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
Music history of Hungary a complex rhythmic structure. Italian religious music played an important role in this development, which was documented in an "unparalleled example of ancient Hungarian music", the "Harmonia Caelestis" of Prince Pál Eszterházy, who tried to create a distinctively Hungarian style of church music using influences from opera, oratio literature, the German music of Johann Kaspar von Kerll and Johann Schmeltzer, and the oratorio and cantata styles. Eszterházy's efforts did not last, as the following century saw an influx of muic from Western Europe under the Habsburgs. Around the start of the 18th century, however, the last national uprising of the