IN September 1737 on doctor's orders, but very reluctantly according to Mainwaring, Handel travelled to Aix-la-Chapelle to take a cure at the steam baths. The story of his profuse sweats and apparently miraculous recovery, and the nuns’ astonishment at his organ-playing, need not be repeated here. No sooner was he back, early in November, than he began the first of his two contracted operas, Faramondo, and after completing it on 24 December embarked on the second, Serse, on the 26th with only Christmas Day in between. Heidegger had opened the Haymarket season on 29 October with Arsace, a pasticcio, presumably arranged by G. B. Pescetti, the Nobility's musical director, which drew a thin house. Caffarelli's engagement as the new primo uomo had been announced as early as 1 May; the other singers were all survivors from the rival companies of the previous season. Heidegger had given only three performances when the death of Queen Caroline on 20 November closed the theatres until the New Year.

A somewhat autumnal aura hovers over the 1737/38 season. The cantankerousness of the previous years had produced a public reaction. A writer in the Craftsman of 4 June had hoped that the Licensing Act would suppress Italian operas on both financial and moral grounds: they carried great sums of money out of the Kingdom, and they ‘soften and enervate the Minds of the People’. One thinks of Johnson's condemnation of the genre as ‘an exotick and irrational entertainment, which has been always combated, and always has prevailed’. Carey and Lampe's burlesque The Dragon of Wantley, produced with no great success at the Little Haymarket in May 1737, became all the rage when Rich took it over at Covent Garden in October, running for sixty-nine performances and outstripping The Beggar's Opera. In a letter of 19 October the future Frederick the Great of Prussia declared that ‘Handel's great days are over, his inspiration is exhausted and his taste behind the times’.