Following “Judas Maccabaeus” Handel’s fortunes rose once more and after his conflicts with ill-will and intrigue he was the incontestable victor. The consequence, far from rest and relaxation, was another stream of great works not all of them, unfortunately, having become as familiar to posterity as they undoubtedly deserve to be. Oratorios like “Alexander Balus”, “Susanna”, “Joshua”, “Solomon” and “Jephtha”, treasurable as they are, are known to few, probably because they are eclipsed by the gigantic shadows cast by “Messiah”, “Judas Maccabaeus” or “Israel in Egypt.” In 1749 he had written “Theodora”, which failed. Its ill luck does not seem to have moved him to more than a kind of “wise-crack” to the effect that “the Jews would not come to it because the story was Christian and the ladies because it was virtuous.” In the same year he composed a scene from Tobias Smollet’s “Alceste”, parts of which he later used in his “Choice of Hercules”. For the signing of the Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle in 1748, the King demanded a showy festival, little as there was to celebrate in the termination of a war both unpopular and remote. Handel was commissioned to compose music for an ostentatious show to culminate in a grand display of fireworks in Green Park, where a vast and grotesque wooden building, surmounted by unsightly allegorical figures, had been set up. Twelve thousand people foregathered for a rehearsal of Handel’s music, in Vauxhall Gardens, and traffic as a result, was desperately tangled. At the actual celebration everything went awry, the fireworks fizzled and to provide a humiliating climax the edifice in Green Park caught fire. Newman Flower tells in a colorful account of the event that Handel had “a magnificent band worthy of the occasion ... forty trumpets, twenty horns, sixteen hautboys, sixteen bassoons, eight pair of kettledrums; for the first time he introduced that forgotten instrument, the serpent into his score, but took it out again.... He had for that night as fine a band as he ever conducted.” Handel’s contribution, indeed, was the one indisputable success of the occasion. He gave the bright and sonorous “Fireworks Music” (a kind of companion piece to the “Water Music”) the month after the Green Park fiasco for the Foundling Hospital, or “The Hospital for the Maintenance and Education of Exposed and Deserted Young Children.” The concert brought Handel the Governorship of the institution.