Music in The Beggar´s Opera

This play was first performed in 1728. It was written by John Gay, who was a member of the Scriblerus club, and a friend of Alexander Pope and Jonathan Swift among other important writers of the time.
    The play is considered to be the starting point of a new type of representation. To start with, it was completely different from the Italian Opera that was so popular in the seventeenth and first half of the eighteenth century. The author wanted to make a point by making it drastically different. Thanks to this play, he was also able to mock the political thinking of the time, and the politics of Robert Walpole, the first prime minister.  These changes were partly the reason that made the play so important; the most outstanding change is the incorporation of musical pieces called arias. These were an accompanied song or melody in usually strophic form. They are typical of the Elizabethan and the Jacobean period. In this play there are 68 airs. They are very different, because some were popular tunes of the time; others were songs with political content. As an example we can take aria number 67, which is an adaptation of the famous tune “Green sleeves”; thanks to it Gay mocks the sentimental love songs of the past and the ignored corruption that had been taking place in Newgate Prison for son long:

                Air 67 Green sleeves (p. 2654)
"Since laws were made for every degree,
To curb vice in others, as well as me,
I wonder we han´t better company,
Upon Tyburn Tree!
But gold from law can take out the sting;
And if rich men like us were to swing,
'Twould thin the land, such numbers to string
Upon Tyburn Tree!"

    Gay uses both dialogue and music to further the action of the story. Forty-one of the sixty-nine airs were broadside ballads of the time. The other tunes were borrowed from contemporary composers. To these tunes he wrote lyrics to fit the play.
Moreover, Gay and George Handel were very close friends; he was a very well know musician and composer of the time. Because of the social impact and popularity that this play had, Handel got very mad, because several of the plays he wrote music for didn´t succeed, and this one did for a very long time.
    Its impact was of such magnitude that it is even considered to be the first musical. It was performed internationally in Dublin, Glasgow, Jamaica and New York. Only twenty-two years later, The Beggar´s Opera was performed in America as one of the first musical comedies. It included a lot of musical pieces that no other play had during the 18th century, and for this it is considered to be the origin of the musicals, like Aphra Behn´s Oroonoko; or Royal Slave and Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe are considered to be the starting point of the novel as we know it today.















http://www.contemplator.com/history/johngay.html
http://www.umich.edu/~ece/student_projects/beggars_opera/music.html