His claim to the throne was tenuous at best, as there were more than 50 people more closely related to Anne George became the heir because everyone ahead of him in the line of succession was Catholic, and therefore barred from taking the throne. George I had ascended to the throne in 1714 on the death of Queen Anne, his second cousin. The piece is a three-part suite, including a Hornpipe in the second suite, which is a nod to the maritime setting as well as sending a political message. Handel rose to the occasion, producing a piece that worked on a grand scale, to be played by 50 musicians, a huge number at the time, and that would carry across the water too. In the summer of 1717, King George I planned an event consisting of a vast royal flotilla going down the river Thames – and Handel was commissioned to write music to accompany it. Unlike Pachelbel’s Canon in D, we know exactly why Handel’s Water Music was written and why. George Frideric Handel – Water Music (1717) The first performance of Handel’s Water Music was commemorated in this painting by Edouard Hamman. It appears in songs from ‘Welcome to the Black Parade’ by My Chemical Romance to ‘Don’t Look Back in Anger’ by Oasis so even if you don’t think you’ve heard this piece, you’ve almost certainly heard something that sounds a good deal like it. One thing that’s particularly fun about the Canon in D Major is that its chord progression – I-V-vi-iii-IV-I-IV-V – has inspired or been ripped off by so much pop music that Pete Waterman has described it as “almost the godfather of pop music”. It’s been suggested that it was originally written for a wedding – that of Johann Christoph Bach, older brother of the composer Johann Sebastian Bach, who was one of Pachelbel’s pupils. It didn’t actually take Pachelbel twenty-six years to write the piece, but its date of composition can’t be narrowed down to anything more precise than the second half of the composer’s lifetime. The oldest piece on our list is one of the best known, not least because of its popularity at weddings where the traditional Bridal March can sound a bit slow and grim, Pachelbel’s Canon in D Major is sprightlier and happier-sounding. Johann Pachelbel – Canon in D Major (1680-1706) Pachelbel’s most famous composition has become a favourite at weddings. We’ve included the top ten pieces of classical music that nearly everyone will have heard at some point, whether by seeking them out in performance, or incidentally at an event or on TV, and filled in some of the back story that you might like to know. Yet just as understanding the historical context of a novel can make its story more interesting, so too can knowing more about the background of a piece of music make it more interesting to listen to. You may well not know when the pieces were written, much about who wrote them, or anything at all about what inspired them or why they sound the way they do. Unless you’ve studied music or played in an orchestra, much of your exposure to classical music is likely to come from film scores, adverts and perhaps a wedding or two.
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