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From: Chapter 16. Guns to Good Effect
Exactly when Handel was asked to compose, or when he did compose, his Royal Fireworks Music is not known, but word of his intentions and other gossip about the event spread, especially among the upper classes. In a letter by a Hanover Square neighbor of Handel’s, Mrs. Susan Archer, to her friend Lydia Catherine, the Duke of Chandos’s wife, Mrs. Archer says she is anticipating hearing Handel’s music, but adds, “His Majesty I hear is excessively out of Humour about the Fire Works.... I believe a good many people will lose their hearing...; there will be 26 Cannons & 3 Barrils of Gunpowder go [off] at once & ... Handell proposes his Musick shall be heard at the same time.” Wisely, in the actual event, the music was heard before the fireworks went off.
The rehearsal at Vauxhall Gardens (without fireworks) involving Handel’s “band” of one hundred performers was itself an auspicious event. Originally scheduled for April 17, the rehearsal was finally held at noon on April 21 so that the Duke of Cumberland could be there (the General Advertiser had been keeping the public informed of the shifting dates). Astonishingly, 12,000 people paid half a crown each to hear the music rehearsed and to get a feel for the spectacle. This snarled traffic on London Bridge for three hours, perhaps the first traffic jam in history. The next day, the General Advertiser remarked on “the brightest and most numerous Assembly ever known at the Spring Garden, Vauxhall.” The paper then tantalized its readers with this curious tidbit: “Several Footmen who attended their Masters, &c. Thither, behaved very saucily, and were justly corrected by the Gentlemen for their Insolence.”
There were equally huge numbers of people at the April 27 celebration. For us modern people used to massive crowds, the words of a Mr. Byrom in a letter to his wife on fireworks night puts this in mid-eighteenth century perspective: “I have before my eyes such a concourse of people as to be sure I never have or shall see again....” The pavilion, envisioned and realized by a theater stage designer, had steps leading to “a grand Area before the Middle Arch,” the whole structure being “extremely neat and pretty and grand to look at.” Handel’s one-hundred players performed from the area in front of the middle arch. The more privileged onlookers sat on scaffolding in order to get a good view of the proceedings and the fireworks.
Handel’s music evidently went off without a hitch. However, the music having been played in the open air, the presence of the huge crowd and all the other goings-on allowed only those up close to hear it well, despite the hundred-member band. As part of a description of the King walking informally in the area, George Harris recorded in his diary: “...He walk’d up to the frame, & soon after[,] the music began playing from the centre, which was in a manner lost.--He heard some of it,
& then walked back to the Library.”
If the audibility of the music was a problem, there were far more serious problems with the fireworks. “One or two” of the “rockets ... took a wrong direction, & turned off horizontal & fell among the spectators & did some mischief,” wrote Harris. Part of the great wooden structure caught fire, putting “all things into confusion.” It took about an hour to extinguish the blaze – “with the help of engines.” Fortunately, no one died in the fire, but one woman in the Duke of Montagu’s box was badly burned after her hat and clothes caught fire. However, at least two other people died in accidents at the event: one man drowned in a nearby pond; another missed his footing at the top of the fireworks “machine” and pitched to the ground. Unfortunately we have no record of Handel’s own reaction to the event, including the unusual rehearsal. He did, however, find other occasions to use the Royal Fireworks Music. Along with the Water Music, it has survived to our day as his most popular orchestral music and is, appropriately enough, increasingly being used in connection with fireworks displays.
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