A John Gay Bibliography
In addition to the works listed under "Further Reading" in the Penguin edition of The Beggar's Opera, the following are important. Irving's biography of Gay has now been supplanted by David Nokes, John Gay, a Profession of Friendship (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995). A good general introduction to Gay is Patricia Meyer Spacks, John Gay (New York: Twayne, 1965). Collections of essays include John Gay and the Scriblerians, edited by Peter Lewis and Nigel Wood (New York: St. Martin's, 1989)-see especially Pat Rogers on "Gay and the World of Opera"-and Twentieth-Century Interpretations of The Beggar's Opera, edited by Yvonne Noble (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1975). Gay's theater, including The Beggar's Opera, is treated by Calhoun Winton, John Gay and the London Theatre (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1993). Background information is available in Sven M. Armens, John Gay, Social Critic (New York: Columbia University, 1954); Gerald Howson, Thief-Taker General: The Rise and Fall of Jonathan Wild, mentioned in the Penguin bibliography, should be noted as particularly relevant to Defoe and Fielding as well as Gay.A Beggar's Opera Discography
The Beggar's Opera was adopted and rescored several times in the eighteenth century, by various composers, including Thomas Arne, to suit the needs of various performing groups. It has also been notably reworked by modern composers, and these versions, none of them satisfactory to people interested in the original, constitute most of the recorded versions now available. The Beggar's Opera was performed in a famous revival by Nigel Playfair at the Lyric Theatre, Hammersmith (London) in 1920, with an relatively inoffensive but sweetly clichéd score by Frederic Austin. It is twice a period piece--a twenties version of the eighteenth century. It has been reissued, on a Pearl CD, in a 1940 version directed by John Gielgud. (The recording is quite scratchy and includes only some of the songs, but the singing, although done by actors, is quite good.) It was again revived in the 1950s by the Old Vic and recorded by RCA. One person who attended the Lyric production was Elizabeth Hauptmann, the secretary and collaborator of Bertolt Brecht; her German translation provided the immediate impetus for Brecht's Threepenny Opera, with original music by Kurt Weill. The complicated performance history of this new version cannot be recounted here, but a good recorded production supervised by Weill's wife Lotte Lenya (who also appeared in the original cast) was issued by Columbia some years ago and may still be available on a Sony CD. A further spin off from the Lyric performance was a very strange movie made around 1950, starring Laurence Olivier as Macheath, directed by Peter Brook, with the Gay play reworked by Christopher Fry. In 1948 Benjamin Britten rewrote the opera, treating the tunes quite severely and imposing an astringency on them still more heavy than Austin's sentimentality. The result is fairly good Britten but is certainly not faithful (dramatically as well as musically) to Gay. It is available on an Argo CD set. It is more intelligent and effective than the more recent musical-comedy version by Richard Bonynge that, among its other sins, sounds borrowed from Sondheim (Peachum as Sweeney Todd) and Lloyd Weber ("The Beggar of the Opera"). It has really wonderful singers (Kiri Te Kanawa as Polly, Joan Sutherland as Lucy, James Morris as Macheath) and the acting is good, but the musical arrangement is quite annoying. (It is available as a CD set from Decca.) This leaves the arrangement by Jeremy Barlow (available in a Hyperion set), which is an authentic musical recreation of the original. The singers act the dialogue atrociously, and they are not much better at acting the songs. But they are rather good at singing them, and the musical performances, although they tend to take the slow songs too fast and the fast songs too slow, are the best authentic ones now available (which is not saying much). Hyperion and Barlow also have a spin-off single CD which plays various eighteenth-century versions of some of the original music used by Gay. But some of these versions are later than The Beggar's Opera, and, at any rate, it is not clear that an eighteenth-century audience would have known the originals. Originals of some of the better songs, which an audience would in fact have known, are inexplicably not included.