A life in letters: Water Music

A collection of movements for orchestra composed by George Frederick Handel after King George I requested a concert on the River Thames.  It was first performed on 17 July 1717 by 50 musicians on a barge close to the royal barge.

The Water Music was part of my life from an early age. When I had piano lessons in my early teens I learned to play a few of the pieces in simplified piano arrangements published in The Lilac Series.

One of my abiding memories of mornings in the mid-1960s is of waking up and turning on the radio beside my bed. It was tuned to the BBC Home Service which at that time didn’t begin transmitting until around ten to seven. I’d lie listening to the crackle and hiss of static which was all you could hear when the station was off air waiting for the moment when the chaos would be abruptly dissolved by the first notes of the Air from Handel’s Water Music which began each day’s transmissions.