Ballad opera

Like the earlier comédie en vaudeville and the later Singspiel, its distinguishing characteristic is the use of tunes in a popular style (either pre-existing or newly composed) with spoken dialogue.

"[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.

[3] It had a libretto by John Gay and music arranged by Johann Christoph Pepusch, both of whom probably experienced vaudeville theatre in Paris, and may have been motivated to reproduce it in an English form.

They were also probably influenced by the burlesques and musical plays of Thomas D'Urfey (1653–1723) who had a reputation for fitting new words to existing songs; a popular anthology of these settings was published in 1700 and frequently re-issued.

The actor Thomas Walker, who played Macheath in the original production, wrote several ballad operas,[1] and Gay produced further works in this style, including a much less successful sequel, Polly.

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 tunes of the original ballad operas were almost all pre-existing (somewhat in the manner of a modern "jukebox musical"): however they were taken from a wide variety of contemporary sources, including folk melodies, popular airs by classical composers (such as Purcell) and even children's nursery rhymes.

[1] In 1762, Thomas Arne's Love in a Village presented a new form of ballad opera, with mainly new music and much less reliance on traditional tunes.

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.