ine, a native of Tuscany, sang Italian airs before and after it.
Tall, swarthy, brusque in manner, she had a voice and a style that made
her famous. It was she who inaugurated the custom of giving farewell
concerts. Meeting with brilliant success at a performance announced as
her last appearance, "she continued," says Dr. Burney, "to sing more
last and positively last times and never left England at all." There was
a rivalry between the two queens of song, which being a novelty,
furnished gossip and laughter for all London. Hughes, that "agreeable
poet," wrote of it:

_"Music has learned the discords of the State,
And concerts jar with Whig and Tory hate."_

Retiring in 1722 with a fortune of ten thousand pounds, Margarita
married the learned Dr. Pepusch, who was enabled by her means to pursue
with ease his scientific studies. In his library she found Queen
Elizabeth's Virginal Book, and being a skilled harpsichordist, she so
well mastered its intricacies that people thronged to her home to hear
her play.

London was divided by another pair of rival queens of song in 1725-6.
One of these, Francesca Cuzzoni, a native of Parma, had created such a
furore on her first appearance, three years earlier, that the opera
directors who had engaged her for the season at two thousand guineas
were encouraged to charge four guineas for admission, and her costumes
were adopted by fashionable youth and beauty. Although ugly and
ill-made, she had a sweet, clear dramatic contralto with unrivalled high
notes, intonations so fixed it seemed impossible for her to sing out of
tune, and a native flexibility that left unimpeded her creative fancy.
Handel, in whose operas she sang, composed airs calculated to display
her charms, but she, confident of her supremacy, rewarded him with
conduct so capricious that, finding her at last intolerable, he sent to
Italy for the noble Venetian lady, Faustina Bordoni. She was elegant in
figure, handsome of face, had an amiable disposition, a ringing
mezzo-soprano, with a compass from B-flat to G in altissimo, and was
renowned for her brilliant execution, distinct enunciation, beautiful
shake, happy memory for embellishments and fine expression.

However pleased the directors may have been at first to have two popular
songstresses, they were soon dismayed at the fierce rivalry that sprang
up between them and was fanned to flames by Master Handel himself, who
now composed exclusively for Faustina.