Rome had not--an opera, and an Italian opera. The success of _Rinaldo_
had shown him that London was the place where he might launch out into a
triumphal career as a composer for the stage.




CHAPTER III

Second visit to London--Italian opera--George I and the _Water
Music_--visit to Germany--Canons and the Duke of Chandos--establishment of
the Royal Academy of Music.


For the greater part of the nineteenth century the Handelian type of opera
was the laughingstock of musical critics; they wondered how any audiences
could have endured to sit through it, and why the fashionable society of
London should have neglected native music for what Dr. Johnson defined as
"an exotic and irrational entertainment." The modern reader's impression
of an Italian opera of Handel's days is a story about some ancient or
mediaeval hero whose very name is often to most people unknown; if he
happens to be someone as famous as Julius Caesar, the familiar episodes
of his life are sacrificed to some imaginary and complicated intrigue
presented in the form of long and elaborate songs, thinly accompanied, and
separated by stretches of dreary recitative. But in those days persons of
culture, in England as well as in Italy, were perhaps more interested in
ancient history and in the history of the later Roman Empire than they are
now; it is significant that Gibbon's _Decline and Fall_ made its appearance
just when the fashion for operas on subjects which might have been taken
from its pages was coming to an end.