ABSTRACT
In the last fifty years the Water Music, first played at the famous royal water-party on the River Thames on 17 July 1717, has become one of Handel's most popular instrumental works. It has been recorded many times, and widely performed; yet there is no modern edition of it that prints the movements in the order in which they appear in the earliest sources. The Water Music was probably not much played in this period; the work came into some sort of prominence in Great Britain in a modern re-orchestration of six of its movements in1920 by Sir Hamilton Harty. Anthony Hicks has suggested21 that a change occurred, when the original circumstances of the Water Music's performance no longer applied, and that copies were made which divided the movements into manageable groups, each with its own individual instrumentation, so that they could be performed separately.
