Captain Macheath's execution lament in The Beggar's Opera

• Authors: Stacey Jocoy
• Languages of publication: EN

Abstracts

EN

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.

Keywords

EN

ballad opera; execution songs; ballad medley; cultural resonance; lament; The Beggar's Opera; John Gay; Johann Christoph Pepusch

Discipline

• ARTS_&_ARCHITECTURE: ARTS & ARCHITECTURE

• Publisher: Masaryk University, Faculty of Arts
• Journal: Theatralia: Revue současného myšlení o divadelní kultuře (Theatralia: The revue of contemporary thought on theatre culture)
• Year: 2021
• Volume: 24
• Issue: 1
• Pages: 78-91
• Document type: ARTICLE

Contributors

author

Stacey Jocoy

• Theatralia, redakce, Masarykova univerzita, Filozofická fakulta, Katedra divadelních studií, Arna Nováka 1, 602 00 Brno, Czech Republic