So Bruno Mars wrote "When I was Your Man" to help put his cat to sleep?

So today's history pop quiz is this:

Describe the life and musical contributions of George Friedrich Handel.  No notes.  No books.  No Wikipedia (though you are welcome to hop on to Wikipedia and see how close I was, and how much this is actually truthful).  

GO!

So George Friedrich Handel was born in Halle, a city in what would one day be Germany, around the same time as J.S. Bach.  Somehow or another he becomes a court musician for King George I of England, and that really is where our story begins.  

Now George I was brought over to be the King of England by the Parliament after the death of Queen Anne.  He's from Hanover:  he can't speak English very well, he thinks Guiness tastes like motor oil, and while he finds the larger noses of the English females simply charming he is utterly horrified at the state of English dentistry (one finds that this is a common theme throughout history).

So he's a nervous wreck.  As he gets rowed up and down the Thames on his barge from the palace to parliament and from parliament to various social engagements he finds himself obsessing over English grammer, and trying to figure out how he can get his damned subjects to put their verbs at the end of sentences as God intended.  He's losing weight.  He won't touch his beer nor his beer wench.  He can't figure out which corner of his tri-corner hat is the front one.  

In desperation, he hits upon an idea.  What if he had a group of musicians on the barge who could play music  to him so that he could forget about his cares for a while?  Relax him?  

So he calls in his head court musician, Handel, a fellow German.  And Handel writes this little ditty for him:

King George I loves it so much that he has them play it again, and again, and again, repeating the first movement incessently, the orchestra acting like the 18th century version of a CD player with the repeat button on....

And so, because the King loved to listen to the music so much while rowing around on his barge, the music became known as "Handel's Water Music Suite".

This is not the only classic work that has such an innocuous beginning.  Bach's Goldberg Variations were written for a student of his (Goldberg), who was a royal musician for a certain Prince Humperdink.  Prince Humperdink's large gambling debts and rampant syphillus tended to keep him up at night, and the only way he could fall asleep was if Goldberg played some soothing piano music in a room adjacent to his.  

But Goldberg was fast running out of material.  He hurriedly scribbled a note to his former tutor J.S. Bach and shot it out the window with a bow and arrow:

Dear Mr. Bach:

Heilige Scheiße!  I can't write music fast enough to keep this guy happy.  I had to play 100 variations on "Home on the Range" last night and I am seriously running out of fucking ideas here.  Please help me!!

                                                                                              Your Friend,

                                                                                              Goldberg

So Bach sits down and he writes a classic set of variations on a very simple theme:

It's amazing to me to think that here we have two classic pieces of music that have endured for nearly 300 years, written to entertain one royal and to put another to sleep.  I don't know how much thought Handel and Bach put into their pieces, I don't know if they were trying to write something that would endure or if they were just putting in another day at the office.  I can't help but wonder at the fact that these two men of genius were able to construct things so beautiful seemingly on a whim.

I also can't help but wonder what, if anything, from our own culture will endure, and what the stories behind their origins will be.  The closest I can think of is how Don Draper drafted his ad campaign for lucky strikes on the back of a napkin at a cocktail bar before boffing some beatnik bimbo, or how Wayne's World 2 was written in 90 minutes.  Will we be talking about Lucky Strikes in 2313? Will we remember Niki Minaj?  Will we tune into NPR to hear Ke$ha?  Will people put on their finest suit of space clothes and, after a nice space dinner with a glass of space wine, file into the space ampitheater to watch the Lunar Surface Philharmonic play the complete "Locked in the Closet" suite?

I don't know about any of that.  But I'll bet we'll be watching Wayne's World 2 every Easter on our space-o-visions.  It's a classic.  

Party on.