A musical stage work primarily made up of folk songs or their tunes. Unlike most classical opera, there is also spoken dialogue.

Ballad operas were popular in 18th-century England and its northern colonies and are related to the French VAUDEVILLE. The work that popularized the style was THE BEGGAR'S OPERA, 1728, by JOHN GAY, with music arranged by John Christopher Pepusch (1667-1752). Subsequent English ballad operas drew freely on arias and choruses of past composers. The genre exhausted itself toward the end of the 18th century. More than a century later, the ballad opera was revived in Germany by KURT WEILL and Bertolt Brecht.