Beggar's Opera

New Zealand Listener, Volume 12, Issue 291, 19 January 1945, Page 8

Beggar's Opera

HY do songs have. words? I switched on to the 3YA broadcast of the Beggar’s Opera anticipating some relief from the remorseless and prehensible Italian which usually leaves one entirely dependent on the commentator to know what’s going on; but I was frustrated. Michael Redgrave as Macheath was sufficiently articulate to demonstrate that most of the songs (choruses in particular) in this abridge-

ment consist of one verse sung twice; but the others enunciated the first word of each verse and the last of every second line; the rest was-not silence, but music. One should, of course, be admiring the music for its own sake, and that brings me back to my opening inquiry. As for the Beggars themselves, I found considerable charm in the union of truly rural music with a plot dealing with criminal life in early eighteenthcentury London, the result (I suspect expurgated) being a sort of affable naughtiness in the best music-hall tradition, % % But unaided by the visual, the atmoappere of the plot was practically nil; t respectable gentlemanly voices, we were told, were those of characters bearing such Newgate Calendar names as Jemmy Twitcher, Crookedfingered Jack and Robin the Basher, and they did not sound as if they believed it. Redgrave had something of the necessary raffishaess, but it failed entirely elsewhere. In any case, Newgate and Tyburn in the 1740’s are so totally devoid of amusement to the modern that only a thoroughly eighteenth-century approach, with its curious union of goodfellowship and complete callousness, could make the Beggar’s Opera authentic; and this presentation, as I say, consisted of little more than the orchestra and le singing-the tune, no doubt, but bo | the sense,