Handel: Water Music and Music for the Royal Fireworks (review)

This is a level-headed account of Handel's two best-known orchestral pieces, carefully rooted in Christopher Hogwood's knowledge of both musical and contextual sources relating to them. As is typical and appropriate for the series in which it appears, the book is not bursting with original research. Indeed, its usefulness will probably be greatest to undergraduate students looking either for specific information on the music, or for a model of how to deal with a diverse range of historical materials—Hogwood's handling of the tortuous paper trail left by these pieces, in manuscript as well as in print, is as clear as it is thorough. However, he is necessarily writing for other audiences as well: on the one hand, researchers in fields ranging from performance practice to intertextuality will be interested in his perspective as a godfather of Historically Informed Performance (HIP); on the other hand, he directs certain passages at listeners and performers. While there is certainly material here that will engage all parties addressed, the pitching of the book at these different levels creates problems of overall coherence.

Hogwood situates the Water Music and Music for the Royal Fireworks in two contexts: first, they are set in relation to the political and social world in which they were generated; second, they are explored alongside Handel's other music, with particular emphasis on other orchestral writing. This strategy enables Hogwood both to present numerous evocative contemporary reports (and some attractive illustrations) and to attempt a holistic account of Handel's compositional technique. To do this, he invokes not only Handel's better-known choral and operatic works but also his Concerti a due cori, to which a short chapter is devoted.

The author's enthusiasm for all this repertory and its period of composition comes across in his imaginative readings. The grand state-sponsored events of the early Hanoverians are cast as early experiments in political 'spin'; Hogwood finds an analogy for such events in the much derided Millennium Dome. Handel's music is part of the razzle-dazzle intended to cement a divided royal family (in the case of the Water Music) and to endear a sceptical nation to a deeply unpopular treaty with France (the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle, whose signing was celebrated by Royal Fireworks). Perhaps Hogwood is guilty of some benign spinning himself: is it in order for him to sex up his story by implicating Handel as a spy in his early itinerant days? Whatever the reason, it all makes for a lively story into which episodes of specifically musical information are dropped.

Much of the book, naturally, is devoted to detailed descriptions of the two works that form its subject. These passages proceed with pedestrian regularity, movement by movement, bar by bar; they provide a systematic account of the music's sources, identifying problematic moments for editors. Amid all this, interpretative and analytical insights arise: structural similarities between movements written at opposite ends of Handel's career point towards real continuity in his rhetorical strategies. It is perhaps a shame that narrative supersedes the abstraction of key themes: such themes do emerge—for instance, Hogwood refers with some regularity to Handel's approach to thematicism, scoring, and rhythm—but readers are left to tease out the connections for themselves.

Sometimes the connection between Hogwood's two contexts—the social and the compositional— seems tenuous, particularly as he chooses to emphasize the non-programmatic, quasi-absolute aspects of the music. He writes that the Water Music was 'music on the water rather than about the water' (p. 17)—though pages later this is contradicted by the claim that the rigaudon, which is employed in numbers 14 and 15, had watery connotations for Mattheson and perhaps also for Handel. Hogwood is also keen to portray Handel's music as ideologically neutral, writing that because these pieces were 'politically generated', they were 'peripheral to Handel's main goals...