A distinctively English form in which spoken dialogue alternates with songs set to traditional or popular melodies and sung by the actors themselves. A vogue for the form was sparked by the enormous popularity of John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera (January 1728) but faded out by the mid-1730s. Some 80 such works were written in these years, but only a handful remained in the repertory. The genre was invented by Gay as a complex vehicle for both harsh and subtle satire; for most of his successors it quickly became little more than a way of padding out farces with popular music.
2. Origins, ‘The Beggar’s Opera’.
CURTIS PRICE, ROBERT D. HUME
The term ‘ballad opera’ is a misnomer. The works so described are plays (almost always comic, usually farcical) into which a variety of songs have been worked. Fewer than half the songs are actually popular ballads: the sources of the music vary widely, ranging from D’Urfey’s Wit and Mirth, or Pills to Purge Melancholy to arias from Handel’s operas and movements of Italian concertos. Sources have been found in The English Dancing Master (1651 and its derivatives), traditional favourites such as Lilliburlero and Tweedside, and most of the popular composers of the time. Among the acknowledged sources are Thomas Arne, Giovanni Bononcini, Henry Carey, Corelli, Francesco Gasparini, Francesco Geminiani, J.B. Grano, Leveridge and Pepusch; among those identified by later scholars are Blow, Jeremiah Clarke, Giovanni Battista Draghi, John Eccles, Galliard, J.F. Lampe, Locke, Henry Purcell and Weldon. In every instance, however, the music is fitted with new words, and the songs are integrated into the dramatic structure of the play, not simply interpolated as variety or entr’acte entertainment.
The sudden appearance of ballad opera in 1728 remains one of the mysteries of 18th-century theatre history. Late 17th-century English plays were heavily laden with music, and many works included integral songs sung by the actors themselves. But these roles were confined to a few specialists, such as Thomas Doggett and Anne Bracegirdle, and the music was freshly written by mainstream composers. Gay’s innovation was twofold: to have all the characters sing as much as they speak, and to use tunes well known to everyone. Such generic precursors as can be found are surprisingly remote in both date and kind – Thomas Duffett’s musical travesties of the 1670s and Richard Estcourt’s musical farce Prunella (1708), a crude satire on Giovanni Bononcini’s Italian opera Camilla (London première, 1706). Whether Gay was familiar with any of these works is uncertain. He may have known contemporaneous plays of the Théâtre Italien and the Théâtres de la Foire in Paris, which included popular tunes fitted with new verses. The immediate inspiration for The Beggar’s Opera seems to have been provided by Jonathan Swift, who suggested that Gay write ‘a Newgate [prison] Pastoral, among the Whores and Thieves there’. None of this detracts from Gay’s originality, for The Beggar’s Opera was radically new: ‘instead of cardboard heroes of antiquity, Gay offered very real modern Londoners; instead of noble sentiments, every crime in the calendar’ (Fiske). Today The Beggar’s Opera is usually performed as a charming period piece, but in 1728 it provoked denunciations for incitement to immorality. More to the point, it confronted the audience with an ironic exaltation of criminals and prostitutes that was in radical contrast to the usual decorum of the 18th-century theatre. This was an innovation in which Gay was not followed by his successors.
As Gay conceived it, ballad opera is a fast-moving satirical drama of low-life characters in which the actors frequently break into song. The Beggar’s Opera contains 69 songs; they are rarely separated by more than a page of spoken dialogue. The familiarity of the music renders it rich in extra-textual references which could either enhance the emotional impact of the dramatic situation or (more often) render it delightfully preposterous. Gay’s snide incongruities between his new words and the old ones are a particular pleasure of the piece. For example, in Act 1 scene ix, Peachum’s rather lame attack on the legal profession, ‘A fox may steal your hens, sir’, was set to Eccles’s ‘A soldier and a sailor’ (from Congreve’s Love for Love), whose notoriously rude original verses would have added an unspoken barb to Gay’s message. By no means all the songs in ballad operas were satirical; for sentimental scenes, Gay often chose similarly sentimental music. Many of his less gifted imitators were insensitive to musical reference and simply searched through the popular collections, especially the volumes of Scotch airs, for any tune that would suit a particular verse, regardless of the character of the music itself.
The Beggar’s Opera has often been said to be a savage satire on Italian opera as Handel was producing it at the King’s Theatre, Haymarket, in the 1720s; it has even been credited with the demise of the Royal Academy of Music in 1728. Neither claim is true. Gay certainly satirized some of the conventions of opera seria and its squabbling performers, but he was by no means hostile to Handel, and the troubles of the Italian opera were not caused by competition from popular English fare. Nonetheless, Gay’s allusions probably tickled opera fanciers. In the introduction to The Beggar’s Opera, the Beggar clearly alludes to the rivalry between the sopranos Faustina and Cuzzoni, for whom Handel in Alessandro (1726) had written parts of almost exactly equal weight. Gay’s improbable happy ending is also a parody of the perfunctory lieto fine of Italian opera. But not all reference was satirical. Macheath’s brilliantly dramatic soliloquy in ‘the Condemn’d Hold’ (Act 3 scene xiii), an unbroken chain of ten airs or snatches of tunes, while ultimately modelled on the mad-song concatenations of Purcell or Eccles, is remarkably similar in style to some of Handel’s big accompanied recitatives and uncannily anticipates the mad scene in Orlando (1733).
The Beggar’s Opera was originally produced at Lincoln’s Inn Fields by John Rich after it was refused at Drury Lane. In its first partial season it ran for 62 performances, a total far surpassing any play in the recorded history of the London theatre. As early as summer 1728 it was pirated at the Little Haymarket, and the rival Drury Lane company naturally hastened to commission and produce ballad operas. At first these were, like Gay’s original, ambitious three-act ‘mainpieces’: Charles Johnson’s The Village Opera (Drury Lane, 1729 – ultimately the basis for Isaac Bickerstaff’s pasticcio comic opera, Love in a Village, 1762), Ebenezer Forrest’s Momus Turn’d Fabulist (Lincoln’s Inn Fields, 1729), James Ralph’s The Fashionable Lady, or Harlequin’s Opera (Goodman’s Fields, 1730), Joseph Mitchell’s Highland Fair and The Jovial Crew (both Drury Lane, 1731). None of these expensive experiments entered the repertory. Polly, Gay’s sequel to The Beggar’s Opera, was suppressed by the Lord Chamberlain in December 1728: Sir Robert Walpole did not fancy having himself impersonated as a pirate who meets a richly deserved end on the gallows and kept it off the boards, although Gay made a small fortune by publishing this rather heavy-handed satire.
An enormous variety of ballad operas were produced between 1728 and about 1735. Historical subjects were tried, as in the anonymous Robin Hood (1730) and Walter Aston’s The Restauration of King Charles II (suppressed in 1732 on suspicion of Jacobite implications). John Mottley and Thomas Cooke’s Penelope (Little Haymarket, 1728) is a delightful little classical spoof: Sergeant Ulysses, who went off to Marlborough’s wars, is now living with Circe in Rotterdam, drinking gin; his faithful wife Penelope keeps a London pub and finds herself courted by the local tinker, tailor and butcher. Another such satire is John Breval’s The Rape of Helen (1733). The best known of this ‘classical’ group is Gay’s posthumous Achilles (1733), a rather sodden reprise of the hero-in-petticoats story. Gay never came close to recapturing the charm and bite of his first effort.
With the exception of The Beggar’s Opera, ballad operas which entered the repertory were all afterpieces, including some which started out as full-length mainpieces. Colley Cibber’s Love in a Riddle (Drury Lane, 1729) was probably the victim of audience hostility to the author; cut down as Damon and Phillida, and produced anonymously at the Little Haymarket the same year, it was long popular. It is a good example of the form’s penchant for sentimentalized country low-life and improbable romance plots. Charles Coffey’s The Devil to Pay (1731) had a disastrous first night in the off season; the songs were cut from 48 to 16 by Theophilus Cibber and the piece became one of the century’s most enduring entertainments. Ballad operas of the early 1730s could be as chastely pastoral and moral as George Lillo’s Sylvia (Lincoln’s Inn Fields, 1730) or as essentially lower-class sentimental as Carey’s The Honest Yorkshireman (Little Haymarket, 1735), but most tend towards the farcical.
The most important practitioner of ballad opera after Gay was Henry Fielding, now remembered largely as a novelist (Tom Jones). Yet Fielding was the foremost English dramatist of his time, and among his 30 plays are about ten that can be plausibly classified as ballad opera, though they vary considerably in the amount of music employed. Fielding’s first attempt at the form was The Author’s Farce (Little Haymarket, 1730, radically revised in 1734), a boisterous spoof on Grub Street life and a brazen attack on theatre managers at Drury Lane and Lincoln’s Inn Fields. The Welsh Opera (Little Haymarket, 1731) is an impudent political allegory that helped get the theatre suppressed: Fielding exhibits King George II, Queen Caroline, the Prince of Wales, Walpole and Pulteney as master, mistress, not-so-hopeful heir and principal servants in the disorganized household of Squire Ap-Shinken, an amiable Welshman whose only wish is peace and quiet in which to smoke and drink. Fielding expanded the work as The Grub-Street Opera (a much more dangerous satire), but the authorities closed the Little Haymarket and appear to have bribed Fielding to withdraw the play, although it received a pirate printing. Don Quixote in England (written 1728; staged at Drury Lane, 1734) was a failure, a scrappy farce with incidental music. Deborah, or A Wife for you All (Drury Lane, March 1733) survived just one night and was not printed. It appears to have been a satire on Handel’s oratorio Deborah.
Several of Fielding’s most lastingly successful plays were part of the series of ballad-opera farces concocted for the popular singer-actress Kitty Clive at Drury Lane: The Lottery (1732), The Mock Doctor (1732), The Intriguing Chambermaid (1734), An Old Man Taught Wisdom (1735, usually performed as The Virgin Unmask’d), Eurydice (1737) and Miss Lucy in Town (1742). Except for the last two, all remained theatrical staples throughout the 18th century. The Lottery and The Intriguing Chambermaid are lightweight musical farce – the latter adapted from Jean François Regnard’s Le retour imprévu (1700), turning the clever valet into the maid Lettice as a vehicle for Clive. The Mock Doctor is a free translation of Molière with just nine songs worked in. The Virgin Unmask’d exemplifies Fielding’s comic skills: Old Goodwill decides to marry off his silly 15-year-old daughter; she listens to proposals from five boobies (an apothecary, a dancing-master, an Oxford student, a singing-master and a lawyer), accepts three of them – and then elopes with a footman whose fine clothes and elegant coiffure have gone to her head. The work offers more ridicule than satire, and Fielding quickly reduced his original 20 songs to 12. It was designed solely to display the talents of Kitty Clive, and both she and her successors found that it worked to perfection.
Fielding’s most interesting and ambitious ballad operas are his last two, both of which burlesque Italian opera. Unfortunately the music is lost and the arrangers are unknown. Eurydice died in one night, ruined by a footmen’s riot at Drury Lane. The piece travesties Orpheus (Stoppelaer) and Eurydice (Clive) as society wastrels from London. Pluto is henpecked; Eurydice tricks Orpheus in order to remain in hell; Orpheus becomes a swipe at Farinelli, the reigning castrato star of the Opera of the Nobility. Nine airs and a ‘Grand Dance’ and ‘Chorus’ are included, the airs preceded by ‘Recitativo’ in English. Miss Lucy in Town is a sequel to The Virgin Unmask’d. Lord Bawble satirizes Lord Middlesex as director of the opera. Horace Walpole wrote to a friend that ‘Mrs Clive mimics the Muscovita [Lord Middlesex’s mistress] admirably, and Beard Amorevoli intolerably’. The piece proved quite popular for a season.
Ballad opera was short-lived. The Beggar’s Opera proved that there was a large, untapped audience in London, and contributed to the establishment of Goodman’s Fields Theatre, the increasing use of the Little Haymarket, and the construction of Covent Garden in 1732. Among Gay’s successors only Fielding really understood how to use the form to good advantage in several sorts of plays, and in the operatic travesties we find him moving into what must have been newly composed pieces that take us into the realm of burletta. A handful of influential ballad operas continued to be performed throughout the rest of the 18th century, but the later burlettas and English operas of Arne, Dibdin, Storace, the Linleys and others, though often including ballad tunes, bear little resemblance to true ballad opera.
One reason for the relatively brief popularity of the original form is that the quality of the musical performances cannot have been very high. Most of the actors were not trained singers, although the demands of the genre helped to produce a new generation of actors who possessed the necessary musical skills. The extent to which the singers were accompanied is unknown. The arrangements provided by Pepusch, Carey and Seedo are often crude in the extreme, even eschewing the original (and easily obtainable) basses of the pieces they were arranging. Nor was much care taken to preserve the integrity of ‘composed’ melodies of Purcell, Handel and others. Nevertheless, the theatres which produced ballad operas maintained fairly large orchestras (a dozen or so, mostly strings), and paylists show that the instrumentalists attended every night. Given the presence of the orchestra, we must presume that it was used.
Only The Beggar’s Opera is now performed, and just a handful of other ballad operas retain even much historical interest. The form is important, however, for its contribution to the musicalization of the British theatre which is one of its most conspicuous features in the second half of the 18th century.
FiskeETM
NicollH
W.B. Squire: ‘An Index of Tunes in the Ballad Operas’, MA, ii (1910–11), 1–17
F. Kidson: The Beggar’s Opera: its Predecessors and Successors (Cambridge, 1922/R)
W.E. Schultz: Gay’s Beggar’s Opera: its Content, History, & Influence (New Haven, CT, 1923/R)
E.McA. Gagey: Ballad Opera (New York, 1937/R)
W.H. Rubsamen: ‘The Ballad Burlesques and Extravaganzas’, MQ, xxxvi (1950), 551–61
E.V. Roberts: ‘Eighteenth-Century Ballad Opera: the Contribution of Henry Fielding’, Drama Survey, i (1961–2), 77–85
E.V. Roberts: ‘Mr Seedo’s London Career and his Work with Henry Fielding’, Philological Quarterly, xlv (1966), 179–90
H. Moss: Ballad-Opera Songs: a Record of the Ideas Set to Music, 1728–1733 (diss., U. of Michigan, 1970)
L.J. Morrissey: ‘Henry Fielding and the Ballad Opera’, Eighteenth-Century Studies, iv (1971), 386–402
W.H. Rubsamen, ed.: The Ballad Opera: a Collection of 171 Original Texts of Musical Plays Printed in Photo-Facsimile (New York, 1974)
R.D. Hume: Henry Fielding and the London Theatre, 1728–1737 (Oxford, 1988)