Instead of great, honorable heroes from high society, such as are familiar from serious opera, the spotlight in The Beggar's Opera is primarily on criminals from the lowest class, who are, however, convinced of the rightness and honorability of their actions and proclaim this in pathetic phrases.While opera parody mostly remains on a rather general level, here we find concrete references to the most famous representative of Italian opera in England, George Frideric Handel, whereby John Gay's intention was to poke fun at the genre as a whole and to set a monument to the moral decay of his time. At the premiere of the Beggar's Opera on January 29, 1728, Gay and Pepusch largely dispensed with professional singers and had mainly actors sing - and within a short time achieved a great success with the public.Against this background, it is only logical and quite appealing that Gardiner also resorts to actors and singers who do not actually come from the world of opera.
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