although Rinaldo had paid him well-so that they did not know him on that account. His brother-in-law Michaelsen was certainly making more. He was the rich relation.

Like his visit of the year before, this one was brief. Handel returned to Hanover to his chamber-music, his royal pupils, his Lieder, growing restless the while, with a goading desire to break out again.

He did not wait long. In the following autumn (1712) he obtained permission to return to London. He wanted the opera, and there was no opera at Hanover. That he intended to go back to London had been obvious for a long time, for he had been studying English,' and corresponding regularly with Hughes and other of the friends he had met in England.

He had in truth become the complete cosmopolitan. Any country was his that held the best chance for his genius, and wisely he chose England, and chose it at the very time when the poverty of English music made a setting for his own genius. England was ripe for him, and he was ripe for England.

It was the chance that comes in every lifetime and he took it. At the beginning of November he stepped off the coach in London.

He had come back for all time.

1 Letter, July 1712, to his friend Andreas Rosner.

CHAPTER VI

THE LAST DAYS OF ANNE

IF English music had been lifeless when Handel first came to London, it was certainly barren of all melody when he returned in November. No production after his Rinaldo had found success. Meanwhile, Aaron Hill had left the Queen's Theatre, and its management had been taken over by an adventurer named MacSwiney, who knew little about music, but was a producer of some skill.

Following his sudden decision to return to London, Handel had prepared the outline of a new opera on a poor libretto by Rossi entitled Il Pastor Fido. A foolish diversion on the part of Handel, for the work showed traces of haste, and was from the start a failure. Immediately on his arrival in London he went to stay at the town house of an English admirer, a Mr Andrews, but it is clear that he must have brought the greater portion of the opera with him, since it was ready to go into rehearsal on 4th November.

Il Pastor Fido was produced on 26th November and failed. It was given at six performances. Nor did the success he had with his singers in Rinaldo follow him with the new work. Nicolini had returned to Italy, so the principal part was given to a singer newly arrived from that country, Cavaliere Valeriano Pellegrini, an artificial soprano of poor execution. Valentini was the only outstanding singer of those who had been heard in Rinaldo they were a poor lot. Not that they can be held responsible for the failure of Rossi's atrocious words, and Handel's hastily-written music, with its rare moments of beauty.

Long before Christmas, Handel was aware that his first opera after his return, was laughed at by the English as being scarcely better than the poor stuff to which lately they had

been accustomed. The failure must have hit him hard. The very patron who had admired him so much kept away from the new work. Early in the New Year (1713) Il Pastor Fido was played for the last time in that form, although in later years Handel, after working over the music afresh, and adding some choruses, revived it.

The failure of the opera taught Handel the important lesson that London audiences, poverty-stricken in musical fare, were certainly not prepared to accept anything. Those two cronies, Addison and Sir Richard Steele, revelled in the failure. The German had come back full of conceit and found defeat! It did a lot to wash the taste of the Rinaldo success from their palates. Not that Handel wept over the ashes of his first English failure. He sat down and composed a new opera in twenty days, completing it on 19th December 1712, and it proved to be one of the usual triumphs that came out of his adversity.

Nicolo Haym had written the "book ”—and an excellent libretto it was the Haym, who with Pepusch, had jeered when Handel arrived in England for the first time! A composer himself, he had recognised the latent strength in the invader, and his libretto of Teseo was an attempt to give to Handel the best that he knew.

Teseo was produced on 10th January 1713. It was a triumph of passionate strength. Teseo is a character fired with every emotion known to man. All the youth, the vigour, the yearning in the human conscience was caught by Handel's violins and carried high in his great waves of singing. He understood human frailty and desire more truly in Teseo than in any other of his early works.

The effect of the Teseo production was magical. But the opera had started badly. After the second performance MacSwiney disappeared with the proceeds of a ripe box-office, the singers unpaid, and most of the expenses of the production still unliquidated. It was one of those eternal tricks which fate was always playing upon Handel-lifting him to the top of the wave only to drop him rudely down on the other side. He probably made little out of the opera, for, in consequence of MacSwiney's delinquency, he received nothing till the