Ballad opera
Earliest ballad operas
Ballad opera has been called an "eighteenth-century protest against the Italian conquest of the London operatic scene."[2] It consists of racy and often satirical spoken (English) dialogue, interspersed with songs that are deliberately kept very short (mostly a single short stanza and refrain) to minimize disruptions to the flow of the story, which involves lower class, often criminal, characters, and typically shows a suspension (or inversion) of the high moral values of the Italian opera of the period.
It is generally accepted that the first ballad opera, and the one that was to prove the most successful, was
After the success of The Beggar's Opera, many similar pieces were staged. The actor
Although they featured the lower reaches of society, the audiences for these works were typically the London bourgeois. As a reaction to opera seria (at this time almost invariably sung in Italian), the music, for these audiences, was as satirical in its way as the words of the play. The plays themselves contained references to contemporary politics—in The Beggar's Opera the character Peachum was a lampoon of Sir Robert Walpole. This satirical element meant that many of them risked censorship and banning—as was the case with Gay's successor to The Beggar's Opera, Polly.
The tunes of the original ballad operas were almost all pre-existing (somewhat in the manner of a modern "
The Disappointment (1762) represents an early American attempt at such a ballad opera.
Singspiel connection
In 1736 the
Pastoral ballad opera
A later development, also often referred to as ballad opera, was a more "pastoral" form. In subject matter, especially, these "ballad operas" were antithetical to the more satirical variety. In place of the rag-bag of pre-existing music found in (for example) The Beggar's Opera, the scores of these works consisted in the main of original music, although they not infrequently quoted folk melodies, or imitated them. Thomas Arne and Isaac Bickerstaffe's Love in a Village, and William Shield's Rosina (1781) are typical examples. Many of these works were introduced as after-pieces to performances of Italian operas.
Later in the century broader comedies such as Richard Brinsley Sheridan's The Duenna and the innumerable works of Charles Dibdin moved the balance back towards the original style, but there was little remaining of the impetus of the satirical ballad opera.
19th century
English 19th century opera is very heavily drawn from the "pastoral" form of the ballad opera, and traces even of the satiric kind can be found in the work of "serious" practitioners such as John Barnett. Much of the satiric spirit (albeit in a greatly refined form) of the original ballad opera can be found in Gilbert's contribution to the Savoy operas of Gilbert and Sullivan, and the more pastoral form of ballad opera is satirised in one of Gilbert and Sullivan's early works, The Sorcerer (1877).[7]
20th century
The Threepenny Opera of Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht (1928) is a reworking of The Beggar's Opera, setting a similar story with the same characters, and containing much of the same satirical bite. On the other hand, it uses just one tune from the original—all the other music being specially composed, and thus omits one of the most distinctive features of the original ballad opera.
In a completely different vein, Hugh the Drover, an opera in two acts by Ralph Vaughan Williams first staged in 1924, is also sometimes referred to as a "ballad opera". It is plainly much closer to Shield's Rosina than to The Beggar's Opera.
In the twentieth century folk singers have produced musical plays with folk or folk-like songs called "ballad operas". Alan Lomax, Pete Seeger, Burl Ives, and others recorded The Martins and the Coys in 1944, and Peter Bellamy and others recorded The Transports in 1977. The first of these is in some ways connected to the "pastoral" form of the ballad opera, and the latter to the satiric Beggar's Opera type, but in all they represent yet further reinterpretations of the term.
Ironically, it is in the musicals of Kander and Ebb—especially Chicago and Cabaret—that the kind of satire embodied in The Beggar's Opera and its immediate successors is probably best preserved, although here, as in Weill's version, the music is specially composed, unlike the first ballad operas of the 18th century.
References
- ^ ISBN 0-19-311323-6.
- ^ a b M. Lubbock, The Complete Book of Light Opera (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1962), pp. 467–68
- ^ J. Milling, P. Thomson, J. W. Donohue, eds, The Cambridge History of British Theatre: 1660 to 1895 / edited by Joseph Donohue (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 131.
- Grove's Dictionary of Music and Musicians, "D'Urfey, Thomas".
- ^ J. Warrack and E. West, The Oxford Dictionary of Opera (Oxford: Oxford University Press), p. 43.
- ^ Walter H. Rubsamen: "Mr. Seedo, Ballad Opera, and the Singspiel", in: Miscelánea en homenaje a Monseñor Higinio Anglés (Barcelona: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, 1958–1961), vol. 2, pp. 775–809.
- ^ Walbrook, H. M. (1922). "IV". Gilbert & Sullivan Opera, A History and a Comment. F. V. White & Co. Ltd. Archived from the original on 2008-05-12. Retrieved 24 June 2009.
Bibliography
- Edmond M. Gagey: Ballad Opera (New York: Columbia University Press, 1937; re-issued New York & London: Benjamin Blom, 1968).
- John Gay, ed. Hal Gladfelder: The Beggar's Opera and Polly (Oxford University Press, 2013).
- Grove's Dictionary of Music and Musicians, article "Ballad opera"
- Harold Rosenthal and John Warrack: The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Opera (Oxford, 1979), article "Ballad opera".
- Walter H. Rubsamen (ed.): The Ballad Opera. A Collection of 171 Texts of Musical Plays Printed in Photo-Facsimile, 28 volumes (New York, 1974).