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The Threepenny Opera 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, if any, contribution Hauptmann might have made to the text, Brecht is usually listed as sole author.
John Gay 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.
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 broadsheet ballads, opera arias, church hymns and folk tunes of the time.
The Theatre Royal Haymarket is a West End theatre on Haymarket in the City of Westminster which dates back to 1720, making it the third-oldest London playhouse still in use. Samuel Foote acquired the lease in 1747, and in 1766 he gained a royal patent to play legitimate drama in the summer months. The original building was a little further north in the same street. It has been at its current location since 1821, when it was redesigned by John Nash. It is a Grade I listed building, with a seating capacity of 888. The freehold of the theatre is owned by the Crown Estate.
Lavinia Powlett, Duchess of Bolton, known by her stagename as Lavinia Fenton, was an English actress who was the mistress and later the wife of the 3rd Duke of Bolton.
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 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."
Charles Coffey was an Irish playwright, opera librettist and arranger of music from Westmeath.
Charlotte Charke was an English actress, playwright, novelist, and autobiographer. She began acting at the age of seventeen in breeches roles, and took to wearing male clothing off stage as well, performing and being publicly known as "Charles Brown" from 1741. Her later career and her writings were conducted under her own name, "Mrs. Charlotte Charke", and identified her as the daughter of Colley Cibber. After being unsuccessful in a series of jobs associated with men at the time, such as valet, sausage maker, farmer, and tavern owner, she succeeded in her career as a writer and continued her work as a novelist and memoirist until her death in 1760.
The patent theatres were the theatres that were licensed to perform "spoken drama" after the Restoration of Charles II as King of England, Scotland and Ireland in 1660. Other theatres were prohibited from performing such "serious" drama, but were permitted to show comedy, pantomime or melodrama. Drama was also interspersed with singing or dancing, to prevent the whole being too serious or dramatic.
The Beggar's Opera is a 1953 British historical musical film, a Technicolor adaptation of John Gay's 1728 ballad opera of the same name. The film, directed by Peter Brook in his feature film debut, stars Laurence Olivier, Hugh Griffith, Dorothy Tutin, Stanley Holloway, Daphne Anderson and Athene Seyler. Olivier and Holloway provide their own singing, but Tutin and others were dubbed.
Augustan drama can refer to the dramas of Ancient Rome during the reign of Caesar Augustus, but it most commonly refers to the plays of Great Britain in the early 18th century, a subset of 18th-century Augustan literature. King George I referred to himself as "Augustus," and the poets of the era took this reference as apropos, as the literature of Rome during Augustus moved from historical and didactic poetry to the poetry of highly finished and sophisticated epics and satire.
Beggar's Holiday is a musical with a book and lyrics by John La Touche and music by Duke Ellington.
Maria, Lady Walpole was the second wife of British politician and Prime Minister Robert Walpole from before 3 March 1738 until her death in childbirth (miscarriage) three months later. She was buried in the Church of St Martin on the Walpole estate at Houghton Hall in Norfolk, England.
Frederic William Austin was an English baritone singer, a musical teacher and composer in the period 1905–30. He is perhaps best remembered for his arrangement of Johann Pepusch's music for a 1920 production of The Beggar's Opera by John Gay, and its sequel Polly in 1922; and for his popularization of the melody of the carol The Twelve Days of Christmas. Austin was the older brother of the composer Ernest Austin (1874–1947).
Captain Macheath is a fictional character who appears both in John Gay's The Beggar's Opera (1728), its sequel Polly (1777), and 150 years later in Bertolt Brecht's The Threepenny Opera (1928).
Thomas Walker (1698–1744) was an English actor and dramatist.
Margaret Kennedy was a contralto singer and actress. She was best known for her performances in male roles, especially in the operas of Thomas Arne.
Hannah Norsa was an English Jewish actress and singer, who achieved fame appearing in John Gay's The Beggar's Opera in 1732 and became the mistress of Robert Walpole, 2nd Earl of Orford.
This is a summary of 1923 in music in the United Kingdom.
The Beggar's Wedding is a 1729 ballad opera by the Irish writer Charles Coffey. Part of a boom in ballad operas following the success of John Gay's The Beggar's Opera, it originally premiered at the Smock Alley Theatre in Dublin in March 1729 before appearing in London at the Haymarket Theatre on 29 May 1729 The original Dublin cast included Richard Elrington.
References
- 1 2 Gay, John: Polly at Boosey & Hawkes
- ↑ The Contemplator's Short History of John Gay and The Beggar's Opera
- ↑ Winton, Calhoun (1993). John Gay and the London theatre . University Press of Kentucky. pp. 132–133. ISBN 0-8131-1832-8.
- ↑ Dryden, Robert. G. "John Gay's Polly: Unmasking Pirates and Fortune Hunters in the West Indies". Eighteenth-Century Studies. Vol. 34, No. 4. (Summer 2001), pp. 539–557
- ↑ Pepusch, John Christopher; Gay, John; Bax, Clifford (1923). Polly: An Opera by Mr. Gay. Being the Sequel to The Beggar's Opera. M. Yard.