The Beggar's Opera is the most well-known example of a ballad opera, a boisterous and comedic genre of musical theater that emerged in England in the early 18th century. Ballad operas combine conventions of opera with elements of popular entertainment, such as folk-tunes, slapstick comedy, and spoken dialogue. Like other examples of ballad opera, The Beggar’s Opera is not generally thought of as a true opera, but rather, as an anti-opera, or in other words, a parody of those French and Italian operas that had become fashionable among the upper class of British society during Gay’s lifetime.
While opera traditionally focused on narratives and themes drawn from classical mythology and European history, ballad operas generally disregard these grand and lofty topics in favor of everyday characters drawn from the lower classes of society. Similarly, while most operatic works convey a strong moral message to the audience, ballad operas often spoof this tendency to moralize. This disinterest in moral didacticism is evident in The Beggar’s Opera, in which the criminal Macheath is miraculously pardoned from his death sentence despite having shown no remorse for his illegal and immoral actions throughout the play. In the ballad opera, fun is privileged over moral seriousness.
