Operas by Benjamin Britten

Please note that the content of this book primarily consists of articles available from Wikipedia or other free sources online. Pages: 23. Chapters: The Beggar's Opera, The Little Sweep, The Turn of the Screw, Peter Grimes, Owen Wingrave, Death in Venice, Albert Herring, Curlew River, Billy Budd, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Noye's Fludde, Gloriana, The Rape of Lucretia, The Prodigal Son, The Burning Fiery Furnace, Paul Bunyan. Excerpt: The Beggar's Opera is a ballad opera in three acts written in 1728 by John Gay. 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 Beggar's Opera premiered at the Lincoln's Inn Fields Theatre on 29 January 1728 and ran for 62 consecutive performances, the longest run in theatre history up to that time. The work became Gay's greatest success and has been played ever since. The original production was so successful that John Rich, the manager of the theatre, was able to build a new theatre, the Theatre Royal, Covent Garden, forerunner of the Royal Opera House. In 1920, The Beggar's Opera began an astonishing revival run of 1,463 performances at the Lyric Theatre in Hammersmith, London, which was one of the longest runs in history for any piece of musical theatre at that time. The piece satirised Italian opera, which had become popular in London. According to The New York Times: "Gay wrote the work more as an anti-opera than an opera, one of its attractions to its 18th-century London public being its lampooning of the Italian opera style and the English public's fascination with it." Instead of the grand music and themes of opera, the work uses familiar tunes and characters that were ordinary peop...