CHAPTER 2 | MILITARY, CONCERT, AND THEATER MUSIC 59
performance in New York in 1750. Gay’s plot, characters,
and lyrics challenged conventional notions of morality
with comic precision. Like other ballad operas, its songs
consist of new words set to familiar tunes, chosen not
only for their melodies but also for their associations.
For example, when Mrs. Peachum reviles her daugh-
ter Polly for marrying for love instead of wealth (“Our
Polly Is a Sad Slut”), the tune Gay borrows is “Oh Lon-
don Is a Fine Town,” a satirical attack claiming that the
city government’s offi cials are totally corrupt. Knowing
the tunes in their original version helped English audi-
ences feel the sting of The Beggar’s Opera’s social critique,
and American audiences must have shared some of that
experience (as they did again in the 1950s when Bertolt
Brecht and Kurt Weill’s 1928 updating of the play, The
Threepenny Opera, was an off-Broadway smash).
Ballad operas concentrated on words and ideas,
sometimes with society as a target. Another popular
theatrical genre of the time, assembled from parts
of other such compositions but placing a higher prior-
ity on music, was the pasticcio. A pasticcio that won
great popularity on both sides of the Atlantic was Love
in a Village (1762), a light romance with music supplied
and arranged by the English musician Thomas Arne,
fi rst performed in Charleston and Philadelphia in 1766.
Except for a handful of new pieces, Arne borrowed the
music for Love in a Village from elsewhere. Most of all,
he tapped a vein of lyrical song that fl ourished from
the 1740s on in England’s pleasure gardens (elegantly
landscaped amusement parks).
The third genre of musical theater work was the
comic opera, or simply opera, which in the English-speaking world denoted a
spoken play with a rather large amount of specially composed music. Despite
the name, the plots are not so much humorous as melodramatic and sentimen-
tal, usually with a happy ending. A favorite comic opera was The Children in the
Wood, with music by Samuel Arnold and a libretto (literally “little book,” i.e., the
words) by Thomas Morton. Premiered in London in 1793, it reached Philadelphia
the following year. Taking its plot from one of the “old, simple ditties” Benja-
min Franklin mentioned in his letter quoted earlier in this chapter, it replaces
the original ballad’s tragic ending with the villain’s comeuppance and a tearful
reunion for the title children, lost and refound, with their virtuous parents.
The early musical theater in America, like the spoken theater, was a branch
of what is today called show business. While the names of the principal genres—
ballad operas, pasticcios, and comic operas—may suggest distinct, self-contained
art forms, all three types of musical stage work were aimed at audience acces-
sibility. Performers, composers, and theater managers sought most of all to fi nd
and please audiences and to increase their size. Toward that end, musical stage
productions featured plots with characters, good or evil, whom spectators could
love or hate; players with a talent for comedy, singing, or dancing; a store of mel-
ody that was catchy if not already familiar; and a certain amount of spectacle.K This program from
Philadelphia’s New Theater
on January 9, 1797, shows
what theatergoers of the
time could expect from an
evening’s entertainment.172028_02_044-062_r3_ko.indd 59 23/01/13 8:14 PM