The Beggar's Opera is a ballad opera in three acts written in 1728 by John Gay with music arranged by Johann Christoph Pepusch. It is one of the watershed plays in Augustan drama and is the only example of the once thriving genre of satirical ballad opera to remain popular today. Ballad operas were satiric musical plays that used some of the conventions of opera, but without recitative. The lyrics of the airs in the piece are set to popular broadsheet ballads, opera arias, church hymns and folk tunes of the time.

The Beggar's Opera premiered at the Lincoln's Inn Fields Theatre on 29 January 1728 and ran for 62 consecutive performances, the longest run in theatre history up to that time. The work became Gay's greatest success and has been played ever since. The original production was so successful that John Rich, the manager of the theatre, was able to build a new theatre, the Theatre Royal, Covent Garden, forerunner of the Royal Opera House. In 1920, The Beggar's Opera began an astonishing revival run of 1,463 performances at the Lyric Theatre in Hammersmith, London, which was one of the longest runs in history for any piece of musical theatre at that time.

John Gay (30 June 1685 – 4 December 1732) was an English poet and dramatist and member of the Scriblerus Club. He is best remembered for The Beggar's Opera (1728), a ballad opera. The characters, including Captain Macheath and Polly Peachum, became household names.

Gay was born in Barnstaple, England and was educated at the town's grammar school. On leaving school he was apprenticed to a silk mercer in London, but being weary, according to Samuel Johnson, "of either the restraint or the servility of his occupation", he soon returned to Barnstaple, where he was educated by his uncle, the Rev. John Hanmer, the Nonconformist minister of the town. He then returned to London.

The dedication of his Rural Sports (1713) to Alexander Pope was the beginning of a lasting friendship. In 1714, Gay wrote The Shepherd's Week, a series of six pastorals drawn from English rustic life. Pope had urged him to undertake this task in order to ridicule the Arcadian pastorals of Ambrose Philips, who had been praised by a short-lived contemporary publication The Guardian, to the neglect of Pope's claims as the first pastoral writer of the age and the true English Theocritus. Gay's pastorals achieved this goal and his ludicrous pictures of the English country lads and their loves were found to be entertaining on their own account.

Jeremy Barlow (born August 11, 1985 in San Francisco, California) is an American soccer player currently playing for Richmond Kickers in the USL Second Division.

Barlow grew up in Herndon, Virginia, and attended Langley High School, where he was named the Liberty District Player of the Year and was selected to the All-Region and All-Journal teams. He played club soccer for Reston FC and DC United Youth, before going on to play four years of college soccer at the University of Virginia. He was named to the 2004 ACC Tournament MVP, and was selected to the 2004 ACC All-Tournament Team and the 2004 ACC All-Freshman Team in his debut year, and went on to be a Second Team VaSID All-State selection as a sophomore. He totaled seven goals and an assist in his freshman year, added two goals and nine assists during his sophomore campaign and two goals and two assists in his junior year before finishing his collegiate career with a goal and six assists last fall.

During his college years Barlow also played in the USL Premier Development League for Richmond Kickers Future, before turning professional in 2008.

Lucio Dalla Grand Officer OMRI (4 March 1943 – 1 March 2012) was a popular Italian singer-songwriter, musician and actor. He also played clarinet and keyboards.

Dalla was the composer of Caruso (1986), which has been covered by numerous international artists. A version of Caruso sung by Luciano Pavarotti sold over 9 million copies, and another version was a track on Andrea Bocelli's first international album Romanza, which later sold over 20 million copies worldwide. This piece is also on Josh Groban's album Closer, which sold over 5,000,000 copies in the United States. The song is a tribute to the emblematic opera tenor Enrico Caruso. Maynard Ferguson also covered the song on his album "Brass Attitude", after having previously paid tribute to Caruso with his rendition of Vesti la giubba (titled as Pagliacci) on the album "Primal Scream".

Dalla was born in Bologna, Italy. He began to play the clarinet at an early age, in a jazz band in Bologna, and became member of a local jazz band called Rheno Dixieland Band, together with the future film director Pupi Avati. Avati said that he decided to leave the band after feeling overwhelmed by Dalla's talent. He also acknowledged that his film, Ma quando arrivano le ragazze? (2005), was inspired by his friendship with Dalla. In the 1960s the band participated in the first Jazz Festival at Antibes, France. The Rheno Dixieland Band won the first prize in the traditional jazz band category and was noticed by a Roman band called Second Roman New Orleans Jazz Band: with them Dalla performed his first record in 1961, and had the first contacts with RCA records, his future music publisher.

Johann Christoph Pepusch (1667 – 20 July 1752), also known as John Christopher Pepusch and Dr Pepusch, was a German-born composer who spent most of his working life in England.

Pepusch was born in Berlin. At the age of 14, he was appointed to the Prussian court. About 1700, he settled in England where he was one of the founders, in 1710, of The Academy of Vocal Music, which in 1726 was renamed The Academy of Ancient Music. In Joseph Doane's Musical directory for the year 1794, the founding of the Academy is discussed; on page 76, it states that:

In the year 1710 (memorable for Handel’s first appearance among us) a number of the most eminent composers and performers in London [agreed] to concert a plan of an Academy for the study and practice of Vocal and Instrumental Music, which was no sooner announced than it met the countenance and support of the principal persons of rank. Among the foremost in this undertaking were Mr. John Christopher Pepusch, Mr. John Earnest Galleard, an excellent composer and performer on the Oboe, Mr. Bernard Gates of the Queen’s Chapel, Henry Niedler, etc.