STRICTLY speaking, there was no Second Academy – or if there was, the Opera of the Nobility when it occupied the King's Theatre in 1734 had a greater right to the title. The original institution was still functioning in early 1729, when a general meeting was held on 18 January ‘in order to consider some Proposals that will then be offered for carrying on Operas; as also for disposing of the Effects belonging to the said Academy’. Lord Percival (later Earl of Egmont), one of the few who attended a hurried assembly, wrote in his diary that, in addition to pursuing members who had not paid their subscription, they agreed ‘to permit Hydeger and Hendle to carry on operas without disturbance for 5 years and to lend them for that time our scenes, machines, clothes, instruments, furniture, etc’. Burney mentions a contract and says that Handel ‘entered into an engagement with Heidegger to carry on the musical drama at their own risk’, and that they each put up ￡10,000 – which is beyond belief. Mainwaring confuses the issue, and some later writers, by saying that the engagement was for three years; but his information, unlike Egmont’s, came to him at second hand. Lord Shaftesbury, a long-time friend and patron of Handel, also gives the figure as five years; and the Handel–Heidegger management did in fact run for five years, until the end of the 1733/34 season. Robert D. Hume, while dispersing some hot air, chastises Reinhard Strohm among others for assuming a binding contract between the Academy on the one part and Handel and Heidegger on the other. All the evidence, considered in the course of this chapter and Chapter 15, suggests that this was indeed the case, though no such document has been discovered.

According to Rolli, Lord Bingley, a previous Deputy-Governor of the Academy, was at the head of the project; he may have been one of the six or seven subscribers mentioned, but he was soon out of the picture for he died in 1731.