Beggar's Opera

The swankest of the arts in 18th-Century London was Italian opera. Periwigged courtiers, who could not understand a word of it, raised their lace cuffs to applaud the ornate trilling of swivel-voiced prima donnas. Fashionable composers like Handel had to write their librettos in Italian. The Caruso of the period was the Italian eunuch-Francesco Bernardi Senesino, whose misfortunate voice earned fabulous sums at London's Royal Academy of Music. Lustier London wits like Henry Fielding began poking fun at this artificial art, inveighed against London's "wanton, affected fondness for foreign musick," with its "squeaking recitatives, paltry Eunuchs . . . and trills of insignificant, outlandish vowels."

In 1728 a poet colleague of Fielding named John Gay decided to take Italian opera for a ride. He picked his tunes from the songs the butchers & bakers sang, strung them on a lowbrow plot about London cops, gangsters and bums, made his tattered characters ape the flouncy foibles of London's diamond horseshoe. His musical show, The Beggar's Opera, became London's biggest hit.

As the centuries passed, the classically prim Italian operas were forgotten, but the frowsy Beggar's Opera became a classic. Last week the Beggar's Opera even made the 20th-century radio, when a company under Conductor Josef Honti gave it a first broadcast over NBC's Red network. John Gay's ribald lines had been studio-broken, but there were still some 18th-Century cracks which strained the broadcasting code ("Yes, indeed, the Sex is frail. But the first time a woman is frail, she should be somewhat nice methinks, for then or never is the time to make her Fortune.") U. S. radio listeners found its gangster Captain Macheath, his moll Polly Peacham, and its other ballad-singing jailbirds as fetching as a trim ankle, its famed tunes as neat as a whistle. Sample:

Before the Barndoor crowing,

The Cock by Hens attended, His Eyes around kirn throwing,

Stands for a while suspended, Then one he singles from the crew

And cheers the happy hen With how do you do and how do you do

And how do you do again.

*As late as the early iQth Century it was an Italian custom to produce artificial "male sopranos" by castration. These castrati often developed into world-famed opera singers.

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