The Beggar’s Opera: An Overview

In the early eighteenth century English music was at a loss for its own national identity,

thanks at large to the massive popularity of Italian opera seria. Opera seria was a style of opera

which had immense popularity across Europe in the 18th and 19th centuries, characterized by

heroic or tragic subject matter, highly embellished singing, and extreme emotions. The English,

unable to compete with the foreign style on the same level, took a different route to return

homemade music to their cultural forefront. Thus, the ballad opera was born, a comic style which

ridiculed the over-the-top Italian works of the time. Thanks to the genres arrival, the British now

had a distinct operatic style to call their own (Opera Text).

The first of these ballad operas was, and remains to this day, the most popular of them all.

The Beggar’s Opera, written by John Gay, with musical arrangements most likely having been

done by Johann Christoph Pepusch, was first performed at London’s Lincoln’s Inn Fields

Theater on January 29th, 1728; it was a huge hit thanks to its original voice and the contemporary

issues it expressed. The show received sixty two performances in its first partial season, and to

this day enjoys continued productions all around the world. In its original run, The Beggar’s

Opera even created a fandom for itself, with popular playing cards, porcelain figures, and

illustrations all sporting subjects from the show. Beyond its own successes, The Beggar’s Opera

has also spawned numerous remakes and adaptations, most popularly being the Three Penny

Opera, a musical by Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill (Oxford).

Musically, the opera used folk, popular, and other well known melodies and set them to

newly written texts. This was a large factor in the works success, for the songs were catchy and

already known, granting audience members the gift of keeping the tunes in their head, and the
ability to hum them long after the performance had finished. The early versions of the score were

quite sparse; the first simply provided the melodies of the songs, while in the second only

slightly improved, with the overture on four staves being added. Unfortunately, no orchestral

parts of the original Beggar’s Opera survive today, but scores from other ballad operas of the

time suggest that the songs were preformed with short orchestral preludes and postludes, the

musical information being derived from the melodies themselves. As time has passed, more

elaborate accompaniments have been created by composers such as Linley and Britten. These

songs and short orchestral pieces were interspersed with spoken dialogue which furthered the

story, an interesting stylistic choice, as the majority of operatic works made use of recitative for

this purpose (a style of singing which emulates speech patterns).(oxford)

Plot-wise, the opera satirized the pretentions of London society, the corruption of

contemporary politicians (brit), and the Italian opera seria, doing so by using characters which

belonged to the bottom of moral ladder: thieves, prostitutes, and other lowly figures, instead of

the typical operatic roles rooted in mythic or noble origins (NAWM). However, with this being

said, it was not a satire in the same vein of a modern work (for it was known by all during the

time that the political system was one of dishonesty), thus, the motive of the opera was not to

show how corrupt the system was, but to simply display the immoral peoples which it created

(kidson).

Much like opera buffa in Italy, or opera comique in France, The Beggar’s Opera target

audience was the common man. By using everyday speech, understandable scenarios, and

realistic characters the work was able to connect with the masses in a way the operatic form had

not been able to prior. In fact, it is quite accurate to state that Gay’s work was a massive fusing
of low and high art (and culture), for it mixed lower class social situations and folk melodies,

with arias by Handel and Purcell and the operatic form (Ablright).

Due to its success, The Beggar’s Opera sparked a historically significant change in the

music of England. Ballad operas became widely popular over the next ten years, marking the

decline of Italian opera in the country, and forever changing the career path of influential

composer George Fredric Handel, leading him to write oratorios instead of operas for financial

reasons. English operas also became highly influential in the early American colonies, with the

majority of operas staged in them being from England or in the style of English opera. Despite

these historical monuments, the form was never able to ripen and rise to the status of a serious

national opera, such as the types of France, Germany, and of course Italy; opera in England was

a form never truly realized (Opera Text).

Bibliography

Albright, Daniel. Untwisting the Serpent: Modernism in Music, Literature, and Other Arts.
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Burkholder, J. Peter, and Claude V. Palisca. Norton Anthology of Western Music: Volume Two,
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Grout, Donald Jay, and Hermine Wiegel Williams. A Short History of Opera 4th Edition. New
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Hume, Robert D. "Beggar’s Opera, The." The New Grove Dictionary of Opera. Grove Music
Online.Oxford Music Online. Oxford University Press, accessed January 20,
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Kidson, Frank. The Beggar’s Opera: Its Predecessors and Successors. United States: Cambridge
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