Alongside the numerous musical developments during the baroque period came the rise of opera: largely from opera developed the cult of the super-star singer. English audiences, conservative as ever, were one of the last to accept opera but, as the eighteenth century began, the form rapidly gained popularity, made all the more attractive by the import of foreign voices. Handel, on his early visits to England, realized that here was a ready market for his work: the extraordinary success of Rinaldo in 1711, with the castrato Nicolini in the title role, proved him right. And so the import of foreign singers, especially castrati, began in earnest, demanding (as Roger North noted) ‘immense charges in profuse salaries, pensions, subscriptions and promiscuous courtship and flatterys into the bargain. These farr fecht and dear bought gentlemen return home rich, buy fine houses and gardens, and live in admiration of English wealth and profusion’. The audiences flocked to hear fashionable foreign singers, and it was not long before Addison noted ‘the audience got tired of understanding half the opera, and therefore, to ease themselves entirely of the fatigue of thinking, have so ordered it at present that the whole opera is performed in an unknown tongue’.