Journal articles: 'Melodrama in music'

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Glatthorn, Austin. "The Legacy of ‘ Ariadne’ and the Melodramatic Sublime." Music and Letters 100, no. 2 (May 1, 2019): 233–70. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/ml/gcy116.

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Abstract Georg Benda’s Ariadne auf Naxos (1775) was an immediate success. By the end of the century, not only was it in the repertory of nearly every German theatre, but it was also one of the few German-language pieces translated for performances across Europe. Central to this melodrama—traditionally defined as an alternation of emotional declamation and pantomime with instrumental music—is its evocation of the sublime. Though scholars have posited Ariadne and its defining aesthetics as a model employed in subsequent Romantic opera, such teleological readings overlook reform melodramas that embraced vocal music and localized sublime moments. I argue that these works, rather than Ariadne, pushed melodrama’s generic boundaries to the verge of opera and in the process provided instrumental music with the power to express the sublime without the aid of text. This exploration offers fresh insight into melodrama’s music–text relations, generic hybridity, and aesthetic entanglements with opera and symphonic music.

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Wang, Dan. "Melodrama, Two Ways." 19th-Century Music 36, no. 2 (2012): 122–35. http://dx.doi.org/10.1525/ncm.2012.36.2.122.

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Abstract The word “melodrama” has accumulated a vast range of uses and definitions. It is the name given to the technique of combining words and music (as in the nineteenth-century musical genre); it is also used to name a mode of expressivity that is exaggerated, excessive, sentimental. These definitions appear unrelated, yet the melodramatic mode also seems to emerge frequently in musical contexts, such as opera and film—raising the question of whether the joining of words and music as such already tends toward, or attracts, a melodramatic impulse. This article first sketches the features of the melodramatic mode as they are described in writing on theater, film, and the novel before turning to a close reading of Richard Strauss's Enoch Arden, op. 38, a melodrama for speaker and piano. I aim to show that not only the themes of Enoch Arden's narrative but also the form of its narration, the meaningfulness it draws from the facts or conditions of narration as such, provide its claim to the melodramatic mode.

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Kaleva, Daniela. "Beethoven and melodrama." Musicology Australia 23, no. 1 (January 2000): 49–75. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/08145857.2000.10415914.

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HAMBRIDGE, KATHERINE, and JONATHAN HICKS. "THE MELODRAMATIC MOMENT, 1790–1820 KING’S COLLEGE LONDON, 27–29 MARCH 2014." Eighteenth Century Music 12, no. 1 (February 17, 2015): 130–33. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s1478570614000566.

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This conference, a collaboration between the two projects ‘French Theatre of the Napoleonic Era’ at Warwick University and ‘Music in London, 1800–1851’ at King's College London, was intended to foster interdisciplinary dialogue about early melodrama. In particular, the aim was to investigate the relationship between melodramatic techniques (spoken word over or alternated with instrumental music), melodramatic aesthetics (such as strong contrasts between good and evil and extremes of emotion) and the generic category of melodrama (given to various concert and theatrical forms). While discussion necessarily engaged with phenomena either side of the thirty years specified by the title, participants focused on the period in which melodrama came to prominence as a stage genre, a period in which several of the key European traditions coincided.

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Summerhayes, Catherine. "Translative Performance in Documentary Film: Bob Connolly and Robin Anderson's Facing the Music." Media International Australia 104, no. 1 (August 2002): 19–29. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1329878x0210400105.

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Facing the Music (2001) is a film that performs at many levels. While its primary narrative is about the effects of government funding cuts to universities, and specifically the effect on the University of Sydney's Music Department, the film also weaves other more generic stories about people and how they interact with each other. Connolly's and Anderson's complex and confronting style of observational film-making is examined in the context of this film for the ways in which it ‘assumes' that film can ‘translate’ the details of people's everyday lives into a broad discussion of particular social issues and conflicts. As with all translations, however, some meanings inadvertently are lost and others added. Drawing on Walter Benjamin's idea of ‘translatability’ and Brecht's concept of gest, this paper describes how particular cultural meanings which are embedded within the documentary film, Facing the Music, can be accessed through the ways in which the audiovisual text ‘melodramatically’ presents people and profilmic events. Thomas Elsaesser's definition of classic fictional melodrama, as a ‘closed’ world of ‘inner’ violence where ‘characters are acted upon’, becomes a guide to understanding the film's secondary narratives about the operation of particular stereotypical, binary representations: men and women; artists and ‘the rest of the world’; academics (‘gown’) and other people (‘town’). Using Laura Mulvey's further distinction of ‘matriarchal’ and ‘patriarchal’ melodramas. Facing the Music is described as a ‘matriarchal’ documentary melodrama. The film's selective translation of how people live their lives in a particular social situation is thereby discussed as a further translation into the broader discourses of gender and power relations in a society.

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Fanning, David, Prokofiev, Sinfonia, Edward Downes, Timothy West, Samuel West, Niamh Cusack, and Dominic Mafham. "Eugene Onegin, Melodrama in 16 Scenes." Musical Times 136, no. 1824 (February 1995): 106. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/1193643.

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Seinen, Nathan. "Prokofiev's Semyon Kotko and the melodrama of High Stalinism." Cambridge Opera Journal 21, no. 3 (November 2009): 203–36. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0954586710000212.

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AbstractThis article examines the first opera of Prokofiev's Soviet period, Semyon Kotko (1939), in light of the disparity between two forms of melodrama, one affecting the opera's composition, the other its reception. The first is the classic melodrama, which offered the composer the foundation for a vivid, intense work that would also be suitable for a mass audience; the second is the melodrama reflecting the aesthetic norms and moral framework of socialist realism and High Stalinism. The simplicity and immediacy of Kotko avoided the directed emotionalism of the officially favoured model of Romantic opera, and the Ukrainian setting prompted references to the tradition of Gogolian comedy rather than an elevation of folk content to an epic dimension. Characters conform to archetypes of classic melodrama, and together with the opera's comic elements and the unique gestural idiom of its music and manner of performance, this detracted from the required effects of sublime heroism and nationalism. While the outlines of a socialist realist plot remain in Kotko, Prokofiev's commitment to what he considered timeless values of music and drama led to a failure, in socialist realist terms, to achieve an appropriate amplification of its moral essence.

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Hibberd, Sarah, and Nanette Nielsen. "Music in Melodrama: ‘The Burden of Ineffable Expression’?" Nineteenth Century Theatre and Film 29, no. 2 (November 2002): 30–39. http://dx.doi.org/10.7227/nctf.29.2.4.

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Cormac, Joanne. "From Tragedy to Melodrama: Rethinking Liszt's Hamlet." Nineteenth-Century Music Review 10, no. 1 (June 2013): 29–55. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s1479409813000037.

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Liszt composed the symphonic poem Hamlet towards the end of his tenure as Kapellmeister of the Weimar Court Theatre, a time when he regularly conducted operas, concerts, incidental music and variety performances. It was also a time when he frequently came into contact with artists, writers, musicians and actors. One actor in particular left a memorable impression: Bogumil Dawison. Dawison's style was unusual at the time; his performances were noted for their aggression, expressiveness and energy, and many praised the flexibility of his voice and face. Dawison aimed for a realistic approach in response to Goethe's Classicism, but the result was closer to the melodramatic style that was gaining in popularity at the time. His portrayal of Hamlet was particularly innovative, and it captured Liszt's imagination shortly before he composed the symphonic poem inspired by Shakespeare's tragedy.The relationship between the world of the theatre (particularly spoken theatre) and the symphonic poems has never before been explored in Liszt scholarship, yet, as this article reveals, spoken theatre had a significant influence on Hamlet. Indeed, this article will draw new stylistic and conceptual parallels between this symphonic poem and both melodrama as a genre and its related ‘melodramatic’ style of acting. The article argues that Dawison's influence can be traced in Liszt's approach to this work and that a ‘melodramatic reading’ can enable us to interpret some of its more puzzling aspects.

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Lockhart, Ellen. "Pimmalione: Rousseau and the Melodramatisation of Italian Opera." Cambridge Opera Journal 26, no. 1 (February 19, 2014): 1–39. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0954586713000347.

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AbstractThis article traces the Italian reception of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Horace Coignet’sPygmalion(1770), ultimately arguing that the influence of early melodrama (and not the better-remembered Viennese reform) was behind the emergence of a style of speech-like singing and gestural mirroring in Italian opera in the decades immediately around 1800. Rousseauian melodrama was one of a few related projects subsuming the spoken word within the domain of music during the 1770s and 1780s; another was Joshua Steele’sProsodia rationalis, which proposed a system of modified music notation in order to preserve and transmit the spoken word. This article suggests (contra most recent historians of melodrama) that such projects were inflected by a kind of twilight classicism, in which the revived object was made to show signs of decay. The revivalist strain in the first melodrama was particularly important for its Italian reception. Rousseau’s ideal of an ancient, onomatopoeic language collapsing meaning and medium was naturalised into the rhetoric of Italian opera reform during the 1770s and 1780s by the Jesuit theorists Antonio Eximeno and Stefano Arteaga. By way of a coda, this article traces the emergence of a ‘melodramatic’ style of Italian opera, first in all-sung adaptations ofPygmalion, thence into Venetian opera of the 1790s more broadly, and finally into Donizetti’s techniques of gestural mirroring and what was called the ‘canto filosofico’ of Bellini’s early operas.

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ESSE, MELINA. "‘Chi piange, qual forza m'arretra?’: Verdi's interior voices." Cambridge Opera Journal 14, no. 1-2 (March 2002): 59–78. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0954586702000058.

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It all started with voices – voices not meant to be heard. Verdi's demand that at crucial moments in Macbeth the performers stifle vocal expression is by now famous. Again and again he urged that the duet and sleepwalking scene be sung ‘sotto voce’, ‘with mutes’, that the singers should speak more than sing, that their voices should sound ‘harsh’, ‘stifled’, ‘hollow’, ‘veiled’. Verdi's wilful insistence that his singers not sing has been understood as part of the composer's struggle to curb the excesses of primo ottocento opera and invest it with a new psychological depth. Gilles de Van, for example, argues that the suppression of the voice in Macbeth creates a shadowy subjective interiority, and claims further that the decision represents a shift in Verdi's aesthetic orientation from ‘melodrama to music drama’. De Van understands Verdi's inward turn as a renunciation of the kind of extroverted display upon which melodrama relies, as a ‘turning point, the beginnings of a dramaturgy of interiority that does away with the superb transparency of traditional melodrama and marks Verdi’s new awareness of the aura of confusion and ambiguity that can inhabit the human soul'.

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Jessen, Edward. "York University: Roger Marsh's ‘Pierrot Lunaire’." Tempo 57, no. 224 (April 2003): 44–45. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0040298203240158.

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There is something of the poisoned chalice about setting the Belgian poet Albert Giraud's Pierrot Lunaire, Rondels Bergamasques – if nothing more than by association to the all-too-famous Schoenberg Sprechgesang melodrama. As interpreters of Giraud's work (and often as compositional interlopers), we are conditioned to assume that we ought not to bathe in the same water as Schoenberg. And yet the Yorkshire-based composer Roger Marsh has succeeded in (re)making Pierrot as a living resource with a tremendous staged production of Giraud's complete and enigmatic torrent of fantasy.

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STOKES, MARTIN. "Adam Smith and the Dark Nightingale: On Twentieth-Century Sentimentalism." Twentieth-Century Music 3, no. 2 (September 2006): 201–19. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s1478572207000461.

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AbstractThis article reconsiders sentimentalism in the light of the writings of Adam Smith and the career of Abd al-Halim Hafiz, Egypt’s ‘Dark Nightingale’ and film-star crooner of the 1950s and 60s. It explores competing representations of emotionality, the limits of enchantment, and the contemporary politics of nostalgia and melodrama in Egyptian public culture. Eighteenth-century sentimental theory provides a critical and productive angle on twentieth-century popular musical culture, angles that this paper explores by imagining Adam Smith watching Abd al-Halim Hafiz’s first film, Lahn al-Wafā‘ (1955).

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Repertório, Teatro &. Dança. "DO MOLEQUE BEIJO AO MESTRE DE GERAÇÕES [Daniel Marques da Silva]." REPERTÓRIO, no. 15 (July 7, 2010): 131. http://dx.doi.org/10.9771/r.v0i15.5219.

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<div>O artigo apresenta um perfil biográfico de Benjamim de Oliveira - palhaço, ator, autor teatral, cantor, ensaiador e diretor de companhia – desde sua infância no sertão de Minas Gerais, em meados do Século XIX até a consagração de sua carreira no Rio de Janeiro do início do século XX. Ainda destaca sua atuação para a consolidação do circoteatro, prática artística híbrida composta por melodramas, comédias, mágicas, revistas e pantomimas executadas como segunda parte da função circense.<br><br /></div><div>The article presents Benjamim de Oliveira’s profile – as actor, clown, dramatic author, singer, metteur en scéne and theater company director – from since his childhood in Minas Gerais countryside in the middle nineties until his success in Rio de Janeiro in early twenties. The work emphasize his attempt in order of consolidating circus-theater performance, an hybrid artistic language which encompasses melodrama, comedy, prestidigitation, music hall and pantomime, perfomed usually at the circus second part of show.</div>

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Bilbija, Marina. "Democracy’s New Song." ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 637, no. 1 (July 25, 2011): 64–77. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0002716211407153.

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W. E. B. Du Bois’s (1935/1998) Black Reconstruction in America, 1860–1880 is commonly regarded as the foundational text of revisionist African American historiography. But Black Reconstruction did more than correct the historical record, it also interrogated the very limits of historiography—what it can communicate, and what and who its “appropriate” subjects should be. Drawing on Susan Gillman’s concept of race melodrama as the dominant framework for late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century racial thinking, this article posits Black Reconstruction as a race melodrama par excellence, with special emphasis on the text’s strategic invocations of music in emotionally and spiritually charged moments. To this end, it traces Du Bois’s use of song, scenes of singing, librettos, and lyrics as both an affective and de-familiarizing device through which he is able to yoke the former slaves’ messianic/religious experience of freedom and their understanding of democracy.

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Philbrick, Jane. "Subcutaneous Melodrama: The Work of Eija-Liisa Ahtila." PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art 25, no. 2 (May 2003): 32–47. http://dx.doi.org/10.1162/152028103321781538.

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Kelleher, David, Karl Kroeger, Victor Fell Yellin, George L. Aiken, George C. Howard, Thomas Riis, and Anne Dhu McLucas. "Early Melodrama in America: The Voice of Nature (1803)." Notes 53, no. 1 (September 1996): 281. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/900334.

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Staverman, Désirée, and Desiree Staverman. "Op zoek naar de ware Elektra. Diepenbrocks toneelmuziek en het probleem van het melodrama." Tijdschrift van de Koninklijke Vereniging voor Nederlandse Muziekgeschiedenis 51, no. 1 (2001): 42. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/939227.

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Citron, M. J. "The Gendered Score: Music in 1940s Melodrama and the Woman's Film. By Heather Laing." Music and Letters 90, no. 2 (April 29, 2009): 315–17. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/ml/gcn096.

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Davis, Jim. "Imperial Transgressions: the Ideology of Drury Lane Pantomime in the Late Nineteenth Century." New Theatre Quarterly 12, no. 46 (May 1996): 147–55. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0266464x00009970.

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How far do popular theatre forms express popular sentiments, and how far populist? This is one of the issues explored in the following article, in which Jim Davis looks at the ideology, explicit and underlying, of the spectacular Drury Lane pantomimes of the late nineteenth century. At once imperialist and redolent of Little England, the pantomimes often displayed an ambiguous attitude to the moral concerns of the time, from temperance reform to ‘the woman question’ – to the influence of the music hall from which they drew their most popular performers. The prevailing tone, it becomes clear, was lower middle rather than working class, despite the irony of such class imperatives being energised by a form which has always transgressed sexual and racial identities. Jim Davis, who teaches in the Department of Theatre and Film Studies in the University of New South Wales, has published widely in the field of nineteenth-century theatre: his earlier contributions to New Theatre Quarterly have included a survey of nautical melodrama in NTQ14 (1988), a study of the ‘reform’ of the East End theatres in NTQ23 (1990), and an analysis of the melodramas played at the Britannia, Hoxton, in NTQ28 (1991).

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LeBlanc, Michael. "Melancholic Arrangements: Music, Queer Melodrama, and the Seeds of Transformation in The Hours." Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture, and Media Studies 21, no. 1 (2006): 105–45. http://dx.doi.org/10.1215/02705346-2005-010.

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Kim Gye-Sook. "Melodrama and music: Focusing on A streetcar named desire and The glass menagerie." STEM Journal 17, no. 1 (February 2016): 39–54. http://dx.doi.org/10.16875/stem.2016.17.1.39.

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Cassaro, James P., Giuseppe Verdi, and Jeffrey Kallberg. "Luisa Miller, Melodrama Tragico in Three Acts by Salvatore Cammarano." Notes 50, no. 3 (March 1994): 1178. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/898607.

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Tieber, Claus. "Walter Reisch: The musical writer." Journal of Screenwriting 10, no. 3 (September 1, 2019): 295–306. http://dx.doi.org/10.1386/josc_00005_1.

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Academy Award-winning Austrian screenwriter Walter Reisch’s (1903‐83) career started in Austrian silent cinema and ended in Hollywood. Reisch wrote the screenplays for silent films, many of them based on musical topics (operetta films, biopics of musicians, etc.). He created the so-called Viennese film, a musical subgenre, set in an almost mythological Vienna. In my article I am analysing the characteristics of his writing in which music plays a crucial part. The article details the use of musical devices in his screenplays (his use of music, the influence of musical melodrama, instructions and use of songs and leitmotifs). The article closes with a reading of the final number in the last film he was able to make in Austria: Silhouetten (1936).

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Wartenberg, Thomas E., and Stanley Cavell. "Contesting Tears: The Hollywood Melodrama of the Unknown Woman." Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 56, no. 1 (1998): 82. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/431958.

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Kovács, András Bálint. "Sartre, the Philosophy of Nothingness, and the Modern Melodrama." Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 64, no. 1 (January 2006): 135–45. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.0021-8529.2006.00235.x.

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Cullen, Shaun. "The Innocent and the Runaway: Kanye West, Taylor Swift, and the Cultural Politics of Racial Melodrama." Journal of Popular Music Studies 28, no. 1 (February 17, 2016): 33–50. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/jpms.12160.

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Cronin, Claire. "Transcendental repair: The ghost film as family melodrama." Horror Studies 10, no. 1 (April 1, 2019): 27–43. http://dx.doi.org/10.1386/host.10.1.27_1.

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BOHLMAN, PHILIP V. "Analysing Aporia." Twentieth-Century Music 8, no. 2 (September 2011): 133–51. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s1478572212000059.

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AbstractThis essay draws upon approaches from music analysis, the cultural study of music, and the philosophy of language to examine the meaning and function of borders in music. Drawing upon Jacques Derrida's concept of multiple aporias as metaphors for understanding the relationship of life to death, the essay begins by exploring three functions of aporia at the borders in music: 1) a line to be crossed; 2) a zone of difference; 3) an area of impossibility and unknowability. Three case studies provide a comparative framework that seeks to extend my analytical approaches beyond specific cultural, geographic, and historical repertories. In the first case study I examine the function of caesura at the borders between oral and written tradition in epic; in the second, I examine the coterminous moment of emptiness and fullness known as khāli in South Asian music; in the third, I analyse the compositional language employed by Viktor Ullmann (1898–1944) in his concentration-camp melodrama, Die Weise von Liebe und Tod des Cornets Christoph Rilke, to represent the musical transcendence of death in the Holocaust. By analysing aporia in such different traditions I demonstrate the ways in which they open possibilities for understanding the sameness that connects music from radically different musical traditions.

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Patterson, Valerie. "Reconstructing Operatic Melodrama – Lyricism and War, Lessons for Creating My Opus Sectile." Public Voices 8, no. 2 (December 9, 2016): 67. http://dx.doi.org/10.22140/pv.164.

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In this article, Valerie Patterson employs what she refers to as “lyrical visioning” – a useful tool for garnering support for claims that may or may not be true – to review several successful strategies used by the Bush administration to secure support for the invasion of Iraq. By assessing the utility of “the hook” that in Hip Hop music and Opera is used to “grab” people and make them like or remember the melody, and in President Bush’s political rhetoric was used to reconstruct and repackage tactics that can be perceived as deceptive by some, the author argues that the repetitive utterance of certain words and concepts could explain the acceptance by many Americans that the WMD claim was a truthful assertion and thus validated and legitimized the decision to engage in a preemptive strike against the people of Iraq.

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Dean, Rob. "From melodrama to blockbuster: a comparative analysis of musical camouflage in Victorian theatre and twenty-first-century film." Studies in Musical Theatre 1, no. 2 (August 31, 2007): 139–52. http://dx.doi.org/10.1386/smt.1.2.139_1.

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This article explores the use of music as a functional device which disguises the artificial construction of narrative media. The identification of the principles behind the specific positioning of musical material in the presentation of film and theatre reveals that in certain scenarios the aural accompaniment is not simply utilized as an emotive tool. Instead the polemic pursued in this article reveals that music also fulfils the practical purpose of camouflaging narrative leaps in time, space and dimension. Furthermore the comparative analysis of nineteenthcentury dramatic texts penned by Dion Boucicault and twenty-first-century films written and directed by M. Night Shyamalan establishes both an interdisciplinary connection between the two media forms and highlights the parallel musical practices employed in the past and the present.

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WARTENBERG, THOMAS E. "Stanley Cavell, Contesting Tears: The Hollywood Melodrama of The Unknown Woman." Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 56, no. 1 (December 1, 1998): 82. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/1540_6245.jaac56.1.0082.

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Flory, Dan. "Race, Rationality, and Melodrama: Aesthetic Response and the Case of Oscar Micheaux." Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 63, no. 4 (September 2005): 327–38. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.0021-8529.2005.00215.x.

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Murphy, Francesca. "David Hart, The Beauty of the Infinite: A Response." Scottish Journal of Theology 60, no. 1 (January 25, 2007): 80–89. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0036930606002687.

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I dissent from Hart's project of a theological aesthetics by a hair's breadth: but that hair's breadth is tragedy. The Beauty of the Infinite is an excellent book, but it would be still better without its misinterpretations of tragedy. Nietzsche told us that ‘we must understand Greek tragedy as the Dionysian chorus which ever anew discharges itself in an Apollonian world of images’: that is, Attic tragedy arises from the clash of Dionysian music with Apollonian thought. Hart regards postmodernism as a story involving the clash of two ‘violences’ – the ‘chthonic and indiscriminate’ violence of Dionysus versus the ‘discriminating’ violence of Apollo. Nietzsche's sympathies lay with Dionysus: ‘Dionysus versus the “Crucified”: there you have the antithesis.’ Nietzsche once confessed that The Birth of Tragedy ‘smells offensively Hegelian’. Both Hegel and Nietzsche read tragedy differently from Aristotle, and from the anterior Western tradition. Nietzsche could equally have confided that his first book imposes a nineteenth-century taste for melodrama on the tragedies of Aeschylus and Sophocles. The argument of this article is that Hart likewise misconstrues tragedy as melodrama. If, as Hart says, ‘Nietzsche had atrocious taste’, it is self-defeating for him to assume that Nietzsche had the last word on Sophocles, Aeschylus and Euripides. Hart takes the modern theologians at their word when they speak of ‘tragedy’. He spontaneously deprecates the use of what he calls tragedy and what most people can recognize as melodrama in the writings of theologians such as Robert Jenson, Donald MacKinnon and Nicholas Lash. He tells us that, ‘None of what I say … is intended as a rejection of tragedy as such … but only as a critique … of the sacrificial logic from which Attic tragedy … sprang and according to which … tragedy is still read’. But his misinterpretation and rejection of tragedy has a wider reference than the writings of Sophocles and Aeschylus and rebounds on his own theology.

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MARSH, ROGER. "‘A Multicoloured Alphabet’: Rediscovering Albert Giraud’s Pierrot Lunaire." twentieth-century music 4, no. 01 (March 2007): 97–121. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s1478572207000540.

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AbstractAlbert Giraud’s cycle of fiftyrondels bergamasques,Pierrot Lunaire(1884), famously became, in Otto Erich Hartleben’s German translation, the basis of Schoenberg’s Op. 21 (1912). But for many decades the work of the Belgian poet was either straightforwardly denigrated for its anachronism and ‘mediocrity’ (Boulez), or at least declared inferior to its ‘vivid, Angst-filled transformation’ (Youens) in Hartleben’s hands. This article questions some widely held beliefs concerning the originalPierrotand its subsequent reworking. The claim that Schoenberg’s selection and reorganization of the poems imposed logic and order on an otherwise jumbled collection is found to be belied by the striking narrative coherence of Giraud’s original sequence, which is unified by a clearly defined set of symbols. Meanwhile, Hartleben’s putative ‘infidelity’ to Giraud is challenged by evidence both internal (his careful preservation of the rondel structure) and contextual (an esteem for his Belgian contemporary manifested in further poetic homages). While there is no doubt that Hartleben’s translations distance the poems from their background in Parnassian aesthetics – omitting crucial references to Brueghel, Shakespeare, Watteau, and the painter and lithographer Adolphe Willette – it is Giraud himself who deserves the credit for the most strikingly memorable images later absorbed into the expressionistic milieu of Schoenberg’s melodrama.

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Esse, Melina. "Donizetti's Gothic Resurrections." 19th-Century Music 33, no. 2 (2009): 81–109. http://dx.doi.org/10.1525/ncm.2009.33.2.081.

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Abstract The preponderance of gothic themes in Italian operas of the early nineteenth century is often cited as one of the few ways essentially conservative Italian composers flirted with the Romantic revolution sweeping the rest of Europe. By 1838, the very ubiquity of these tropes led the Venetian reviewer of Donizetti's gory Maria de Rudenz to plead ““exhaustion”” with the ever-present ““daggers, poisons, and tombs”” of the contemporary stage. Based on the French melodrama La Nonne sanglante, Donizetti's sensational opera is almost a litany of gothic tropes. The most disturbing of these is the female body that refuses to die: Maria herself, who rises from the dead to murder her innocent rival. This fleshy specter is musically rendered as a body that is too receptive to emotion, particularly to (imaginary) cries of longing or grief. Significantly, Donizetti's foray into the gothic was also distinguished by a spate of self-borrowing; his 1838 revision of the earlier Gabriella di Vergy borrows material from Maria de Rudenz. Exploring the connections between the trope of gothic resurrection and Donizetti's borrowings highlights how the two works represent a characteristic approach to the gothic, one that mingles a corporeal orientation with more familiar themes of ghostly immateriality.

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Watt, Paul. "Marie Lloyd (1870–1922) and Biographical Constructions of the Nineteenth-Century Female Superstar." 19th-Century Music 44, no. 2 (2020): 119–30. http://dx.doi.org/10.1525/ncm.2020.44.2.119.

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Marie Lloyd (1870–1922) was a vocal superstar of the late nineteenth century. With tens of thousands of ardent followers in Britain and America—and an income that eclipsed even what Adele Patti and Nellie Melba earned—Lloyd was a vocal sensation. Biographers of the prima donna, the female vocal celebrity, are often quick to turn their subjects into heroines through the conferment of appellations such as “The Swedish Nightingale” (for Jenny Lind), “The Queen of Song” (Adelina Patti), and “The Voice of Australia,” in the case of Nellie Melba. Marie Lloyd was also bestowed a heroic title, but in an entirely different milieu: “Queen of the Music Hall.” This article probes the varied reasons—and ambiguities—of this appellation in biographical constructions of Lloyd, especially in relation to the dexterity of her voice that was arguably more varied in its scope than most of her operatic peers. Lloyd's biographers provide disembodied narratives of her career and achievements, since they have virtually nothing to say about the extraordinary range and versatility of her voice. With the aid of historic recordings it is possible to finally make an estimate of Lloyd's technique, and the results are surprising: she was no mere music-hall singer. Lloyd's voice and acting encompassed techniques ranging from eighteenth-century melodrama to nineteenth-century diseuse, allowing for an alternative reading of Lloyd's reputation as Queen of the Music Hall and the varied range of singing found in this institution.

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Bergeron, Katherine. "The castrato as history." Cambridge Opera Journal 8, no. 2 (July 1996): 167–84. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0954586700004675.

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One of the final scenes of Farinelli, Il Castrato, dir. Gerard Corbiau (Sony Pictures Classics, 1994), shows a solar eclipse witnessed, eighteenth-century style, by members of the court of Philip V of Spain around 1740. Restless spectators squint through pieces of tinted glass prepared in the smoke of a small fire. It is a precious visual detail, a jot of history in this sumptuously though often inaccurately detailed film that offsets the melodrama to follow. Without warning, a wind, helped along by corny, time-lapse photography, ushers in a sea of Goya-like clouds. A murmur passes through the entourage; eerie blackness falls on the court.

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Letort, Delphine. "The tales of New Orleans after Katrina." Alphaville: Journal of Film and Screen Media, no. 5 (August 1, 2013): 101–15. http://dx.doi.org/10.33178/alpha.5.07.

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Focusing on the months that followed Katrina and the breach of the levees in New Orleans, the first two seasons of HBO series Treme (2010, 2011) plumb the interstices between fact and fiction, thereby testifying to the confusion that prevailed after the storm. The series derives entertainment from the disruptions engendered by the floods, which create enigmas and knowledge holes in the narrative, dramatising the characters’ individual life stories. From melodrama to docudrama to crime fiction, the series pulls together various generic modes that enhance the impact of Katrina on the local community. While many episodes are devoted to celebrating the resilience fostered by the musical creativity that characterises New Orleans cultural life, this article argues that the focus on music as spectacle downplays the political significance of the events the series retraces.

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Izzo, Francesco. "Comedy between Two Revolutions: Opera Buffa and the Risorgimento, 1831-1848." Journal of Musicology 21, no. 1 (January 1, 2004): 127–74. http://dx.doi.org/10.1525/jm.2004.21.1.127.

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For more than a century discussions of the relationship between the operatic stage and the socio-political scene of the Risorgimento have relied almost exclusively on serious operas (particularly those of Giuseppe Verdi) and especially on the period after 1848. Roger Parker's recent revision of Verdi's ostensibly exclusive role as "Bard of the Risorgimento" provides an opportunity to reassess the politics of Italian opera during this period, considering also other composers and works. The purpose of this study is to discuss the interaction between opera and the Risorgimento in a group of comic works composed between the revolutions of 1831 and 1848, focusing in particular on the representation and implications of national identity in Luigi Ricci's Il nuovo Figaro(1832) and in two Italian versions of Donizetti's La Fille du rgiment (1840), as well as on the significance of military themes. Furthermore, relevant cases of censorship in these and other comic works are examined. These operas uncover numerous affinities with the political discourse in contemporary serious melodrama, showing that warlike themes, choruses, and other statements of patriotism were not a prerogative of Verdi's operas, nor an exclusive feature of the serious genre. Their authors used conventional buffa procedures, such as modern European settings and encoded allegories of national character, in ways that reveal connections with the tensions and aspirations of the Risorgimento. A better knowledge of this repertory can only improve our understanding of the politics of opera during this crucial period of Italian history.

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Astbury, Katherine, and Diane Tisdall. "Sonorising “La Forteresse du Danube” Functions of music in Parisian and provincial melodrama of the early nineteenth century." Studi Francesi, no. 191 (LXIV | II) (August 1, 2020): 348–59. http://dx.doi.org/10.4000/studifrancesi.31171.

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Bombola, Gina. "Searching for a Fresh Point of View." Journal of Musicology 35, no. 3 (2018): 368–96. http://dx.doi.org/10.1525/jm.2018.35.3.368.

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In the early 1940s Aaron Copland cultivated an identity as an authority on film composition through public lectures, interviews, and his own film scores. Championing film music’s potential as a serious art form, Copland sought to show Hollywood that film composers could branch out from the romantic and post-romantic aesthetics that infused contemporary soundtracks and write in a more modern, even American, style. During the 1940s the film industry was already embracing an abundance of new production styles, techniques, and genres that fostered innovation in the development of cinematic musical codes. When Copland returned to Hollywood in 1948 to score William Wyler’s psychological melodrama The Heiress (1949), he chose to take on a set of new challenges. Copland attempted to discover a new idiom for love music, on the one hand, and began to use leitmotifs as a structural device, on the other. Copland’s experience with The Heiress opens a space in which to reassess his opinions about appropriate film-scoring techniques as well as his public endorsement of film composition. His perspectives on film composition—as demonstrated in his writings, correspondence, and film scores as well as in interviews and reviews of his film music—reveal a tension between the composer’s artistic sensibilities and his attitude toward the commercialism of film music. Indeed he maintained a more ambivalent attitude toward cinematic composition than he publically professed. Understood in this context, Copland’s scoring decisions in The Heiress reflect a turn away from the Americana of Rodeo (1942) and Appalachian Spring (1944) and the Russian-themed score of The North Star (1943), as he sought to refashion his identity as a composer in the post-war years.

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Hodgson, Amanda. "Beyond the Opera House: Some Victorian Ballet Burlesques." Dance Research 38, no. 1 (May 2020): 7–24. http://dx.doi.org/10.3366/drs.2020.0288.

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Histories of ballet have tended to pay little attention to Victorian theatre dance that was not performed in the opera house or the music hall. A great deal of dance was embedded in such popular theatrical genres as melodrama, extravaganza and burlesque, and is therefore best understood in the context of the wider theatrical culture of the period. This essay examines two ballet burlesques performed at the Adelphi Theatre in the 1840s: The Phantom Dancers (a version of Giselle) and Taming a Tartar (based on Le Diable à quatre). When located in relation to the generic qualities of other theatrical burlesques of the period, their particular combination of parody and serious attention to classical dance is clarified. In both plays classical dance is set against more demotic dance styles. This serves as a way of mocking the excesses of the original ballets, but also as a way of interrogating the nature and significance of the danse d’école when presented to a popular theatre audience.

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Michael-Berger, Lee. "Hilarious Homicides: Satirizing Sensational Murders in Late Nineteenth-Century London." Journal of Victorian Culture 26, no. 2 (March 9, 2021): 227–43. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/jvcult/vcaa041.

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Abstract Whereas many studies consider the nineteenth-century fascination with murder as synonymous with the contemporary cultural tendency towards sensation and melodrama, this article offers a fresh perspective on the subject. Here, I deal with a corpus of humorous murder representations, which have rarely been addressed before. I examine how murder was comically represented and look at the contemporary discourse on murder, through the investigation of sources including music hall songs, cartoons, and theatrical travesties, with an emphasis on visual representations. In the context of the democratization of culture, the article examines the importance of murder in the elite claim to cultural authority versus its perception of plebian taste. It demonstrates how late nineteenth-century notions of modernity, which were crystallized through the discussion of murder, were classed and gendered. Thus, a hidden discourse is exposed, in which murder serves as a central tool in a mechanism similar to Bourdieu’s theory of distinction, where cultural and artistic ‘taste’ has a social dimension.

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Wolf, Eugene K., Christine Heyter-Rauland, and Christoph-Hellmut Mahling. "Untersuchungen zu Musikbeziehungen zwischen Mannheim, Bohmen und Mahren im spaten 18. und fruhen 19. Jahrhundert: Symphonie, Kirchenmusik, Melodrama." Notes 52, no. 3 (March 1996): 809. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/898638.

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Stilwell, Robynn J. "Black Voices, White Women's Tears, and the Civil War in Classical Hollywood Movies." 19th-Century Music 40, no. 1 (2016): 56–78. http://dx.doi.org/10.1525/ncm.2016.40.1.56.

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Two musical trends of the 1930s—the development of a practice for scoring sound films, and the increasing concertization of the spiritual in both solo and choral form—help shape the soundscape of films based in the South and/or on Civil War themes in early sound-era Hollywood. The tremendous success of the Broadway musical Show Boat (1927), which was made into films twice within seven years (1929, 1936), provided a model of chorus and solo singing, and films like the 1929 Mary Pickford vehicle Coquette and the 1930 musical Dixiana blend this theatrical practice with a nuanced syntax that logically carries the voices from outdoors to indoors to the interior life of a character, usually a white woman. Director D. W. Griffith expands this use of diegetic singing in ways that will later be the province of nondiegetic underscore in his first sound film, Abraham Lincoln (1930). Shirley Temple's Civil War–set films (The Little Colonel and The Littlest Rebel [both 1935] and Dimples [1936]) strongly replicate the use of the voices of enslaved characters—most of whom are onscreen only to provide justification for the source of the music—to mourn for white women. Jezebel, the 1938 antebellum melodrama, expands musicodramatic syntax that had been developed in single scenes or sequences over the entire second act and a white woman's fall and attempted redemption. Gone with the Wind (1939) both plays on convention and offers a moment of transgression for Prissy, who takes her voice for her own pleasure in defiance of Scarlett O'Hara. The detachment of the spiritual from the everyday experience of African Americans led to a recognition of the artistry of the music and the singers on the concert stage. In film, however, the bodies of black singers are marginalized and set in service of white characters and white audiences.

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GEARY, JASON. "Reinventing the Past: Mendelssohn's Antigone and the Creation of an Ancient Greek Musical Language." Journal of Musicology 23, no. 2 (2006): 187–226. http://dx.doi.org/10.1525/jm.2006.23.2.187.

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ABSTRACT In 1841, Sophocles's Antigone was performed at the Prussian court theater with staging by Ludwig Tieck and music by Felix Mendelssohn. Commissioned by King Friedrich Wilhelm IV, this production aimed to re-create aspects of Greek tragedy by, among other things, using J. J. Donner's 1839 metrical translation and having an all-male chorus sing the odes. Mendelssohn initially experimented with imitating the purported sound of ancient music by composing primarily unison choral recitative and limiting the accompaniment to flutes, tubas, and harps; but he quickly abandoned this approach in favor of a more traditional one. Yet despite his overall adherence to modern convention, he did employ several strategies to evoke ancient Greek practice and thus to meet the unique demands of the Prussian court production. Highlighting important distinctions between verse-types in the original poetry, Mendelssohn retained a vestige of his initial approach by composing unison choral recitative to indicate the presence of anapestic verse while turning to melodrama for the lyric verse of the play's two main characters. In addition, he reproduced the poetic meter by shaping the rhythm of the vocal line to reflect both the accentual pattern of Donner's translation and, in some cases, the long and short syllables of Sophocles's Greek verse. Owing largely to the irregular line lengths characteristic of Donner's text, the music is marked by conspicuously asymmetrical phrases, which serve to defamiliarize the otherwise straightforward choral styles being employed to convey the various moods of Sophocles's choruses. In the opening chorus, Mendelssohn alludes to the familiar sound of a Mäännerchor accompanied by a wind band, thereby suggesting the ode's celebratory and martial associations while recalling his own Festgesang written for the 1840 Leipzig festival commemorating the 400th anniversary of Gutenberg's printing press. The listener is thus presented with a thoroughly recognizable musical idiom and yet simultaneously distanced from it in a way that underscores the historical remoteness of ancient Greek tragedy.

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Colton, Lisa. "The Gendered Musical Score: Music in 1940s Melodrama and the Woman's Film. By Heather Laing. Ashgate, 2007. 196 pp. ISBN 978-0-7546-5100-0 (hb)." Popular Music 28, no. 2 (May 2009): 277–78. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0261143009001895.

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Büttner, Fred. "Der Schluss von Wagners Götterdämmerung und sein Zusammenhang mit der barocken ‘Licenza’." Anuario Musical, no. 66 (December 30, 2011): 203. http://dx.doi.org/10.3989/anuariomusical.2011.66.129.

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Cuando Pietro Metastasio, al comienzo de la década de 1750, reelaboró para una representación en Madrid su famoso libreto Dido abandonada de 1724, le añadió una licencia, que introdujo mediante una amplia didascalia escénica. El desarrollo del final del Crepúsculo de los dioses de Richard Wagner corresponde de forma evidente a esta didascalia escénica, lo que sugiere que el más reciente drama wagneriano depende del libreto precedente de Metastasio. Sin embargo, Wagner no consideró exaltar el poder aristocrático, típico de la licencia barroca, sino que, antes al contrario, se sirvió de un elemento histórico, característico de la antigua tradición del melodrama, para simbolizar el final de la vieja sociedad de los dioses mitológicos. [de] Als Pietro Metastasio sein berühmtes Libretto Didone abbandonata von 1724 zu Beginn der 1750er Jahre für eine Aufführung in Madrid überarbeitete, fügte er eine Licenza an, die durch eine ausführliche Szenenanweisung eingeleitet wird. Mit dieser Szenenanweisung stimmt in auffälliger Weise der Schluss von Richard Wagners Götterdämmerung überein, so dass mit einer bewussten Anlehnung des neueren an das ältere Stück gerechnet werden darf. Jedoch geht es Wagner nicht um die Huldigung an ein aristokratisches Herrschertum, das die barocke Licenza kennzeichnet, sondern im Gegenteil darum, das Ende der alten Göttergesellschaft durch den Bezug auf ein historisches Element zu versinnbildlichen.

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Featherstone, Simon. "Spiritualism as Popular Performance in the 1930s: the Dark Theatre of Helen Duncan." New Theatre Quarterly 27, no. 2 (May 2011): 141–52. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0266464x11000273.

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In this essay the social historian Simon Featherstone examines the theatre of the Scottish medium Helen Duncan and argues that her strange, illicit performances offer a way of re-reading British popular performance in the 1930s and 1940s. This critically neglected period has been characterized by the decline of the radical energies of nineteenth-century music hall and the variety theatre which displaced it. Duncan's performances, however, with their extravagant display and management of her body and deployment of a range of references to popular materials, including puppetry, melodrama, children's games, and sentimental narratives, suggest the existence of other trajectories. Like the ‘dark village’ that Eric Hobsbawm identified as the illegal shadow of nineteenth-century social practices, Duncan's ‘dark theatre’ can be seen as a shadow world of mid-century performance styles. It provided a knowing yet emotionally fulfilling theatrical experience for her audiences while at the same time posing radical questions about the limits and meanings of the representation of gender and class in the unregulated venues of the spiritualist circuit. Politically ambiguous in their mixture of entrepreneurial exploitation and willingness to offer forthright challenges to social and legal authorities, Duncan's performances indicate the persistence of complex spaces and traditions of popular theatricality in the period.

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Journal articles on the topic 'Melodrama in music'

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