All these scandals, spectacular squabbles and silly exhibitions did not, in the long run, enhance the credit of the Academy. Handel, who had been naturalized on February 13, 1726 and at the same time been appointed Composer to the Court and to the Chapel Royal, was together with the rest of London, shocked in the early summer of 1727, to learn of the death of George I on a trip to Germany. On October 11 of the same year George II was crowned and, though less favorably disposed to the composer than his father, continued the pensions Handel held from the late sovereign and from Queen Anne and contributed to them another large sum for music lessons to the young princesses. Handel, for his part, wrote for the new King four Coronation Anthems which added to his glory. The Academy, after losing an appalling amount of money presently received its death blow, the production at the theatre in Lincoln’s Inn Fields of “The Beggar’s Opera”, by the clever satirist, John Gay, with music compiled by Dr. Pepusch, Handel’s predecessor in the employ of the Duke of Chandos. This “ballad opera”, that “made Gay rich and Rich, the manager, gay”, which still leads a lusty existence, and has been at various times a landmark in English and American theatrical history, proved an earthy and bawdy entertainment, against the barbed shafts of whose ridicule the artifices of Italian opera could not prevail for long. Yet Handel remained incorrigible. Once again he entered into partnership with Heidegger, planned another opera season, secured Senesino again and went abroad to engage other singers. On that occasion he traveled again to Italy, went to Hamburg and made a last visit to his aged mother in Halle. She was now paralyzed, and shortly afterwards she died. The new London opera season got off to a bad start, one failure succeeding another. Politics aggravated the situation, the more so as George II and the Prince of Wales were at odds and the supporters of the latter, determined to set up a rival opera company to ruin Handel. But the story of Handel’s pertinacious efforts to float new operatic enterprises for almost another ten years is too long, involved and too honeycombed with intrigue, contending influences and low tactics of one sort or another to be examined here. The composer’s Hanoverian origin stirred many parties against him. Moreover, he was a self-willed, imperious person, who, like Richard Wagner more than a century later, had the gift of stimulating antagonism. He was, wrote W. McNaught, “a pervading presence, a busybody forever intruding upon public affairs. He had taken to ordering the amusements of the town in his own interests; and he belonged to the wrong party.” One almost fancies oneself confronted with a chapter from the life of the creator of “Die Meistersinger!”