Handel on the Beach? Classical Music's Murky Waters

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, as well as 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.

Similarly, as we’ve noted here before, Beethoven’s 'Moonlight Sonata' was given its nickname by a critic for whom its opening passages brought to mind the texture of moonlight on Lake Lucerne in Switzerland.

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.

And with names like 'The Diver', 'The Captain' and 'On the Lake', you might be forgiven for thinking you-know-what was on Schubert’s mind when his songs about water were penned. But you’d probably be wrong. Instead, verse was also this composer’s muse, with works by Goethe and his lesser known contemporary, Friedrich Leopold zu Stolberg-Stolberg, providing Schubert’s stimulus.

Finally, there’s Elgar’s 'Sea Pictures', a cycle of five songs for contralto and orchestra. It seems these lovely pieces were the English composer’s successful attempt to dress up some decidedly pedestrian poems.

So the real lesson here is that while lots of classical works were circuitously inspired by water, the great composers really needed to get out more. Which is precisely what we intend to do very soon indeed.