Handel came into contact with one Aaron Hill, who managed the Queen’s Theatre in the Haymarket, and received from him an opera text, “Rinaldo”, which an Italian, Giacomo Rossi, had adapted from Tasso’s “Jerusalem Delivered.” The new arrival rose magnificently to his opportunity. The music was completed in just two weeks and performed on February 24, 1711. And luck aided Handel by supplying him with some extraordinary singers, all of them new to England—Giuseppe Boschi, a young and astounding bass, and the sensational castrato, Nicolini, who took London by storm. The tale of “Rinaldo” was that of the Venetian “Agrippina” all over again! In one evening the British capital was subjugated, for all the bile and venom Addison and Steele could discharge into the columns of _The Spectator_ and _The Tatler_. The melodies of the opera spread like wildfire and seem to have appealed to the lower classes as well as to the aristocracy. To this day some of them have preserved their vitality. The noble air, “Lascia ch’io pianga”, in sarabande rhythm, is a fairly familiar item on recital programs; and the Crusaders’ March, a fine, swinging tune, was adapted to the words “Let us take the road” by Dr. Pepusch when he assembled out of countless folksongs and dances John Gay’s deathless “Beggar’s Opera”—in 1728 a thorn in Handel’s side but still, after more than two centuries, a classic with an iron constitution. * * * Roughly speaking, Handel composed forty-four operas from “Almira”, in 1705, at Hamburg to “Deidamia”, 1741, in London. It is obviously impossible to consider even a small fraction of them here and we shall have to content ourselves with little more than the names and dates of only a few. All the same, it may be well to pause here momentarily to ask ourselves what, in the first place, a Handel opera really is like. For unless we are specialists, not to say antiquarians, we have little means of definitely knowing. The lyric drama of that period cannot be judged by the works of the 19th and 20th Centuries or even by more than a scant handful of masterpieces of Gluck and Mozart. Its problems, its musical and dramatic aspects are basically different. A movement, which had its rise in Germany after the First World War and which continued on and off for several years (even spreading intermittently to other countries, including the United States) demonstrated that these baroque entertainments are essentially museum pieces, prizable as certain of their elements may be. To us, who have been nurtured on the theatre works of Mozart, of the composers of the school of dramatic and pictorial “grand opera”, of the opera buffa and the opéra comique, the _drame lyrique_ of Gounod and Bizet, the works of Verdi, the music dramas of Wagner and his assorted successors of various nationalities—to us the operatic specimens of Handel seem infinitely alien and remote in their premises and calculated stylizations. The nearest we can approach