never (ne'er, perhaps) was a shade dearer, kindler and gentler

even if we disregard the use of 'vegetable' (it was current until perhaps the 19th century when referring to big trees - you certainly know this, Tones!), it is bizarre in the extreme to make a love song to a plane tree (even if I dearly love plane trees!)

It is almost madly comic to listen to Caruso or Kathleen Ferrier (one in feverish anguish, the other in deep gloom and tragedy) singing those words... yet the tune is perfect. Haendel really had a sense for melody that is quite unsurpassed by Bach.

 

One of the funniest things of all, Rodrigo, is that the Largo, because of the sheer beauty of the tune, was and is very popular at weddings in the English-speaking world, where it is played with enormous solemnity, the congregations (and usually organist too, I suspect) being blissfully aware that Xerxes is a comic opera and that it's a serenade to a tree!

GF certainly could write a good tune, and nobody could write a chorus quite like him. As befits a composer one-third of whose output was Italian operas, he understood the human voice very well and wrote magnificently for it.

 

Yes, I think organists do not know the words. I only learned them because I am planting oriental plane trees right now...

In a way, the words very often detract from what we experience in music. Take, for instance, Schumann's lieder. For someone (like me) who has forgotten almost all of his German, the music is beautiful. Then we think 'with all this pathos, the verses must be magnificently moving'. And it turns out to be about a beautiful girl that decided to become a nun, or a nightingale that keeps singing. Sometimes, the poem is indeed very beautiful to our modern minds and the music does magnificent justice to it. But very often, the distance between the world views of the romantic poets and ourselves is just too big. Even if we manage to put ourselves into their own world views, the process is somewhat fabricated (there is a better word, but it is eluding my memory: is it contrived?). More or less the same happens when we go to Greece, see a load of dilapidated buildings and try to see them as they were 2000 years ago and then praise their purity of lines, precisely what they have not because it's all broken down. It's not natural, it is forced and I always think I am pretending to like what really is just a heap of rubbish.

Returning to the poems, I know many people who do not like religious music because of that: they cannot understand the ways emotion is expressed (for me this is often true in Bach's music: I don't quite remember which, but some librettos are not to my taste; and, of course, there are those horribly vulgar eager steps of the Soul in St. Johns Passion).

As I said, sometimes I have the choice to ignore the meaning (and in the Saint John, if I can, to fast forward until the next Evangelist entry or Choir). But it seems that words and attitudes get old more quickly than music. I may be mistaken. Perhaps the old fellows listened to something completely different to what we like in their music.

And this is why I am very often at adds with the HIP performances.

As I am again straying, I'll just put a stop to it.

 

As I said, Rodrigo, your straying is invariably interesting. And the point you make about lyrics is a good one. Beethoven did some Scottish songs. The libretti were provided for him, and he provided the music, brilliant, strong Beethoven stuff - but because he actually hadn't a clue what it all meant, the music is sometimes gloriously inappropriate for the words!

Let's face it, when it comes to writing meaningful lyrics, the librettists of days gone by were sometimes no better than modern pop song writers. The difference lay in the quality of the music itself, which was generally better back then. The Bachs and Handels didn't provide their own texts, they just provided the music. It results in some oddities. One of the most loved parts of Messiah (and rightly so) is the gorgeous aria "I know that my Redeemer liveth". What most people don't realise is that the actual quote:

I know that my Redeemer liveth
And that he shall stand on the latter day upon the earth
And though worms destroy this body
Still in my flesh shall I see God

- truly magnificent lines that they are - are taken from the Book of Job, and have been completely pulled out of context and stuck on to a piece from Corinthians and made to say something that they were never meant to say. I guess Charles Jennens (who wrote the libretto) was desperate.

 

My main memory of that piece of verse is Schütz's version of it. It is very impressive.

I can't recollect the context of the words in the Bible. But of course if it is from the book of Job... I would listen to The Messiah itself, but my records are in total disarray, scattered between three houses and 5 rooms... I don't know where it is.

Now I'll stray, not too much, this time . I think the Old Testament (many parts of it) provide some of the most beautiful lyrics in the world. In a sense it has to do with the powerful psychological insight the Old Testament abounds in. Perhaps we, as westerners, are used to this kind of writing and therefore like it, but I wouldn't be too sure. We were all brought up on Homer and I detest his writing: shallow, merely descriptive and psychologically nil. The old testament is quite the contrary: what it does not show it makes us guess and the guesses are clued so the meaning is more powerful than words. (This is not an original opinion: it is from Auerbach's Mimesis, but I agree).

The Bible really is a wonderful book - I mean it in literary terms; of course it is a wonderful book, indeed The Book.

 

Especially, in the English-speaking world, the Authorised ("King James") Version, which, with its cadenced phrasing, is a literary masterpiece. There are times when the language simply takes flight. Two examples that come to mind are Psalm 23

The Lord is my shepherd
I shall not want

and I Corinthians 13:

Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels and have not charity [love], I am become a sounding brass or a tinkling cymbal.

 

Tones, can you please post the catalogue number of the CD? Thanks.

 

You'll find it here, Dev:

http://www.amazon.com/Handel-Water-...=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=music&qid=1221825042&sr=1-1

Curiously, it doesn't appear to be available in either Amazon UK or Amazon DE; they only have references to the older (early '90s)versions that have been deleted.

 

Thanks Tony.