The Harmonious Blacksmith

The Harmonious Blacksmith is the popular name of the final movement, Air and variations, of George Frideric Handel's Suite No.

Around the time of 1720, G. F. Handel had just left his native land of Germany to London, accepting his new position at the Royal Academy of Music.

[2] It has been suggested that the move to Cannons was related to the fact that in 1717 there was reduced demand for his services in central London because operatic productions were experiencing a temporary downturn.

At the end of Handel's stay at Cannons, the Duke and his friends helped him establish a new opera company in London, the so-called Royal Academy of Music.

This suite was promulgated a year after Handel became Master of the Orchestra at the Royal Academy of Music, also known as the first Italian opera company in London.

[4] Handel lived the remainder of his life in London after leaving Germany to work as resident composer for Earl of Carnarvon.

Henry Wylde and Richard Clark then found an old anvil in a smithy near Whitchurch, Edgware, and fabricated a story to identify William Powell as the fictitious blacksmith, when, in fact, he had been the parish clerk.

Handel had written his harpsichord suites of the 1720 publication before he lived at Cannons, when he was at Adlington Hall in Cheshire, or even earlier still.

The piece came to be called after him, probably because he published it under that name for reasons outlined in the following extract: A few months after Clark's publication the writer saw the late J.W.

He printed the movement in a detached form, because he could sell a sufficient number of copies to make a profit.Chappell was a respected musical historian and the story is probably true, but there is no copy of Lintern's edition of the piece in the British Museum, and Mr W. C. Smith, who worked at the museum and was a Handelian specialist of high standing, said that the earliest copy of the piece that he had yet (as of 1940) been able to find under the name The Harmonious Blacksmith was that published by the British Harmonic Institution, arranged as a piano-forte duet, the paper of which bears the watermark '1819'.

Variation one includes the same motivic ideas and adds arpeggiation of the chords with focus on the tonic and dominant key, B major.

The same progression and structural ideas are maintained throughout this variation, ending on a descending E major scale starting on the dominant, resulting in a final perfect authentic cadence.

Aunt Evelyn is heard to be playing the piece one evening and the author recalls this happy memory during his time at the Front.

The Italian guitarist-composer Mauro Giuliani used the theme as the basis for his Variazioni su un tema di Handel ("The Harmonious Blacksmith"), Op.

Composer-conductor Igor Markevitch composed Variations, Fugue, and Envoi on a Theme of Handel for piano, based on this melody.