Handel's Water Music, Adapted For The Harpsichord, Or Organ. [Hwv 349]. [Keyboard Arrangement] Handel, George Frideric 1685-1759 New Arrivals

One bifolium. 4 pp. With imprint to foot of final page. Comprising three movements including an Adagio, [no tempo indication], and a March (the adagio and march are not included in what has become, in modern times, the standard version of the suite; see note below from Grove Music Online regarding suite groupings). Slightly worn, soiled, and stained, mostly to margins; horizontal tear repaired with early thread to first leaf; sewing holes to gutters. Rare. Smith p. 260. BUC p. 443. RISM H1325 and HH1325 (no copies in the U.S.). "The major orchestral work of this period is the Water Music, a large-scale suite specially written to accompany a royal water party of June 1717, in which George I and his entourage were conveyed by barge along the Thames from Whitehall to Chelsea and back. The suite is remarkable for being the first orchestral work composed in England to include horns, crooked in both F and D; in movements in D major they are joined, sometimes in dialogue, by trumpets. The jovial opulence of such moments is balanced by lightly scored movements in both major and minor keys, mostly having G as their tonic. Though some of the music may have been written earlier for other contexts, the recent notion that the music was conceived or considered to exist as 'three suites' is questionable, since the earliest sources (keyboard transcripts from the early 1720s) show the movements in D and G in mixed order (as in the editions of Arnold and Chrysander). Ordering the movements by key had however become a practice by the 1730s, and is reflected in the keyboard arrangement published by Walsh in 1743." Anthony Hicks in Grove Music Online An elegant keyboard arrangement of three movements from Handel's celebrated Water Music.