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
Mikhail Sokolovsky (composer) revived. Sokolovsky's contemporary, composer Yevstigney Fomin later revised the music of the opera adding an overture to it. Under the reign of autocratic Czar Nicholas I of Russia, verses of Sokolovsky that were critical of Nicholas's predecessors were often sung at anti-Nicholas rallies. Mikhail Sokolovsky (composer) Mikhail Matveyevich Sokolovsky ( (1756—after 1795) was a late 18th-century Russian opera composer, conductor and violinist. Sokolovsky played the violin in the orchestra of the Maddox Theatre in Moscow. It is known that he also taught singing at the university. The music of the renowned-in-its-day opera "The miller who was a wizard, a cheat