Handel on the Beach? Classical Music's Murky Waters
June 2010
With summer occasionally peeking out its golden head from behind the clouds these days, we have the seaside on our minds. Whether it’s a beach in the Med, Scotland’s craggy coastline or a perfectly chilled lake in cottage country, we’re sure water will figure in lots of Dilettantes’ holidays this year.
That got us thinking about water music, naturally. Not just the Handel kind, of course, with its three suites written for one of King George I’s society river parties, but the many other classical works that were inspired by H2O, along with those that evoke it.
For instance, it was on a trip to that craggy Scottish coastline that Mendelssohn first came upon Fingal’s Cave whose weird echoes inspired his Hebrides Overture. The work in turn lured the tourist hordes, including Queen Victoria according to the folks at Wikipedia.
In fact, a little digging leads to the rather interesting discovery that many of the composers who wrote works ‘about’ water weren’t actually inspired by the clear liquid at all. Take Vaughan Williams’s A Sea Symphony, for instance. Turns out the composer’s longest symphony was actually inspired by a poem by the American Walt Whitman, in which the ‘sea voyage’ is a metaphor for one’s journey through life.
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