George Frideric Handel Acis and Galatea
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The work
According to the music historian Charles Burney, who knew him well, ‘Handel’s look was somewhat heavy and sour, but when he did smile it was his sire the sun bursting out of a black cloud’. Across Handel’s music, is there anything to rival the sunburst that is Part I of , composed in 1718 for the pleasure-loving) had been given an Italianate makeover, and the house itself restyled as a Palladian villa complete with terraced gardens boasting ostriches, flamingos, storks, macaws and, above all, a fountain. Leafy Edgware today might struggle to resemble the paradise envisaged by Brydges, but if ever a place deserved its gilding of bespoke musical Arcadia it was surely Cannons.
