Succeeding his father Albert as King of Saxony on 19 June 1902 at age 70, August reigned for an extremely brief two-years until his death on 15 October 1904. The King died in Pillnitz, Dresden, and was succeeded by his eldest son Frederick Augustus III. While for most of his adult life, he served as a military officer, Georg not only played piano, he even visited the factory of the piano maker Carl Ronisch in Dresden in July 1903 and played for nearly half an hour on a grand piano custom made for his summer residence. Fascinatingly this incident was reported in The Advertiser, a Newspaper from Adelaide Australia. However, during his short reign he never gained any real popularity. The king was forced to put down a workers’ strike in the town of Crimmitschau in 1904. Shortly thereafter he fell ill with influenza and passed away.