ABSTRACT

Pantomimes were quintessentially musical. There were arias, as well as recitatives, ensembles and choruses. Several comic songs were sung, and between the vocal items there were instrumental pieces which accompanied the performers’ mimes. In pantomime, the music was virtually continuous from beginning to end. The popular music is the key to the form. Old tunes known since childhood are reassuring, comfortable, but they also create resonances with a wilder world, releasing the imagination into the unpredictable carnival of popular culture, and the world turned upside down. A ballad opera is one which uses popular existing tunes and sets new words to them, in an operatic three-act structure. The Beggar’s Opera presents a deliberately sideways view of society, wry, sometimes contemptuous, always fascinated. Part of the success of The Beggar’s Opera came from the ribald mockery of upper-class opera, especially in its ending which ridiculed neoclassical poetic justice.