The Beggar's Opera

John Gay

Apr 2009 · The Floating Press

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The Beggar's Opera is the only ballad opera that is still popularly performed today. A ballad opera is a satirical musical, which uses the form of an opera but incorporates popular songs and ballads as well as operatic numbers. The Beggar's Opera satirizes the corruption to be found in all levels of society. Its immense popularity provided funds for the Theatre Royal, Covent Garden, to be built and also catapulted its leading lady to fame. It has continued to be performed ever since its premier in 1728.

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Gay is a highly original poet and dramatist who experimented in various forms and genres. His The What D'Ye Call It: A Tragi-Comical Pastoral Farce (1715) is a burlesque of high seriousness, as is Three Hours after Marriage, which he wrote with his fellow members of the Scriblerus Club Alexander Pope and Dr. John Arbuthnot. The Beggar's Opera (1728) is his best-known work; it started the vogue for ballad operas, with tunes drawn from popular airs (Gay's are mostly from Thomas D'Urfey's Pills to Purge Melancholy, a popular sourcebook for ribald songs). The Beggar's Opera satirizes gentility and vulgarity alike, and its topical political allusions are so direct that the government forbade its' sequel, Polly. Bertolt Brecht caught the spirit of the work in his Threepenny Opera.