they continued to sing together for Handel until his company's demise in June of that year. A continental interlude Cuzzoni spent the winter of 1728-29 in Vienna at the invitation of Count Kinsky (Imperial Ambasasador to London), but, in spite of her great success there was not engaged by the opera because she demanded too high a salary. Later in 1729 she sang at Modena and Venice, and in the autumn of that year, Handel's impresario Heidegger wished to engage both her and Faustina for the new "Second Royal Academy". Handel had had enough of both of them, however, and so Cuzzoni went instead to Bologna, Naples, Piacenza and Venice during 1730-31, and Bologna and Florence again during the following season, when, amongst others, she sang in operas by her husband (she never performed under his name). Their association continued during the carnival seasons of 1733 and 1734, when she appeared at Genoa. In London again In 1733, a group of English aristocrats wished to set up an opera company to rival Handel's, and Cuzzoni was one of the first singers they approached. She returned in April 1734, joining the cast of Porpora's Arianna a Nasso. For this company, known as the "Opera of the Nobility", she sang in four more operas by Porpora, and others by Sandoni, Hasse, Orlandini, Veracini, Ciampi, the pasticcio Orfeo and even a version of Handel's Ottone. It would seem that she made less of an impression during this visit, not least due to the presence of the incomparably famous Farinelli in the same company. Later career Nonetheless, Cuzzoni was still a force to be reckoned with. After the collapse of the Nobility Opera, she returned to the continent, singing in Florence in 1737-38, and at Turin the following year, when, for one carnival season, she received the huge fee of 8,000 lire. Later that year she sang at Vienna, and seems to have made her last operatic appearances in Hamburg in 1740. On 17 September 1741 the "London Daily Post" reported that Cuzzoni was to be beheaded for poisoning her husband, but, though they had separated by 1742, he did not die until 1748. She sang concerts in Amsterdam in 1742, and by December 1745 had become a court singer in Stuttgart. In debt, a condition she frequently suffered in her later life, she absconded from there to Bologna in 1748. Still needing to