When Peachum and his wife learn that their daughter, Polly, has married Macheath, a.k.a. Retaining the essential plot and characters of The Beggar’s Opera, The Threepenny Opera updates the setting to Victorian London, where Jonathan Jeremiah Peachum, the “boss of London’s beggars,” owns a shop where he outfits and trains beggars in return for a cut of their takings. Translations for all the texts were by made by Brecht’s close collaborator, Elisabeth Hauptmann. In addition to Gay’s text, Brecht also used poems by Rudyard Kipling and Françoise Villon. A satire of both Italian opera conventions and the political corruption of England’s reigning prime minister, Sir Robert Walpole, The Beggar’s Opera was tremendously popular with 18th-century theatergoers and had enjoyed a successful London revival in the early 1920s. Gay’s work consisted of dialogue interspersed with 69 songs, mainly popular ballads of the British Isles and France, and well-known opera arias by Handel and Purcell, among others. The source for the work was John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera (1728), a humorous “ballad opera” with no generic precedent.
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