La Paix
from Music for the Royal Fireworks, HWV 351
by George Frideric Handel
arr. by Michèle Sharik

The end of Europe's War of Austrian Succession came with the signing of the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle. To celebrate this occasion, England's King George II commissioned George Frideric Handel to write a suite of grandiose music to accompany an immense pyrotechnic display to be held on April 27, 1749.

Featuring an orchestra of "martial instruments" (King George specifically ordered, "No fiddles!"), the dress rehearsal held a week before the festivities — 100 musicians playing to a crowd of over twelve thousand people — went very well. Unfortunately, the main event did not.... A newspaper of the time reported:

The rockets succeeded mighty well, but the wheels, and all that to compose the principal part, were pitiful and ill-conducted ... and then, what contributed to the awkwardness of the whole, was the right pavilion catching fire, and being burnt down in the middle of the show.

The Music for the Royal Fireworks, however, was so popular that Handel added strings and continuo to the orchestra and presented it again at a concert in May of that same year. La Paix, a gentle "Largo alla Siciliana", is a lovely dance movement which features an ornamented figure echoed back and forth between the bells and the piano.

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