The King came back to London in January 1717, and it is supposed that
Handel came with him. The opera was on the verge of collapse. _Rinaldo_ and
_Amadigi_ were once more revived for Nicolini, but Handel contributed no
new work, and, after the season came to an end in July, there was no more
Italian opera in London until 1720. It was during this period that Handel
became musical director to the Duke of Chandos, for whom he composed works
of a character new both to England and to himself.

James Brydges, first Duke of Chandos, had built himself an Italian palace
at Canons, near Edgware, in which he must have outdone even the magnificent
Lord Burlington in sumptuousness and ostentation. Like a German princeling,
he kept his choir and his band of musicians, though there seems to be no
evidence that he was himself genuinely musical. The chapel of the house, a
florid Italian baroque building with frescoes in the appropriate style by
Italian painters, was opened in 1720, and the anthem for the occasion
was no doubt one of Handel's. It is not known what music of Handel's was
performed at the Duke's private concerts, but for the services of the
chapel he composed the famous _Chandos Te Deum_ and the twelve _Chandos
Anthems_. Here again Purcell was his model, but the style was Handel's
own, a style indeed so appropriate to the formal stateliness of the Duke's
establishment that these works have never become part of the ordinary
cathedral repertory. It was to Purcell, and to some extent to Scarlatti
too, that Handel owed the general plan of the anthems with their orchestral
accompaniments, but even Purcell's anthems with orchestra had by that time
been found too elaborate for general use.

To the Chandos period belongs also a work which is still one of Handel's
most popular compositions, the English _Acis and Galatea_, to words by John
Gay. It was not a revision of the _serenata_ which he wrote at Naples, but