River Thames
The Water Music composed by George Frideric Handel premiered on 17 July 1717, when King George I requested a concert on the River Thames. The concert was performed for King George I on his barge and he is said to have enjoyed it so much that he ordered the 50 exhausted musicians to play the suites three times on the trip.
Handel's lost Hamburg operas
The loss of much of Handel's early work was first noted by his earliest biographer, Mainwaring (1760), who refers to "a great quantity of music" from Hamburg and Italy, adding that it was not known how much of it still existed. On departing from Hamburg, Handel spent a further three years in Italy before settling in London, where he remained the dominant composer of Italianate opera for the following thirty years. After his Hamburg initiation, Handel composed more than forty operas, beginning with "Rodrigo" in 1707, and ending in 1740 with "Deidamia". These works were quickly forgotten after Handel's death; modern revivals did not begin until the 1920s. Dean and Knapp believe that, despite the years of relative neglect, Handel's achievements as a composer of opera entitle him to rank alongside Monteverdi, Mozart, Verdi, and Richard Wagner as one of the supreme masters of the genre.