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
Baroque music of the British Isles Despite these hindrances, his aim (and that of his collaborator John Dryden) was to establish serious opera as a dramatic form in England, but these hopes ended with Purcell's early death at the age of 37 in 1695 and English opera gradually fell out of favour and Italian opera began to dominate. After the death of Charles II in 1685, royal patronage of music became less significant. In the short and troubled reign of his successor James II (1685–88), whose more overt Catholicism, together with his preference for Italian music and musicians, limited patronage of Anglican church music and the