’Strains of New Beauty’: Handel and the Pleasures of Italian Opera, 1711–28

Abstract

So wrote Mrs Pendarves, a devoted follower of Italian opera, and an admirer of Handel since childhood, on 25 November 1727. Two months later John Gay’s Beggar’s Opera, which was to become the greatest stage success of the eighteenth (and any other) century, opened with the first of a record-breaking sixty-two first run performances. Gay’s work, a bathetic satire on the lives of fence and thief-taker Peachum, his family, and his low-life criminal acquaintances such as the notorious highwayman Macheath, had a variety of targets, not least of which was Walpole and his political allies and methods. But it also offered a thorough travesty of Italian opera, with its sixty-nine English airs on mock-heroic subjects set to popular tunes. On 29 January Mrs Pendarves wrote again to her sister: Yesterday I was at the rehearsal of the new opera composed by Handel: I like it extremely, but the taste of the town is so depraved, that nothing will be approved of but the burlesque. The Beggars’ Opera entirely triumphs over the Italian one.²

I doubt operas will not survive longer than this winter, they are now at their last gasp; … harmony is almost out of fashion.¹