Orpheus Paris' Montmartre) in search of his fortune and ultimately to attempt the rescue of his doomed love. The film adapts a widely known piece from Jacques Offenbach's comedic operetta "Orphée aux enfers" ("Orpheus in the Underworld"), identified with the once-popular can-can music hall dance. Offenbach's operatic work had itself parodied the classical tale of Orpheus' attempted rescue of Eurydice from Pluto (Hades). Gavin Bryars' music for Édouard Lock's full length ballet "Dido and Orfeo" (2011) reworks music from the operas "Dido and Aeneas" (Purcell) and "Orfeo ed Euridice" (Gluck) for a small ensemble of saxophone, viola, cello and piano. Orpheus
The Beggar's Opera piece satirised Italian opera, which had become popular in London. According to "The New York Times": "Gay wrote the work more as an anti-opera than an opera, one of its attractions to its 18th-century London public being its lampooning of the Italian opera style and the English public's fascination with it." Instead of the grand music and themes of opera, the work uses familiar tunes and characters that were ordinary people. Some of the songs were by opera composers like Handel, but only the most popular of these were used. The audience could hum along with the music and identify