Melodramatic Voices: Understanding Music Drama

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Contents: Introduction, Sarah Hibberd
Part I Melodrama as Genre: Music in PixA(c)rA(c)court's early melodramas, Katherine Astbury
Operatic or theatrical? Orchestral framings of the voice in the melodrama Sept Heures (1829), Jens Hesselager
Reconstructing Greek drama: Saint-SaA"ns and the melodramatic ideal, Elinor Olin
In a woman's voice: musical recitation and the feminization of American melodrama, Marian Wilson Kimber. Part II Melodrama on the Operatic Stage: 'Si l'orchestre seul chantait': melodramatic voices in Chelard's Macbeth (1827), Sarah Hibberd
Melodramatic spectacle on the English operatic stage, Philip Carli
JanA!cek and melodrama, John Tyrrell
Dismembering 'expectations': the modernization of monodrama in fin-de-siAcle theatrical arts, Jessica Payette
Opera for the people: melodrama in Hugo Herrmann's Vasantasena (1930), Nanette Nielsen. Part III Melodramatic Transformations: Berlioz's 'RomA(c)o au tombeau': melodrama of the mind, Violaine Anger
Be it [n]ever so humble? The narrating voice in the underscore to The Wizard of Oz (MGM, 1939), Fiona Ford
The voice-over as 'melodramatic voice', Jacqueline Waeber
Dismembering the musical voice: Mahler, melodrama and Dracula from stage to screen, Jeremy Barham
Bibliography
Index.

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The genre of mélodrame Ã grand spectacle that emerged in the boulevard theatres of Paris in the 1790s - and which was quickly exported abroad - expressed the moral struggle between good and evil through a drama of heightened emotions. Physical gesture, mise en scène and music were as important in communicating meaning and passion as spoken dialogue. The premise of this volume is the idea that the melodramatic aesthetic is central to our understanding of nineteenth-century music drama, broadly defined as spoken plays with music, operas and other hybrid genres that combine music with text and/or image. This relationship is examined closely, and its evolution in the twentieth century in selected operas, musicals and films is understood as an extension of this nineteenth-century aesthetic. The book therefore develops our understanding of opera in the context of melodrama's broader influence on musical culture during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This book will appeal to those interested in film studies, drama, theatre and modern languages as well as music and opera.

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Music and Letters

This is an important and useful book... We venture into the territory of musical melodrama at some peril which is precisely why we should do so, if with as much caution as enthusiasm of the kind that must surely be aroused by this collection of essays

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