Translations for all the texts were by made by Brecht’s close collaborator, Elisabeth Hauptmann. In addition to Gay’s text, Brecht also used poems by Rudyard Kipling and Françoise Villon. A satire of both Italian opera conventions and the political corruption of England’s reigning prime minister, Sir Robert Walpole, The Beggar’s Opera was tremendously popular with 18th-century theatergoers and had enjoyed a successful London revival in the early 1920s. Gay’s work consisted of dialogue interspersed with 69 songs, mainly popular ballads of the British Isles and France, and well-known opera arias by Handel and Purcell, among others.
The source for the work was John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera (1728), a humorous “ballad opera” with no generic precedent.
0 kommentar(er)
