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The ballad opera is a genre of English comic opera stage play that originated in the early 18th century, and continued to develop over the following century and later. Like the earlier comédie en vaudeville and the later Singspiel , its distinguishing characteristic is the use of tunes in a popular style (either pre-existing or newly composed ...
Ballad opera: English: Entertainment originating in 18th-century London as a reaction against Italian opera. Early examples used existing popular ballad tunes set to satirical texts. Also popular in Dublin and America, Influenced the German Singspiel, and subsequently 20th-century opera. The Beggar's Opera (1728)
The Beggar's Opera [1] is a ballad opera in three acts written in 1728 by John Gay with music arranged by Johann Christoph Pepusch.It is one of the watershed plays in Augustan drama and is the only example of the once thriving genre of satirical ballad opera to remain popular today.
His opera Artaxerxes (1762) was the first attempt to set a full-blown opera seria in English and was a huge success, holding the stage until the 1830s. His modernized ballad opera, Love in a Village (1762), was equally novel and began a vogue for pastiche opera that lasted well into the 19th century. Arne was one of the few English composers of ...
The company moved to New York in the summer of 1753, performing ballad-operas such as The Beggar’s Opera and ballad-farces like Damon and Phillida. [20] By the 1840s, P.T. Barnum was operating an entertainment complex in lower Manhattan. [21] Other early musical theatre in America consisted of British forms, such as burletta and pantomime. [8]
Rather than the more aristocratic themes and music of the Italian opera, the ballad operas were set to the music of popular folk songs and dealt with lower-class characters. [30] Subject matter involved the lower, often criminal, orders, and typically showed a suspension (or inversion) of the high moral values of the Italian opera of the period.
England traces its light opera tradition to the ballad opera, typically a comic play that incorporated songs set to popular tunes. John Gay's The Beggar's Opera was the earliest and most popular of these. Richard Brinsley Sheridan's The Duenna (1775), with a score by Thomas Linley, was expressly described as "a comic opera". [2] [3]
The Threepenny Opera [a] (Die Dreigroschenoper [diː dʁaɪˈɡʁɔʃn̩ˌʔoːpɐ]) is a 1928 German "play with music" by Bertolt Brecht, adapted from a translation by Elisabeth Hauptmann of John Gay's 18th-century English ballad opera, The Beggar's Opera, [1] and four ballads by François Villon, with music by Kurt Weill. Although there is ...