Ballad Opera

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The Ballad opera (English "Lieder-Oper") was a successful genre of English-language musical theater around 1730. The most famous example of the genre is The Beggar's Opera (1728) by John Gay and Johann Christoph Pepusch .

description

In the Ballad opera , the structure of the Italian opera of the era was retained, with the recitatives being replaced by spoken dialogues and mostly simple folk melodies being used. In the manner of a singspiel , the ballad opera mocked and parodied serious works of theater or musical theater. The first noteworthy example of the genre is The Gentle Shepherd (1725) by Allan Ramsey , the climax undoubtedly the famous " Beggar's Opera " ( The Beggar's Opera , 1728), based on the Threepenny Opera (1928) by Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill . For around a quarter of a century, the ballad opera, as a contrast to serious music theater, enjoyed great popularity among the London audience. Its most famous creators included Colley Cibber , Henry Fielding and David Garrick . The last notable example was Richard Sheridan's The Duenna , written in 1775, when the great days of the genre were already over.

Effects

The Ballad opera can be seen as a critical reaction to the predominant form of Italian opera, which was reserved for an upper-class audience because of the foreign language, artificial dialogues in the form of recitatives and unrealistic acts. The pieces of the new genre were able to lure people from the English lower and middle classes into the musical theater. Its success pushed the Italian opera ever further back, so that, for example, Georg Friedrich Händel stopped composing other operas in 1741.

Charles Coffey's ballad opera The Devil to Pay (1731) and its sequel The Merry Cobbler (1735) were of particular influence on the German Singspiel .

literature

  • Edmond McAdoo Gagey: Ballad Opera. Columbia University Press, New York NY 1937 ( Columbia University Studies in English and comparative Literature 130, ZDB -ID 1023149-3 ).
  • Hans Heinrich Eggebrecht (ed.): Riemann-Musiklexikon. Material part . Mainz 1967. Article “Ballad opera”.

Web links

  • Musical Background - Article about the Ballad opera in general and The Beggar's Opera in particular.