Yet there were breakers ahead! Whether or not he could discern them from afar it is probably unlikely that the prospect of conflict would have troubled over much a nature as powerful and combative as Handel’s. Indeed, difficulties were what this prodigious vitality and ever renewing creative inspiration best throve upon. As so often happens in lands where opera is fundamentally an exotic people again wanted opera. It was a logical time to end the Cannons interlude. The psychology of the moment, to which Handel was sensitive, came just when company-promoting took on almost the aspect of a hobby. There was money aplenty and the South Sea Bubble, which was indeed swelling, had not yet burst. So Lord Burlington and other peers raised capital for a new season of Italian opera, appointed Handel director-in-chief, made the ugly but efficient Heidegger stage manager, rounded up librettists and sent Handel to the Continent to engage singers for what was to be known as “The Royal Academy of Music”—an English duplication of the official name of the Paris Opéra. And the _Weekly Journal_ soon announced that “Mr. Handel, a famous Master of Musick, is gone beyond the sea, by order of His Majesty, to collect a company of the choicest singers for the Opera in the Haymarket.” “Mr. Handel” visited Hanover, Düsseldorf, Dresden and Halle, where he went to his birthplace “Am Schlamm”, saw his old mother, who was going blind, and her aging spinster sister. And at this point occurred one of the most poignant incidents of musical history—that meeting of Handel and Bach, thwarted by an inscrutable destiny. Bach learned that his contemporary was in Halle, went there on foot from Coethen to seek him out and—missed him by a day! Even Bach’s subsequent dispatch of his son, Wilhelm Friedemann, to invite Handel to visit him misfired and the two were destined forever to remain personal strangers. Handel secured some extraordinary singers in Dresden, where the Italian opera was blooming. In addition to Boschi, the bass, who had sung in “Rinaldo”, he bagged the great Signora Durastanti and the castrato Senesino, who until the subsequent coming of the mighty Farinelli, was perhaps the artificial soprano whom London most worshipped at a time when castrati were completely the rage. Senesino played incredible havoc with the hearts of deluded women. Handel, in addition to the countless duties of a music-director had also operas to compose, and in due season he was somehow turning out three a year. Nicola Francesco Haym supplied him with a libretto adapted from Tacitus, “Radamisto”, and this work, produced on April 27, 1720, was a triumph such as even Handel had never experienced. It ran till the season ended late in June; “crowds flocked to ‘Radamisto’ like a modern mob to a notorious prize-fight.” (Newman Flower)