failure. The music is lost, but the libretto survives, and that is enough
to account for the collapse. The opera had three performances only. In the
very same season Keiser re-set _Nero_ to music himself, and brought it
out under the title of _Octavia_; shortly afterwards he did the same with
_Almira_, which was performed in August of the same year. Although Keiser's
operas were no more successful than Handel's, and his extravagance and
mismanagement forced him to leave Hamburg for three years in order to avoid
imprisonment, it is evident that he had made Handel's position in the
theatre impossible. Handel withdrew into private life and devoted himself
to earning a living by teaching. Mattheson says that Handel remained in
Hamburg until 1709, and that he still worked in the theatre, but the first
of these statements is certainly untrue, and the second probably so.
Mattheson himself left the theatre after the failure of Handel's _Nero_,
and his friendship with Handel seems to have come to an end. About Handel's
subsequent life in Hamburg we know nothing, until the theatre was taken
over by one Saurbrey in the autumn of 1706. Saurbrey commissioned an opera
from Handel, but, owing to the confusion in which Keiser had left the
affairs of the theatre, it could not be brought out until January 1708,
when it was found to be so long that it had to be divided into two operas,
_Florindo_ and _Daphne_, both of which were put on the stage successively.
By that time Handel had left Hamburg for Italy; he evidently took little
interest in the production of these works, neither of which has survived.

It was during the run of _Almira_, says Mainwaring, that Handel made the
acquaintance of Prince Gian Gastone de' Medici, son of the Grand Duke Cosmo
III of Tuscany. Mainwaring's date is wrong, for it is known that Gian
Gastone at that time was in Bohemia with his wife, a German princess, to
whom he had been married against his will. But it is also known that he was
in Hamburg for a few months during the winter of 1703-04, and, if he met
Handel at that time, the rest of Mainwaring's story becomes much more