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 of Hungary using French and Italian models, thus launching the field of Hungarian opera. At the end of the 19th century, Hungarian music was dominated by compositions in the German classical style, while Viennese-style operettas gained immensely in popularity. This ended beginning in about 1905, when Endre Ady's poems were published, composer Béla Bartók was published for the first time, and Zoltán Kodály began collecting folk songs. Bartók and Kodály were two exceptional composers who created a distinctively Hungarian style. Bartók collected songs across Eastern Europe, though much of his activity was in Hungary, and he used their elements in his music.