The conductor Sir Thomas Beecham made several orchestral suites from neglected music by George Frideric Handel, mostly from the composer's 42 surviving operas. The best known of the suites are The Gods Go a'Begging (1928), The Origin of Design (1932), The Faithful Shepherd (1940), Amaryllis (1944) and The Great Elopement (1945, later expanded as Love in Bath, 1956).
Some of the suites were written as ballet scores; others were intended for concert use. Beecham made no attempt to emulate Handel's original instrumentation, and employed the full resources of the modern symphony orchestra, introducing such instruments as trombones, cymbals, triangles and harps into the orchestration. He made recordings of parts or the whole of all the above suites with the two orchestras with which he was principally associated, the London Philharmonic between 1932 and 1945 and the Royal Philharmonic thereafter.
Both at the time and in the present day, Beecham's arrangements of Handel have divided opinion. Some critics have found the 20th-century orchestration inappropriate; others have praised Beecham for unearthing long-forgotten music and bringing it before the public. Recordings of the suites, mostly conducted by Beecham between 1932 and 1959, remain in the current catalogues, but the works have dropped out of the general concert repertoire.