Ballad Opera
English satire with spoken dialogue and songs set to borrowed popular tunes
Related
Ballad opera was an eighteenth-century English stage form: spoken dialogue plus songs, most of them new words to popular ballads, dances and opera tunes, with no Italian recitative.
Gay and Pepusch's The Beggar's Opera (1728) was both beginning and peak: London's underworld, thieves and corrupt officials filled the stage, and Italian opera's pretensions were mocked. Its sequel Polly was banned, but the form flourished.
It is not a folk version of opera; most of its music was borrowed. Unlike operetta it has no original waltz tunes or romantic story, and unlike Singspiel it is sharper and more political. It influenced French opéra comique and German Singspiel.
Sources
- 谣曲歌剧的《乞丐歌剧》开端、借曲填词与政治讽刺，参 The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, "Ballad opera"；本文为原创表述
Used for fact-checking only; all prose is original.