Title: Captain Macheath's execution lament in The Beggar's Opera
Source document: Theatralia. 2021, vol. 24, iss. 1, pp. 78-91
Extent
78-91
-
ISSN1803-845X (print)2336-4548 (online)
Persistent identifier (DOI): https://doi.org/10.5817/TY2021-1-6
Stable URL (handle): https://hdl.handle.net/11222.digilib/143815
Type: Article
Language
License: CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International
Notice: These citations are automatically created and might not follow citation rules properly.
Abstract(s)
On the eve of his execution, Captain Macheath in John Gay's The Beggar's Opera (1728) sings a lament or "Last Goodnight". Unlike the rest of the opera's musical numbers, Macheath's lament is a medley consisting of ten tunes. Placing them in close succession, Gay created a mini-narrative embedded within the larger story, forming a climactic picture of Macheath's mind – clearly the most musically dynamic moment of the opera. Daniel Heartz likens Macheath's "delirium" lament with the quodlibet or medley, popular on the contemporary French stage. While this speaks to the dark humor of the piece, an Italian musical genre, the solo cantata, had only recently been introduced to English audiences and may also account for the style and placement of Gay's work. Johann Christoph Pepusch, responsible for musical settings in The Beggar's Opera, had published his English Cantatas in 1710, and Henry Carey had published comic cantatas throughout the 1720s. Comparing continental traditions and formal analysis of Macheath's lament, this study considers the lament as a musical combination of the French comic and the dramatic Italian cantata traditions, in which the two continental genres melded with the English ballad to create a musical, sociopolitical tour de force, mocking British and Italian conventions simultaneously.
References
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[4] DUGAW, Dianne. 2001. "Deep Play": John Gay and the Invention of Modernity. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2001.
[5] GAY, John. 1720. Poems on Several Occasions. London: Jacob Tonson and Bernard Lintot, 1720.
[6] GAY, John. 1969. The Beggar's Opera. Edited by Edgar V. Roberts. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1969.
[7] GOLLAPUDI, Aparna. 2006. Mending Manners: Reform Comedy and Culture 1696–1747. PhD dissertation. University of Connecticut, 2006.
[8] HUME, Robert D. 1983. The Rakish Stage: Studies in English Drama, 1660–1800. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1983.
[9] CHAPPELL, William and Sir G. A. Macfarren. 1859. Popular music of the olden time; a collection of ancient songs, ballads, and dance tunes, illustrative of the national music of England. London: Cramer, Beale and Chappell, 1859.
[10] KNIGHT, Stephen. 2003. Robin Hood: A Mythic Biography. Ithaca/London: Cornell University Press, 2003.
[11] KRAMNICK, Isaac. 1968. Bolingbroke and his Circle, The Politics of Nostalgia in the Age of Walpole. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1968.
[12] LINEBAUGH, Peter. 1992. London Hanged: Crime and Civil Society in the Eighteenth Century. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1992.
[13] MACKIE, Erin. 2009. Rakes, Highwaymen, and Pirates. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2009.
[14] MARSH, Christopher. 2004. The sound of print in early modern England: the broadside ballad as song. In Julia Crick and Alexandra Walsham (eds.). The Uses of Script and Print, 1300–1700. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004.
[15] MCKENZIE, Andrea. 2007. Tyburn's Martyrs Execution in England, 1675–1775. London: Continuum Books, 2007.
[16] NOBLE, Yvonne. 1966. John Gay The Beggar's Opera: A Critical Edition. PhD dissertation. Yale University, 1966.
[17] ROBERTS, John Michael. 2000. The Enigma of Free Speech: Speakers' Corner, The Geography of Governance and a Crisis of Rationality. Social and Legal Studies 9 (June 2000): 271–292. | DOI 10.1177/096466390000900205
[18] SHARPE, J. A. 1985. 'Last Dying Speeches': Religion, Ideology and Public Execution in Seventeenth-Century England. Past and Present 107 (May 1985): 144–167.
[19] SIMPSON, Claude M. 1966. The British Broadside Ballad and Its Music. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1966.
[20] STERNFELD, F. W. 1964. Ophelia's Version of the Walsingham Song. Music and Letters 45 (April 1964): 108–113. | DOI 10.1093/ml/45.2.108
[21] ST JOHN, Henry. 1749. Viscount Bolingbroke, Letters on the Spirit of Patriotism: on The Patriot King. Dublin: For J. Smith, 1749.
[22] TAGG, Philip. 2003. Ten Little Tunes Towards a musicology of the mass media. New York: The Mass Media Music Scholars' Press, 2003.
[23] "Totus mundus agit Histrionem; / Anglice, / The Stage turns all the World to Ridicule" on the title page of A Key to the Beggar's Opera. In Letter to Caleb Danvers, Esq.; appended to the end of Woman's Revenge: or, A Match in Newgate, by Peter Padwell of Padington, Esq. (alias Christopher Bullock), 3rd ed. London: George Faulkner and James Hoey, 1728: 49.
[24] WHITE, Barbara. 2008. Duval, Claude (d1670). In Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford University Press, 2004; online edition, Jan 2008. Available online at http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/8333.