’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

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