Opera · Opera in English

The Beggar's Opera

29 January 1728, Lincoln's Inn Fields Theatre, London

John Gay · airs arranged by Johann Christoph Pepusch

John Gay's ballad opera set spoken English dialogue among sixty-nine familiar tunes — broadside ballads, folk songs, hymns and even Handel — and put a highwayman, a fence and a gaoler where Italian opera seria put kings and gods. It was the hit of the age, founded a whole English genre, and two centuries later became the model for Brecht and Weill's Die Dreigroschenoper.

How to spot them

▸A ballad opera: spoken dialogue between short airs set to existing popular tunes, not newly composed arias
▸Newgate and the criminal underworld of Walpole's London; a highwayman married to two women at once
▸A frame in which the Beggar-author and a Player argue about the ending and grant an absurd reprieve
▸Peachum the receiver-of-stolen-goods, Lockit the gaoler, and their daughters Polly and Lucy
▸Read as a satire on Robert Walpole, whose nickname 'Bob Booty' appears in the text

Arias & moments — listen

"Through all the employments of life" — a fence compares his own trade to the lawyer's and the statesman's (1728)

Peachum's opening air, set to the tune 'An old woman clothed in grey'

"Were I laid on Greenland's coast" — the highwayman and his new bride sing 'over the hills and far away' (1728)

Air XVI, the duet between Macheath and Polly Peachum

"How happy could I be with either" — a bigamist caught between two women in a gaol (1728)

Macheath's air, to the tune 'Have you heard of a frolicksome ditty'; Polly and Lucy then quarrel

"Let us take the road" — a gang of highwaymen march out to a tune lifted from Handel's Rinaldo (1728)

Set to the March from Rinaldo, a deliberate jab at Italian opera

"Cease your funning" — one daughter tells the other that her claim on their husband is the older one (1728)

Polly's air; the tune was later used by Beethoven and by Britten

"Youth's the season made for joys" — a tavern chorus urging love and dancing while there is time (1728)

Sung in the tavern near Newgate, just before the whores betray the highwayman

"The charge is prepared, the lawyers are met" — a condemned man sings in the cell before his hanging (1728)

Air LVI, to the tune 'Bonny Dundee'; it leads into a chain of short airs in the cell before the author grants a reprieve

Quick-fire facts

•Premiered at Lincoln's Inn Fields on 29 January 1728 under the manager John Rich, and ran 62 nights — the pun was that it made 'Gay rich and Rich gay'.
•It contains 69 airs, set to existing tunes; Johann Christoph Pepusch arranged them and supplied an overture.
•The original Polly Peachum, Lavinia Fenton, became famous overnight and later married the Duke of Bolton.
•Gay's sequel, Polly, was banned by the Lord Chamberlain in 1729 and not staged until 1777, though printing it made Gay a fortune.
•Hogarth painted several versions of a scene from it, showing Macheath between Polly and Lucy in Newgate.
•Macheath is thought to draw on the highwayman Jack Sheppard, and Peachum on the thief-taker Jonathan Wild.
•Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill's Die Dreigroschenoper (The Threepenny Opera), from Elisabeth Hauptmann's translation, opened in Berlin on 31 August 1928, exactly two centuries later; Macheath became Mackie Messer and gained the ballad 'Mack the Knife'.
•Britten made his own realisation of the airs in 1948; Nicholas Hytner directed a 1983 film with Roger Daltrey, and Peter Brook staged it on film in 1953 with Laurence Olivier singing Macheath.
•Its success is often credited with helping to provoke the Licensing Act 1737, which imposed theatre censorship for over two centuries.

Drill it — 9 cards

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Sources

Encyclopaedia Britannica — The Beggar's Opera: ballad opera by Gay
Grove Music Online (Oxford Music Online) — Gay, John: The Beggar's Opera
John Gay, ed. Bryan Loughrey and T. O. Treadwell (Penguin Classics) — The Beggar's Opera