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COMPOSER SPOTLIGHT
Videos via YouTube
GEORG FRIEDRICH HANDEL
Born: February 23, 1685
Notes - Harpsichord Suite in E Major HWV430 - Mov. 1-3/4 (video)
GEORGE FRIDERIC HANDEL (1685-1759)
Suite for harpsichord in E major HWV430
"The Eight Great Suites" No. 5
1. Prelude
2. Allemande
3. Courante
Performed by Paul Nicholson
* This particular harpsichord suite is known mostly for the fourth movement of the piece, an air and variations nicknamed
"The Harmonious Blacksmith". There are numerous stories behind the origin of the name although there is only one which has
a significant likelihood of being true.
William Lintern was a blacksmith's apprentice from Bath who later took up music for publication and so was perhaps THE
Harmonious Blacksmith. The piece came to be called after him, probably because he published it under that name for reasons
outlined in the following extract:
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A few months after Clark's publication the writer saw the late J.W. Windsor, Esq., of Bath, a great admirer of Handel
and one who knew all his published works. He told the writer that a story of the Blacksmith at Edgware was pure imagination,
that the original publisher of Handel's lesson under that name (The Harmonious Blacksmith) was a music seller at Bath,
named Lintern, whom he knew personally from buying music at the shop, that he had asked Lintern the reason for this new name,
and he had told him that it was a nickname given to himself because, he had been brought up as a blacksmith, although he
had afterwards turned to music, and that was the piece he was constantly asked to play. He printed the movement in a detached form,
because he could sell a sufficient number of copies to make a profit.
— William Chappell (1809-88), 1889, first edition of Grove's Dictionary of Music
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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'.
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