People went to
talk and to be seen as well as to see and hear; they do so in certain
opera-houses still. And the Queen's Theatre in the Haymarket possessed the
greatest opera-composer living, a greater even than Scarlatti himself.
It was a period when there was still a considerable tradition of
musicianship among the amateurs of English society. Old Countess Granville,
known to her younger relatives as "the Dragon," who had lived all through
the age of Locke and Purcell, wrote, at the age of eighty, to her cousin
Mrs. Pendarves--Handel's child friend Mary Granville--in 1734: "There is,
I think, no accomplishment so great for a lady as music, for it tunes
the mind." There were plenty of people in the great houses capable
of appreciating the merits of Handel, or at any rate of constituting
themselves his enemies.
Handel must have arrived in England at least as early as the beginning of
October 1712, for the manuscript of _Il Pastor Fido_, the first new opera
which he produced, is dated, at the end, "Londres, ce 24 Octobre." The
opera-house was now under the management of Owen MacSwiney, who seems to
have been both incompetent and unreliable. _Il Pastor Fido_ did not attract
the public, and was withdrawn after six performances, but Handel soon had
another opera ready to take its place.
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