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) with spoken dialogue. These English plays were 'operas' mainly insofar as they satirized the conventions of the imported opera seria. Music critic Peter Gammond describes the ballad opera as "an important step in the emancipation of both the musical stage and the popular song."
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👉 Ballad opera in the context of Number opera
A number opera (Italian: opera a numeri; German: Nummeroper; French: opéra à numéros) is an opera consisting of individual pieces of music ('numbers') which can be easily extracted from the larger work. They may be numbered consecutively in the score, and may be interspersed with recitative or spoken dialogue. Opera numbers may be arias, but also ensemble pieces, such as duets, trios, quartets, quintets, sextets or choruses. They may also be ballets and instrumental pieces, such as marches, sinfonias, or intermezzi. The number opera format was standard until the mid-19th century and most opera genres, including opera seria, opera buffa, opéra comique, ballad opera, Singspiel, and grand opera, were constructed in this fashion.
The replacement of numbers with more continuous music began in operas by Jommelli, Traetta, Gluck, and especially Mozart, whose late operas Le Nozze di Figaro and Don Giovanni contain several segments in which different numbers are unified by bridge passages to form a musical whole. This trend became even more striking in the operas of the German composers Beethoven, Weber, and Meyerbeer, while their Italian and French contemporaries Rossini, Donizetti, Bellini, and Auber retained the number opera style.
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Ballad opera in the context of John Gay
John Gay (30 June 1685 – 4 December 1732) was an English poet and dramatist and member of the Scriblerus Club. He is best remembered for The Beggar's Opera (1728), a ballad opera. The characters, including Captain Macheath and Polly Peachum, became household names.
Ballad opera in the context of The Beggar's Opera
The Beggar's Opera 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. Ballad operas were satiric musical plays that used some of the conventions of opera, but without recitative. The lyrics of the airs in the piece are set to popular broadside ballads, opera arias, church hymns and folk tunes of the time.
The Beggar's Opera premiered at the Lincoln's Inn Fields Theatre on 29 January 1728 and ran for 62 consecutive performances, the second-longest run in theatre history up to that time (after 146 performances of Robert Cambert's Pomone in Paris in 1671). The work became Gay's greatest success and has been played ever since; it has been called "the most popular play of the eighteenth century". In 1920, The Beggar's Opera began a revival run of 1,463 performances at the Lyric Theatre in Hammersmith, London, which was one of the longest runs in history for any piece of musical theatre at that time.
Ballad opera in the context of Victorian burlesque
Victorian burlesque, sometimes known as travesty or extravaganza, is a genre of theatrical entertainment that was popular in Victorian England and in the New York theatre of the mid-19th century. It is a form of parody in which a well-known opera or piece of classical theatre or ballet is adapted into a broad comic play, usually a musical play, usually risqué in style, mocking the theatrical and musical conventions and styles of the original work, and often quoting or pastiching text or music from the original work. Victorian burlesque is one of several forms of burlesque.
Like ballad opera, burlesques featured musical scores drawing on a wide range of music, from popular contemporary songs to operatic arias, although later burlesques, from the 1880s, sometimes featured original scores. Dance played an important part, and great attention was paid to the staging, costumes and other spectacular elements of stagecraft, as many of the pieces were staged as extravaganzas. Many of the male roles were played by actresses as breeches roles, to show off women's legs in tights, and some of the older female roles were taken by male actors.
Ballad opera in the context of The Threepenny Opera
The Threepenny Opera (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, and four ballads by François Villon, with music by Kurt Weill. Although there is debate as to how much contribution Hauptmann might have made to the libretto, Brecht is usually listed as sole author and Hauptmann as the sole translator, which was probably an unfair oversimplification typical of the time.
The work offers a socialist critique of the capitalist world. It opened on 31 August 1928 at Berlin's Theater am Schiffbauerdamm.