Handel was not only to compose operas for the company but hire the star singers, supervise the orchestra and musicians, and adapt operas from Italy for London performance. The Royal Academy of Music collapsed at the end of the 1728 - 29 season, partly due to the huge fees paid to the star singers. A bitter rivalry had developed between the supporters of the two prima donnas who had appeared in Handel's last few operas, Francesca Cuzzoni and Faustina Bordoni, culminating in June 1727 with a brawl in the audience while the two prima donnas onstage stopped singing, traded insults and pulled each other's hair, to enormous public scandal satirized in the popular "The Beggar's Opera" of 1728 and bringing Italian opera of the kind Handel composed into a certain amount of ridicule and disrepute. At the end of the 1729 season, both ladies left London for engagements in continental Europe. Handel went into partnership with John James Heidegger, the theatrical impresario who held the lease on the King's Theatre in the Haymarket where the operas were presented and started a new opera company with a new prima donna, Anna Strada. For the opera season of 1732, opening with "Ezio", Handel added to his ensemble of singers the tenor Giovanni Battista Pinacci, his wife alto Anna Bagnolesi, and the renowned bass Antonio Montagnana, the latter beginning a long association with Handel and creating many roles in Handel's works. "Ezio" is the last of three operas Handel composed to texts by the most famous librettist of the day, Metastasio, the other two being "Siroe" and "Poro". Many of the long passages of recitative in the Metastasio original were cut in Handel's version, London audiences preferring to move more swiftly from one aria to the next. Unlike most of Handel's operas, there are no duets or other ensembles in the piece at all, only recitatives and arias. "Ezio" was performed just five times in Handel's lifetime, one contemporary noting of it that it was "a New Opera, Clothes & all ye Scenes New - but did not draw much Company" (at that time scenery and costumes were often drawn from stock, entirely new costumes and scenes were an added attraction.) Nevertheless, King George II attended every performance but one.