Handel joined Heidegger once more in 1738, at the King's Theatre. In two years he wrote four operas, of which the fourth, _Deidamia_, was the last he ever produced. After this he abandoned dramatic music, and, as a composer of Oratorios, entered upon what was to him a far higher career. Handel was at this time fifty-six years of age, and since his arrival in England, in 1711, he had written no less than thirty-five Italian operas. [Sidenote: CAPABILITIES OF MUSIC.] Handel's Italian operas, as such, are now quite obsolete. The air from _Admeto_ is occasionally heard at a concert, and Handel is known to have introduced some of his operatic melodies into his Oratorios, but there is no chance of any one of his operas ever being reproduced in a complete form. They were never known out of England, and in this country were soon laid aside after their composer had fairly retired from theatrical management. I think Mr. Hogarth[25] is only speaking with his usual judiciousness, when he observes, that "whatever pleasure they must have given to the audiences of that age, they would fail to do so now.... The music of the principal parts," he continues, "were written for a class of voices which no longer exists,[26] and for these parts no performers could now be found. A series of recitatives and airs, with only an occasional duet, and a concluding chorus of the slightest kind, would appear meagre and dull to ears accustomed to the brilliant concerted pieces and finales of the modern stage; and Handel's accompaniments would appear thin and poor amidst the richness and variety of the modern orchestra. The vocal parts, too, are to a great extent, in an obsolete taste. Many of the airs are mere strings of dry, formal divisions and unmeaning passages of execution, calculated to show off the powers of the fashionable singers; and many others, admirable in their design, and containing the finest traits of melody and expression, are spun out a wearisome length, and deformed by the cumbrous trappings with which they are loaded. Musical phrases, too, when Handel used them, had the charm of novelty, have become familiar and common through repetition by his successors."