ABSTRACT
France had cultivated stage genres such as opera and comedie-ballet, but the entertainment at various French fairs was also important. The Beggar's Opera expected its audience to be familiar with Italian opera, and it parodied the foreign genre unmercifully. Originally, Gay planned for the actors to sing the tunes without any accompaniment; musicians call this type of performance monophony. Young Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, who traveled through Europe with his family, tried his hand at most musical genres he encountered. Musicians often use the term medium (or sometimes performance medium or performing forces) to describe the performers needed for a particular work, and so the medium for "Diggi, Daggi" is voice and orchestra. One aesthetic concern of late eighteenth-century music was the principle of increasing animation—in other words, as the piece progresses, the music starts to sound busier and busier, and the notes start to follow each other more rapidly.
