ABSTRACTS
Anderson, Virginia (University of Nottingham)
‘“I Fought a Monster Today”: Melodrama, Experimentalism, Politics and the
Spoken Voice’
Although experimental composers have integrated the spoken word with musical
thought more closely than the avant garde, classic experimental indeterminacy
often lacks the sentiment and realism for an engagingly consistent association
with melodrama. Postmodern experimentalism (minimalism, new tonality and
other postmodern music having similar attitudes to the more familiar ‘modern’
(indeterminate) experimentalism) often displays a kind of distant ‘cool’, irony,
even an exploration of sentimentality that does not engage emotionally and
directly enough to match the heightened emotional world of typical melodramas.
However, exceptions to this emotional distance exist when the composer is
exploring personal emotions, culture and beliefs (for instance, Steve Reich’s
Jewish works). For later experimentalism in Britain, such a breakthough from
‘cool’ through personal beliefs is usually political (Cornelius Cardew’s work from
1971-1981 is probably best known). Although he doe not think of it as such,
Dave Smith is the only British postmodern experimentalist who has produced a
work that would be recognisable as a melodrama to nineteenth-century
audiences: his Second Piano Concert, Ireland One and Ireland Free (1984-93),
using texts by Bobby Sands and other writers on the subject of Republican
resistance in Northern Ireland. Ireland One and Ireland Free resembles high
melodrama of good and evil, like Pixérécourt’s mélodrames à grand spectacle; its
setting, for speaker and piano, like melodramas by Liszt. This paper will examine
the earliest of the pieces that make up ‘Ireland One and Ireland Free’, a setting of
Bobby Sands’ ‘I Fought a Monster Today’ (1984) and, briefly, Margaretta D’Arcy’s
‘The Armagh Women’ (1985). It will compare this Piano Concert to Smith’s
compositional style in other piano works, examine its political background, its
theatrical associations (D’Arcy’s and John Arden’s Brechtian Irish plays), and its
associations and differences with Brooks’ concept of the melodramatic aesthetic,
as well as Hibberd and Nielsen’s features of melodramatic music.
Anger, Violaine (University of Evry Val d’Essonne)
‘Melodrama without Text, and without Body: the Invocation au tombeau in
Berlioz’s Romeo and Juliet’
The Invocation au tombeau, in Romeo and Juliet, is quite particular: far from the
mute duetto of the love-scene, that can be analyzed or as a second movement of
a symphony, or as programmatic music, it is written in a melodramatic way, as a
scene of high emotion, with juxtaposition of musical ideas, each of them depicting
a precise gesture or emotion, -entering in the tomb, discovering the loved boy of
Juliet, despair… until the final death of both lovers. Berlioz is here clearly by the
melodramatic techniques.
But his profound originality relies in three points: we, audience, are
supposed to know what happened, in the staging of Shakespeare by Garrick;
there is no text, and there is even nobody on stage. So, it becomes a “dreamed
melodrama”, a melodrama that everybody is invited to set in his own intern
imagination.
It is possible to understand this choice: before the last scene, written in a
“Grand opera style”, where real characters arrive on stage, and after Queen
Mab’s scherzo, where music is explicitly dream-like, the melodramatic style
without characters is a way of making a transition between dream and realistic
staging. But regarding melodrama as a genre, it is very interesting insofar as it
fits very well Jacqueline Waeber’s intuition of the melodrama as another
esthetical choice, against formalism. Berlioz deeply believed in a “visual music”,
far from any inner organic form. A further musical analysis of the Invocation
should then investigate the tonal coherence of the piece, but at the same time
point out Berlioz as one ancestor of Mickey mousing techniques…
Astbury, Kate (University of Warwick)
‘Performance, the Press, and the Rise of Melodrama in France’
Guilbert de Pixérécourt is generally recognised as both the inventor of the
mélodrame and its most successful exponent. Music is an integral part of many of
his plays and yet, while dance has been the object of studies of his mélodrames
(see O.G. Brockett, ‘The Function of Dance in the Melodramas of Guilbert de
Pixerecourt’, Modern Philology 56.3 (1959), pp. 154-61), an examination of the
role of music has only recently been undertaken. Sarah Hibberd’s intriguing
examples of how music is used in Pixérécourt plays from the 1820s point to the
potential riches of a systematic study of the music of melodrama in France in the
early 19th century. This paper aims to offer a starting point for a broader study by
reflecting on the beginnings of Pixérécourt’s mélodrames, their relationship with
the French Revolution and with music. In exploring the role of music in the origins
of melodrama, it will focus specifically on the extent to which the playwright and
the theatrical press of the period explicitly identify music as an essential element
in Pixérécourt’s success.
Austin, Kristi (Librarian, Idaho State University)
‘Big Drama Back Stage: The Ballets Russes Premieres of L’Après-midi d’un faune
and Daphnis et Chloé, Paris, 1912’
Paris in the early years of the 20th century attracted and spawned a tremendous
number of creative and brilliant artists, including composers, painters,
choreographers, writers, theatre designers, dancers, and musicians. These
artists inspired each other and often worked collaboratively to create works for
the theatre, ballet, and opera. In this paper we’ll explore the relationship
between two ballets created by Serge Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes in 1912, L’Aprèsmidi d’un faune and Daphnis et Chloé. Although the productions probably
appeared to their audiences as successful examples of the interdisciplinary
collaborative process, the behind-the-scenes drama that these two productions
created seems in retrospect to have been even greater than the emotions
expressed on stage.
Faune was based on a poem by Stéphane Mallarmé, with music by Claude
Debussy, artistic design and costumes by Léon Bakst, and first-time
choreography by famed dancer Vaslav Nijinsky, while Daphnis came from the
story by Greek pastoral writer Longus, choreographed by Michel Fokine to music
by Maurice Ravel, with, again, artistic design and costumes by Bakst. The deus
ex machina or puppet master over all was Ballets Russes producer Serge
Diaghilev, and while his interactions with many of those named above may have
served as catalyst for the creation of these and many other ballets, he also stirred
the emotional pot in such a way that irreparable damages occurred, long-time
friendships were broken, suspicions and jealousies aroused, and hot tempers
flared out of control.
We will examine the two ballets in the context of their time and compare
the “teams” who created them, the processes they underwent, and the aftermath
of the 1912 season. We will also contrast the ballets themselves, one almost a
static, frieze-like tableau, the other a more traditional but Isadora Duncaninspired paean to ancient Greece and its art and dance.
Barham, Jeremy (University of Surrey)
‘Mahler’s Apocalypse: Symphony 2 and Virtual Melodrama’
Relying on strong gestural, emotional and ethical forms of representation and on
intensely juxtapositional structuring processes, melodrama, as both composite
historical form and wider aesthetic category, can justifiably be implicated in
constructions of modernist cultural landscapes. Among Mahler’s lost early works
were four opera projects and two sets of pieces designed to accompany the
staging of tableaux vivants in the Kassel Theatre: Der Trompeter von Säkkingen
(1884) and Das Volkslied (1885). Although little is known about these works and
Mahler wrote no further original music for the stage, this early involvement with
such forms of combined visual, spoken and musical dramatic presentation, and its
subsequent intensification during a performance career spent mostly as theatre
Director, nevertheless fed deeply and diversely into his ‘non-theatrical’, texted
and non-texted compositions. The Second Symphony’s neuropathic and scenic
formal disruptions and textural excesses, its recourse to collages of musical topics
conjoining the grandiose with the banal, its virtual vocality and its episodic
dialectic of pathos and action, dystopia and utopia, offer examples. Frequently
rebuked by contemporary critics, such symphonic ‘imaginary theatre’, together
with Mahler’s apparent quest to articulate the morality of a potentially nihilist and
chaotic ‘post-sacred’ society, may be seen as characteristic manifestations of the
‘competing logic’ or ‘second voice’ of the early modernist melodramatic
imagination.
Bayman, Louis (King’s College, University of London)
‘The Operatic Expressivity of Italian Melodrama’
Italian cinematic melodrama developed primarily under the influence of the
operatic stage, rather than the popular theatres and literature that were the
formative influences on French and Anglophone melodrama. This paper will seek
to illustrate with reference to cinema of the 1950s how Italian melodrama
translates an operatic way of constructing drama into film, and what notions this
challenges in the theories of cinematic melodrama developed largely in relation to
Hollywood.
Melodramma is synonymous in Italian for both opera and melodrama,
suggesting the way the musicality of melodrama's emotional expressivity
interacts with dramatic development just as music and drama co-exist in opera.
Indeed the silent movie diva was an Italian invention imported from the stage for
her ability to heighten emotion through bodily expressivity. In the sound era, this
bodily expressivity was accompanied by a dramatic use of vocal declamation in
melodramatic climaxes. Therefore while theory generally regards melodramatic
climax in cinema to be based around violent excess of character movement,
faster editing and symbolic mise-en-scène, Italian cinematic melodrama reduces
the expressivity of these elements. Instead of sensational effects, its 'operatic'
expressivity involves a reduction of cinematic technique and movement during
dramatic high-points, characterised rather by confrontations between two or
three characters restricted within the stage-like space of the set to the point of
bodily stasis, often reaching tableau formation, with the expressivity of the voice
marking emotional climax. These techniques belong to an operatic sensibility that
extends emotion across time and space, and provide an aesthetic that developed
from the cineopere (filmed performances by opera stars) to become the basis of
the massive postwar success of both generic popular melodrama, and the art
cinema of the likes of Luchino Visconti.
Carli, Philip (Eastman House, Rochester, NY)
English Romantic Opera
English opera developed in the early Victorian period into something of its own
unique genre, and the process of eclectically adapting Continental styles to "the
English" taste went so far -- and was sometimes ideologically obscured by its
practitioners, not to mention later critics and historians -- as to demand that we
go back to popular forms to see what made the English operas of the 1830-65
period work and hold the stage in the UK for nearly a century; tellingly, they held
the stage most tenaciously in the industrial provinces, far removed from the
intellectual snobbery of London. These were operas of the people, adapting
popular and professional musical and dramatic conventions -- a curiously and
idiomatically British way of doing things. As such, I want to at least suggest that
English opera had strong ties to popular melodrama and melodramatic spectacle,
and as such are worthy of further examination in this light.
Cruz, Gabriela Gomes da (Universidade Nova de Lisboa)
'On the Properties of Gems and Voice'
Commenting on the impending arrival of contralto Emma Leonardi in Lisbon in
1890, a local critic exclaimed: “we have been told ... that she carries more
diamonds than Patti! In truth, a fine clue, excellent information.” The reference
to Adelina Patti’s habit of wearing all her jewelry for the ball scene in La traviata
resonates with a peculiar belief in a sympathetic connection between the voice
and the gem. Following on this thread, my paper untangles a largely
unacknowledged”before” to lyrical song; the knowledge formations that have
long fed into the belief of a “mineral voice,” understandings of geology, optics,
and anatomy nurtured at different times by alchemists, philosophers and poets,
and which survive nowhere but in the habit of the lyrical. I will make a case for
an “alchemic turn” in nineteenth-century opera by considering insights on gems
and their relationship to the voice as explored in Rémy Belleau’s Les Amours et
nouveaux eschanges des pierres précieuses: vertus et proprietez d’icelles (1576)
and Diderot’s Bijoux indiscrets (1747) and will explore their persistent relevance
to the understanding of the material and technical precepts at the heart of the
aesthetic experience of song in nineteenth-century France. In so doing this paper
considers the ways in which the modern culture of jewelry, brought forth by the
rise of chemistry and the flourishing of a new industry of fakes, has contributed to
our understanding of the voice as object. The notion will be discussed with
reference to an emblematic scene of French lyrical modernity: Gounod’s “Air des
bijoux” a piece historically entangled with the “mineral” in ways that are both
fancifully imaginative and prosaicly technical.
Dean, Robert (University of Glamorgan)
‘Discord Underscored: Anempathetic Music in Nineteenth Century Melodrama’
The music which accompanied theatrical melodramas during the nineteenth
century is generally regarded as a device which directly reflected, supported and
amplified the action taking place on stage. In contrast numerous twentieth
century film sound theorists and practitioners have explored and applauded an
alternative approach which aligns dramatic events with musical material that is
anempathetically related to the situation taking place on screen. However when
the descriptions and definitions of this process are viewed alongside instructions
detailing the diegetic and non-diegetic music which accompanied a number of
scenes taken from nineteenth century melodramas it is clear that the technique is
not a modern cinematic invention. This paper will focus on examples of
‘dissonant harmony’ and ‘anempathetic underscoring’ employed in Boucicault’s
The Colleen Bawn (1860), Foote’s Bitter Cold (1865), and Albery’s Two Roses
(1870). The semiotic analysis of the music and the narrative context in which it is
used reveals that nineteenth-century theatre practitioners did not limit
themselves to aural accompaniments which were wholly consonant with the
dramatic situation they were selected to underscore. Furthermore it is clear that
in these extracts the semantic function of the music and the principles within
which it operated bears direct similarities to techniques more commonly
associated with twentieth century film.
Ford, Fiona (University of Nottingham)
‘Melos and Musical Clichés in the Emerald City: Features of 19 th-Century Stage
Music in between Harold Arlen’s Songs in the The Wizard of Oz (MGM, 1939 and
MUNY, 1945)’
Harold Arlen’s greatest success came with MGM’s 1939 musical version of Frank
Baum’s The Wizard of Oz, but his hit songs only account for about half the total
score. Between these there are functional musical interludes in the manner of
19th-century melodrama and other staged genres (ballet, pantomime, etc.), many
using clichéd chromatic scale patterns and rising sequences (for example to
suggest the cyclone and to characterise the entrance and exit of witches). This
background music was provided mostly by Herbert Stothart, MGM’s house
composer, with help from George Bassman, George Stoll and Robert Stringer.
Fast-forward a few years to the St. Louis Municipal Opera (MUNY) stage version
in the early 1940s and, again, Arlen’s hit songs are interwoven with equally oldfashioned incidental music (composer unknown). Were these composers
deliberately alluding to older traditions, or were such conventions still inherent in
20th-century American film and stagecraft? This paper will explore possible
answers to these questions, setting the MGM musical and the MUNY stage version
in the context of an earlier adaptation of Baum’s novel for the stage in 1902 and
numerous silent film versions. In addition, it will be debated whether finding
connections between European 19th-century stage music and American scores for
screen and stage from the 1930s and 1940s can be useful as evidence of shared
and continuing practices when finding similar clichés in silent-film research,
despite Rick Altman having castigated those who would dare to find links without
firm geographical and temporal substantiation.
Goodwin, Polly (London)
‘Acting Suspicious: Exemplification of Silent Film Acting Technique(s) in
Hitchcock’s Early Crime Talkies’
The transition from making silent pictures to making sound ones presented many
challenges: not least for the actors. Aside from the much publicized (& parodied)
issue of ‘whether or not the star had a voice’, actors were faced with having to
discover and develop, what were in many ways significantly different, sets of
acting techniques in order to effectively communicate with their audiences in this
new medium. They were on a learning curve, and the actors in the Hitchcock
films made during this experimental transitional period are a prime example of
this. Evolutionary more than revolutionary, their initial efforts often saw them,
quite understandably, draw upon the silent heritage of film acting. In many
places, we can see a retained technique integrated to great effect in its new
surroundings, whilst yet remaining recognizably ‘silent’ in genesis. But there are
many unsuccessful occasions where so doing renders their acting clunky,
unintentionally humorous, and, in some cases, just criminally ‘bad’. However,
where actors have mistakenly employed techniques which are, in essence or in
usage, specific to the silent medium, this does succeed in highlighting and indeed
validating their existence, standing out (as they do!) in this alien environment.
Further proof can be had by taking a ‘mis-use’ of a silent technique from a talkie,
and (re)viewing that paragraph or sentence of the film as though it were part of a
silent film (the recorded sound/dialogue replaced with appropriate musical
accompaniment). By transposing it back to the medium it was really designed for,
it is remarkable how it can morph into a performance that is coherent and
believable
I propose to take a selection of Hitchcock’s early talkies – specifically his crime
talkies: Number 17, Blackmail, & Murder – and use them to demonstrate silent
film acting techniques. I will then go on to use these films to discuss and illustrate
some of the ‘silent’ techniques and choices which characterize silent film acting:
the fragmentation of expression; extra acting space and response time;
avoidance of physical interruption; physical & gestural bias; & the ‘investment’ in
points of visual reference. I will include within the presentation a practical
demonstration of my main point: muting a section from one of Hitchcock’s talkies
and having it accompanied as if it were a silent.
Hesselager, Jens (University of Copenhagen)
‘Sept heures (1829) and its Music’
Sept heures – a three-act mélodrame by Victor Ducange and Anicet Bourgeois –
premiered at Théâtre de la Porte Saint-Martin on March 23, 1829. The play
starred Frederick Lemaître and Marie Dorval in the leading roles – as the ruthless
‘agent supérieure’, Marcel (modelled partly on the French revolutionary, JeanPaul Marat), and Mlle D’Armans (modelled partly on Charlotte Corday, Marat’s
assasin) respectively. The music was by Alexandre Piccinni, probably the most
prolific composer of melodrama-scores within the repertoire which Peter Brooks
has called the ‘classical’ French boulevard melodrama (c.1800-1830).
I shall present some findings in the surviving orchestral material for this
melodrama, thus seeking to contribute to the task, formulated by Emilio Sala
some ten years ago, of ‘sonorising’ the melodramatic imagination defined by
Peter Brooks (see Revue de musicologie, 84/2 (1998), p.243). We still need to
pursue this task, I believe, and in order to do so, confront our understanding of
the various musical and musico-dramatical qualities of this repertoire with close
readings of existing, yet largely unexplored, sources – indeed with close readings
of individual works within this repertoire.
Sept heures was heavily censured. Le figaro made a witty note about this
in its March 25 issue: “La censure a retranché un quart du mélodrame intitulé:
Sept heures ; le public ne verra plus que sept heures moins un quart.” In fact,
the orchestral material testifies to even more drastic cuts in the music than the
note in Figaro suggests: Out of a total of 82 musical numbers in the original
design, only 28 survives in the version eventually performed. Furthermore, a
large ouverture in the ‘dramatic’ style (quoting musical material from the
murderscene of the last act), a four-movement divertissement towards the end of
act one, and a concluding, solemn ‘Marche Lente’ were left out in performance.
I shall present an overview of the general musico-dramatic structure of Sept
heures, seeking to evaluate, along the way, what aspects of the drama were
accompanied by music in the two versions, and in what manner. To that end I
shall also present a few transcribed examples of musical numbers that in various
ways may provoke a discussion of the relation between music and dramatic
action, and other examples which illustrate the type of composerly ambition
invested in the original score on the one hand, and, on the other, the type of
reworking of the material that the cut version testifies to.
In conclusion, I shall argue that Sept heures indeed belongs to the
tradition of the ‘classical’ mélodrame, but also that it has qualities that decidedly
point towards the French romantic drama of the 1830’s (Dumas, Hugo, and
others), just as a few musico-dramatic ideas (at least in the original,
unperformed, version) may seem to look ahead towards the style and aesthetics
of the grand opéra of the 1830’s.
Hibberd, Sarah (University of Nottingham)
‘Macbeth: Opera meets Melodrama in 1820s Paris’
Macbeth is arguably Shakespeare’s most melodramatic play. It was precisely its
larger-than-life characters, heightened emotions, dark colour – and touch of the
supernatural – that attracted early nineteenth-century audiences to adaptations
at the popular theatres of Paris, and inspired the emerging generation of French
Romantics seeking to rejuvenate national elite drama. Perhaps intending to profit
from this vogue, the composer Hippolyte Chelard and poet Rouget de L’isle
collaborated on a tragédie lyrique to help revive the Paris Opéra’s flagging
fortunes. The result was a curiously hybrid work, part popular modern
melodrama, part traditional eighteenth-century opera, which ultimately failed to
convince audiences or critics.
In this paper I examine the precise reasons for the failure of the opera,
outlining the tensions between high and low art, traditional and modern
approaches, music and mise en scène. Ultimately, Chelard’s work was deemed a
failure for its mismatch of form and content, and its perceived lack of realism. I
shall focus on Lady Macbeth’s sleepwalking scene to reveal how Chelard’s
approach to realistic expression of emotion – rather than realistic narrative –
inspired in part by that of melodrama puzzled opera audiences more familiar with
the classical aesthetic on one hand, while anticipating the developments in
European opera later in the century on the other.
Hicks, Jonathan (New College, Oxford)
‘Music and Encounter in the Melodramatic Metropolis’
How does incidental music function in the contested space of the melodramatic
metropolis? That question is my point of departure, and in this paper I would like
to explore just one of the paths it opens up. Or rather, I would like to pursue the
notion that, within the melodramatic staging of the contradictory city, it is music
which allows characters’ paths to cross without consequence. Focusing on George
R Sims’ The Lights o’ London (1881) as a hugely successful example of late
Victorian melodrama, I will argue that incidental music, in conspiracy with various
other dramatic and theatrical strategies, is implicated in the regulation and
mediation of urban experience. Specifically that part of experience marked by the
threat of the unexpected and potentially uncontrollable encounter. In other
words, non-diegetic music, in this generic context, operates as something like a
buffer; it stops people bumping into one another on stage.
Building on the current literature linking 19th-century melodrama with the
discourse of urbanization, my approach calls for a broader conception of the
function of music within theatrical melodrama. By incorporating a spatial
dimension into existing interpretive frameworks, the tunes and chords from the
orchestra can be heard to do other things besides announcing the hero, recalling
the cottage, or boiling the blood for the fight scene. Finally The Lights o’ London
is a particularly useful case study, not only because there is a surviving orchestral
score, but also because of the author’s enduring preoccupation with documenting,
dramatizing, and versifying life in London. As such, we can begin to situate the
theatrical negotiation of urban encounter within a wider discourse of social
anxiety and mass-mediated entertainment.
Higgins, Ceridwen (Trinity College, University of Wales)
‘Composing the comedia ranchera: Image and Music in the Mexican Musical
Melodrama’
Focusing on the seminal film of Mexican musical melodrama, Allá en el Rancho
Grande (Fernando de Fuentes, 1936) the paper will explore how the film’s
cinematographer, Gabriel Figueroa, constructed images in relation to the music
and melodramatic narrative. The film is significant in that it was fundamental in
establishing the comedia ranchera genre, so central to Mexican cinema during the
1930s and 1940s. The films are not so much musicals as melodramas that
incorporate long interludes of diegetic music, performed and played on screen by
the actors. Figueroa's handling of the film's visual language set the benchmark
for subsequent films in the genre and the foundation for visualising music in his
ensuing work. The paper will go on to discuss the lack of connection between the
study of sound and image in film and suggests a synthesis of critical approaches
to enable a more syncretic appreciation of both elements, with particular
reference to the Mexican melodrama genre. Moreover, although critics have
interpreted Allá en el Rancho Grande as a 'reactionary', nationalist text, on
examination of the melodramatic aesthetic, it becomes clear that the film
transcends its reputation to reveal a complex web of contradictions in nationalist
rhetoric and imagery that resulted from the transnational relations so
fundamental to the film's production and the performance of music in Mexican
films of the time.
Nielsen, Nanette (University of East Anglia)
‘Opera for the People: Melodrama in Hugo Herrmann’s Vasantasena (1930)’
A prominent music critic and opera producer in the Weimar Republic, Paul Bekker
(1882-1937) worked closely with the composer Hugo Herrmann (1896-1967) on
a now-forgotten opera, Vasantasena, performed at the Staatstheater in
Wiesbaden (where Bekker was Intendant) in 1930. At this time, Bekker was
returning to the sociological ideals of his groundbreaking book of 1916, Das
deutsche Musikleben, which had participated in the contemporary flurry of
utopian thought by theorising how music might help shape society. By 1930
Bekker had adapted a conservative idealism, and formulated a new ethical
conception of 'the human voice' in an attempt to explain how opera might help
rebuild a disintegrating Weimar society.
Influenced by Bekker's sociology, Herrmann also shared his concern that
opera as a genre had failed to renew itself in the post-war context. Both intended
that Vasantasena should lead the way towards a new form, one that would have
greater artistic merit than other experiments in music theatre of the 1920s, such
as the Zeitoper or the Lehhrstück. While Krenek's extremely popular Jonny spielt
auf (1927), as one prominent example, had borrowed techniques directly from
the cinema, Herrmann and Bekker turned to the popular theatre and to the
narrative mode that provided its foundation: melodrama. At the same time there
remained here a parallel with film, closely based as it was on the popular theatre
and melodrama.
My discussion of Vasantasena draws on previously unexplored archival
material, including extensive correspondence between Bekker and Herrmann that
fed directly into the composition, along with examples from the obscure score. I
analyse the opera as a work profoundly based in the narrative mode of
melodrama, with a clear-cut moral opposition and its embodiment in particular
characters, a reliance on coincidence, mistaken identity, violence, and extremes
of emotion, a conclusion that reinstates a status quo whilst it delivers poetic
justice, and not least in a strong emphasis on non-verbal means of expression,
including gesture, pantomime, dance, static tableaux – and music.
Vasantasena also enables a deeper understanding of the development in
Bekker's sociological views, including his musical ethics, as he sought to maintain
opera’s status in the face of its decline, leading it in new directions that did not
however lose contact with a humanist orientation. Melodrama provided a means
to communicate directly with the audience, and at the same time could be seen
to represent a modernist move in using popular art to reinvigorate high art.
Herrmann's opera thus presents a union of otherwise conflicting modernist and
reactionary aspirations in Bekker's theory and practice, while at a more general
level it embodies similar antagonistic trends within the tense political and artistic
arena of the Weimar Republic.
Olin, Elinor (National-Louis University, Chicago)
‘Reconstructing Greek Drama: Saint-Saëns and the Melodramatic Ideal’
Though his star quality has diminished during the last century, Saint-Saëns was
once hailed by his contemporaries in the French press as nothing less than “the
uncontested leader of the Modern French School.” A composer with an extensive
compositional output, a performer with a lengthy career as pianist and conductor,
and a scholar at the forefront of emerging French musicology, Saint-Saëns was
one of the most celebrated cultural icons of his day. Although his leadership role
disseminating ideas on French music have been considered by numerous writers,
less well-known is Saint-Saëns’s response to 19th-century theories in archeology
and their connection to historical performance practice. His pamphlet Note sur
les décors de théâtre dans l’antiquité romaine (Paris, 1886) discussed not only
the architecture and ornament of ancient Roman theaters in Pompeii and Orange
(France), but also the way the archeological evidence provided “the key to the
mysteries” of dramatic performance in the ancient world, specifically via stylized
gesture and the performance technique of mélodrame.
During the 1880s and 1890s Saint-Saëns collaborated with writer Paul
Mariéton (1862-1911), founder of the long-running Chorégies d’Orange, the
earliest of the plein air musico-dramatic festivals. Under Mariéton’s direction
(1888 to 1911), a repertory of stage works was created, capitalizing on the
mythology, architecture and impressive physical structure of the extant 1 st
century Roman theater in Orange. Seven of Saint-Saëns’s “antique” works,
including one premiere, were performed at nine iterations of this festival. His
music, including extensive mélodrames, for the 1893 French adaptation of
Sophocles’s Antigone was performed at the festival in 1894, 1897 and 1909.
Examination of these works, through the lens of gestural theory and the
melodramatic aesthetic will shed light on the use of music, language and myth as
foundational elements of national identity.
Payette, Jessica (Oakland University, Rochester, MI)
‘Die Frau as Diseuse: Twentieth-Century Monodrama’s Roots in Cabaret’
Erwartung’s generic subtitle, “monodrama,” is often ignored or viewed as
equivalent to other descriptors such as “one-act opera” or “vocal monologue.”
Even musicological discussions about early twentieth-century solo vocal music
tend to conflate the generic categories of melodrama and monodrama, most
notably in the MGG (Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart) where the entry on
monodrama offers a simple visual instruction: “Monodram → Melodram.” This
paper will argue that the generic differentiation should not be treated lightly and
propose that the term monodrama, used occasionally in the eighteenth century,
was reintroduced at the beginning of the twentieth century precisely to
distinguish it from melodrama, the more ancient and theorized genre, and draw
attention to its depiction of “inner processes.” Playwright Nicolai Evreinov’s 1908
treatise entitled “Introduction to Monodrama” indicates that the genre, which he
believes “requires each of the spectators to stand in the protagonist’s shoes and
to be the first to see and hear the same thing the protagonist does,” was in vogue
in spoken theatre.
My exploration of Erwartung’s relation to fin-de-siècle cabaret and
experimental theatre was prompted by a Neues Weiner Journal critic who alluded
to the “Elf Scharfrichter” cabaret in his review of the 1924 premiere of Erwartung:
“Its content? – A chilling episode, a sketch of horror, a lingering sound of the ‘Elf
Scharfrichter!’ ” Erwartung’s subject matter, poetic style, and the Woman’s
increasingly harrowed appearance mirror the traits of spellbinding acts at turn-ofthe-century cabarets, where the best female entertainers devised performances
of hysteria as a means to showcase their virtuosic emotional range. As a result of
indifference to its generic specification, Erwartung’s connection to
contemporaneous popular entertainment has gone unnoticed.
Raykoff, Ivan (The New School, New York)
‘Schumann’s Melodramatic Afterlife’
Robert Schumann’s three published melodramas, or poetic declamations with
piano accompaniment (op. 106, and op. 112 nos. 1 and 2), are rarely performed
and not highly regarded by most critics and scholars, but they do provide a
conceptual model for examining the enduring popularity of some of his bestknown compositions, such as “Träumerei” from Kinderszenen (op. 15, no. 7). The
frequent “melodramatic” uses of “Träumerei” on the soundtrack of numerous
films and animated cartoons, for example, typically involve an emotionallyheightened monologue recitation over this background music, a technique which
can be linked to the nineteenth-century genre of melodrama by way of musical
practices in popular theater and silent film accompaniment around the turn of the
century. This technique also appears in certain literary works of the period that
integrate Schumann’s music into the text itself as a “live” accompaniment to a
dramatic scenario. This paper focuses on a close reading (and listening) of Arthur
Schnitzler’s 1924 novella Fräulein Else and the Hollywood film Possessed (1947),
both of which employ Schumann’s music melodramatically to represent the
troubled psychological states of their female protagonists.
Rooley, Anthony (Schola Cantorum, Basel)
‘John Stafford Smith (1750-1836): Early Dramatic Musical Examples of 'ProtoMelodrama', c.1790’
With the passing of the 'Pastoral Convention' into the 'Picturesque', and that
metamorphosing into the 'Gothic', the last years of the 18thC provided fertile
material for the emergence of 'Melodrama' proper. In this detailed study and
analysis of two extraordinary works by John Stafford Smith: The Lunatic Lover 'Grim King of the Ghosts', and The Frantic Lady - 'I burn, my brain consumes to
ashes', I suggest we can discern the beginnings, already surprisingly mature, of
the essential nature of music to accompany Melodrama. Indeed, with a
backwards glance at the extraordinary English tradition of theatrical 'Mad-Songs'
(having its roots in Jacobean black-comedy theatre) Stafford Smith reveals his
grasp of history and also becomes a pivotal turning point in his own time, thus
laying a foundation for the future exploration of music to heighten the
Melodramatic Aesthetic. Gestural implications will also be explored, with reference
to the work of Henry Fuseli. The paper will be illustrated with specially recorded
examples.
Sheil, Trish (Cambridge)
‘Beyond the Real: Music, Melodrama and Theatrical Gesture in Michael Powell and
Emeric Pressburger’s 1947 Black Narcissus’
“Here was the ‘composed film’ that I had been dreaming about in which music,
emotion and acting made a complete whole, of which music was the master”
(Michael Powell, Million Dollar Movie 1992).
In Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s 1947 Black Narcissus, Powell
experimented with the composed film in which a sequence was shot to previously
composed music rather than adding music in post-production. It allowed Powell to
move beyond the confines of dialogue and enabled choreographed gestures and
heightened emotion to be played out with an excess of melodramatic intensity. It
distinguished a style of filmmaking for Powell that would lead to The Red Shoes,
Tales of Hoffmann and Blue Beard’s Castle but it also created unease in critical
discourses of the time.
In this paper I will draw on Peter Brooks’ The Melodramatic Imagination to
explore how Black Narcissus and the composed sequence draw on 19th century
acting codes and silent film practices. In contrast to the classic realism of 1940’s
‘quality films’ as identified by John Ellis, the excesses of emotion, gesture and
mise en scene in Black Narcissus break through the surface of verisimilitude and
function as myth to articulate cultural anxieties about post-war women’s sexual
freedoms.
Sheppard, Jennifer (University of California, Berkeley)
‘How the Vixen Lost her Mores: Gesture and Music in Janáček’s The Cunning Little
Vixen’
During the weeks leading up to the Prague premiere of Janáček’s opera The
Cunning Little Vixen, a few stage directions – in particular an indication for the
female lead to “relieve herself” on stage – caused the theatre concern.
Preoccupation with staging the Vixen was by no means idle: the opera comprises
large portions of instrumental music, which Janáček referred to as “pantomime.”
Thus music that is fixed to movement on stage and produces meaning on a
gestural level can be readily located. Some sections, however, imply gesture so
continuously that it is the moments in which the music abandons its
representational function that stand out. I focus here on a few short scenes in
which the Vixen’s actions could call for moral comment – if not judgement. Yet
emptied of gesture and uncoupled from actions on stage, the music neither
generates movement nor provides commentary on it. At such crucial moments, in
fact, the music remains stubbornly reticent. From its reception, it seems clear
that audiences understood the congruence of physical action and music in a
meaningful way such that the absence of that congruence became even more
charged. Critics repeatedly compared Janáček’s choice of an animal subject for The Cunning Little Vixen to the Čapek brothers’ play, From the Life of Insects
(1921), among other contemporary animal satires; however, in Janáček’s opera it
was the absence of satire that was noted. His animals did not reflect human vice,
as was conventional in such stories, and by the end of the opera no moral could
be drawn. Indeed, the Vixen’s perceived amorality unsettled critics and burdened
producers with staging difficulties. In my paper, then, close reading is directed by
historical context, nuanced with reception history, and finally set in a larger
framework of an ongoing performance and production tradition in the Czech
Republic.
Smith, Jake (University of Nottingham)
‘Tearing Speech to Pieces: Voice Technologies of the 1940s’
Visitors entering the Bell Telephone exhibit at the 1939 World’s Fair in New York
were greeted by a striking demonstration of a new device that produced an
electronic simulation of human speech. Fair-goers were fascinated by the talking
machine known as the Voder, as well as by the young female operators who
manipulated its complex interface of keys, knobs, and foot-pedals in order to
produce a voice. The Voder, along with Bell Lab’s subsequent Vocoder and a
device called the Sonovox, were technologies of the voice that received extensive
discussion in the popular press and had a significant impact on radio and film
production during the 1940s. In this presentation, I will examine the cultural life
of these mid-century talking machines, in particular the use of the Sonovox in
radio advertising and the Hollywood melodramas (or “women’s films”) Possessed
(1947) and Letter to Three Wives (1949). In a manner similar to the Voder
demonstration at the World’s Fair, the Sonovox was operated by “female
enunciators,” and in fact, the use of this device was inflected by notions of gender
at every point in its implementation. As such, the examination of the cultural
discourses that surrounded these devices can add to our understanding of the use
of sound in film melodrama, the performance of the female voice, and overlaps
between radio and film sound production.
My analysis is informed by work on the social construction of sound media
technologies, in particular that of Rick Altman, who has outlined a “crisis
historiography” of new media technologies, which takes into account the multiple
and conflicting definitions of a new technology, and considers “unsuccessful
experiments and short-lived practices” as well as those which become established
(Altman 22-3). The Sonovox effect was a relatively “short-lived practice” in the
history of film sound and radio broadcasting, but it provides a useful barometer
for issues of gender and performance in the sound media of the 1940s. Because
of its ability to make recorded sounds take on the qualities of human speech, the
Sonovox found success in the relatively new area of radio spot advertising, where
it could make consumer products “speak” to a largely female audience. The
Sonovox was also used in the Hollywood films Letter to Three Wives and
Possessed as a way to make objects speak the unconscious thoughts and
anxieties of female characters. My examination of these films can thus provide a
new perspective on the representation of the female voice and the function of
sound in the film melodramas of the 1940s.
Taylor, George (formerly University of Manchester)
‘Scenes of Incarceration and Exile in British Romantic Opera and Melodrama’
This paper will examine the theatrical depiction of the dungeon in the period of
Gothic Drama and early Melodrama and relate this to the political and cultural
issues of the period. Changes in stage mechanics and lighting, enabled theatres
at the turn of the eighteenth century to produce dungeon scenes with greater
authenticity and atmosphere. Many plays in the 1780s and 90s, from Historical
Romances to Ballad Operas and Gothic Tragedies, featured dungeons, caves and
oubliettes. Parallels with Newgate or the Bastille are easily drawn. Early ‘Rescue
Operas’ concentrated on unjust detention, as under the Ancient Regime, though
later examples focused on the sacrifices made to free victims from incarceration.
During the Revolution writers and dramatists, in both France and England, faced
political persecution, exile, prison and, in France, the guillotine. For survivors of
Robespierre’s Terror the dungeon had particular significance, while for the
aristocrat émigrés, returning once Bonaparte, as First Consul, initiated a policy of
reconciliation, images of exile were perhaps more resonant.
In this post-revolutionary period Pixérècourt’s seminal melodramas
included both dungeons and forest wildernesses, as a common theme was the
reclamation of a usurped inheritance, home or identity after an escape from
prison or return from exile. In translation to England, Pixérècourt’s plots may not
have had the same implications as for the French, but, their settings were open
to a range of metaphorical interpretation - conscious and unconscious - in a
period when political, cultural and moral values were under drastic review.
Matthew Lewis’s monodrama The Captive (Covent Garden in 1802) was
set ‘a cell in a private madhouse’, and the scenic atmosphere, the musical
accompaniment and the acting of Mrs Lichfield were so powerful that members of
the audience fainted or became hysterical. Significantly the theme of a wife
unjustly incarcerated by her husband was one that Lewis took from Mary
Wollstonecraft’s unfinished novel Maria; or the Wrongs of Women.
Taylor, Millie (University of Winchester)
‘”The British Tar is a Soaring Soul”: Exploring Satire and Parody in HMS Pinafore’
James Day in ‘Englishness’ in Music suggests in relation to English music with
words that ‘what might be legitimately regarded as English is the manner in
which the mechanism of music is exploited to convey a specific message – an
emotional or ethical attitude’ (Day 1999, p. 5). In light of this I am arguing that a
feature of Gilbert and Sullivan’s musical comedies is a taste for satire and that a
mechanism used to convey this is parody of musical style or genre. My objective
is to suggest that satirical presentation is created through the juxtaposition of
musical genres, characters and text in ways that might later be termed ‘gestic’.
This paper draws examples from HMS Pinafore to analyse some types of
interaction between music, lyrics and book. The examples are drawn from ‘He is
an Englishman’, the trio and company versions of ‘A British tar is a soaring soul’,
Ralph and Josephine’s solos, ‘A maiden fair to see’ and ‘Sorry her lot’, and
Buttercup’s opening recitative and aria. The analysis suggests that the interaction
of media can contribute to complex and comic readings of characters and satirical
representations of identity.
The paper concludes that in this work incongruity and unexpected
juxtapositions are being used to challenge class based hierarchies and
stereotypical representations and to make topical allusions. It raises the question
of whether these devices are more widely used in comic or satirical musical
theatre performances
Townley, Sarah (University of Nottingham)
‘“O wicked, wicked voice, violin of flesh and blood!”: the resistance of material
form and the role of the melodramatic aesthetic in Vernon Lee’s supernatural tale
“The Wicked Voice”’
In her collection of supernatural tales Hauntings (1890), writer Vernon Lee
(1856-1935) dramatises her wide-ranging body of critical interests, which brings
music, aesthetics and literature into a multi-disciplinary framework. For Lee, the
aesthetic is most affective when ephemeral and in turn, most artificial when given
material form. The supernatural is deemed an apt literary genre to articulate this
point. In ‘Faustus and Helena: Notes on the Supernatural,’ she writes, ‘the
supernatural is necessarily essentially vague, while art is necessarily distinct:
[once art] gives shape to the vague [...all that is indistinct] ceases to exist.’
In this paper, I will examine Lee’s ‘The Wicked Voice,’ a tale in which a musicianscholar obsessed with art’s materiality—and the scholarship which frames it—is
forced to participate in the rustic traditions of Venetian folk culture. Whilst
revered by the Venetian public, the melodramatic vocals of the historic castrato,
Zaffirino, frustrate the musician-scholar. Resisting material form, Zaffirino’s voice
opposes the publish-or-perish print culture of late-Victorian literary life. Once
dependent on a ‘battered little volume’ of facts about the singer, Magnus, the
musician-scholar becomes enamoured with—and reliant on—the castrato’s
melodramatic aesthetic ‘of scales and cadences and trills.’ As regards rhythm and
pattern, the style with which Zaffirino’s cadenza haunts Magnus at unforeseen
intervals revises the relationship between musical form and the expectations it
sets up. The way these expectations are broken furnishes Lee’s campaign to
challenge the formulaic and systematic measurements of creative esteem on
which the scholar so heavily relies. This paper seeks to examine how ‘The Wicked
Voice’ initiates the link between aesthetic value (as Lee defines it), what it
unexpected, and the supernatural. Considering the story in the context of Lee’s
wider work, I hope to collaborate with recent scholarship which registers Lee as
an ‘interdisciplinary public intellectual.’
Tunbridge, Laura (University of Manchester)
'Words before Music: Recitation and Lieder Recitals in the Early Twentieth
Century'
This paper explores the interaction between recitation and musical performance
in Lieder recitals at the beginning of the twentieth century. Often, poems would
be declaimed before they were sung, or recitations would feature alongside Lieder
in concerts, reminding us that the connection between spoken words and music
was not unique to the genre of melodrama but also reflected a strand of
performance practice. Examples will be drawn from a week-long festival of
melodramatic music at the Queen's Hall, London, in 1902, which featured
performances of Robert Schumann's Manfred, Richard Strauss's Enoch Arden, and
recitations by Ernst von Possart from Goethe and Schiller, accompanied by
Strauss at the piano.
Tyrrell, John (University of Cardiff)
‘The Thirteenth Head: Reflections on Fibich's Stage Melodrama Hippodamia’
Czechs have a strong history of composing melodramas, from Georg Benda’s
‘duodrama Ariadne (1775) - an influence on Mozart - to a popular concert genre
in the earlier part of the twentieth century. Zdeněk Fibich (1850-1900) was
particularly assiduous in cultivating the genre, writing five concert melodramas
(two of them with orchestra) and a three full-evening stage melodrama, a trilogy
entitled Hippodamie [Hippodamia], after Aeschylus. This paper will put Fibich’s
Hippodamia into context among his oeuvre and investigate its strengths and
weaknesses as a stage work.
Waeber, Jacqueline (Duke University)
"Music-Image-Text: Searching for the Melodramatic" [keynote]
Any attempt to define the “Melodramatic in music” reveals its prolixity, and
fickleness: as a genre (the ‘musical melodrama,’ itself varying from one period
and one country to another, crossing boundaries with the ‘theatrical melodrama’),
as a technique (melodramatic or mimodramatic scenes in opera, in which the
spoken utterance, or the pantomime, is invoked), and above all, as an aesthetic
marked by redundancy, abrupt juxtapositions and discursive breakdowns.
Although my intention is not to draft a theoretical categorization of the
melodramatic, I want to focus this paper on what can be described as invariant
traits of the melodramatic through selected case-studies: among which the
adequacy of the melodramatic with the monologic situation; the melodramatic as
a transitory function, creating footbridges between the real and the unreal, the
present and the past; the melodramatic as a ‘new Laocoon,’ perceived by many
commentators as a contradictory construct of music, image, and text; the
melodramatic understood as a renunciation to singing, through the use of the
spoken declamation, or the silent mime; and the specific status of the
melodramatic voice, as exemplified in the concert melodrama.
Wilson Kimber, Marian (University of Iowa)
‘The Feminization of Melodrama: Gender, Genre, and Musical Recitation in
America’
The increase in American musical melodramas between ca. 1880 and 1935
stemmed in part from the popularity of accompanied recitation among women
performers, both on the platform and in the domestic sphere. At least sixty-five
female reciters from the 1890s featured music in their programs. Evidence that
musical recitation took place in private settings and women’s clubs is found in
women’s magazines and in the gendered selections published in recitation
anthologies; in Musical Effects (1911), melodramatic settings are sometimes
associated with particular female performers. As women came to lead the
elocutionary profession, they also became the primary composers of melodrama.
Almost half of approximately five hundred English-language melodramas
documented from the period were composed by women, some forty-five female
composers in all, who came to dominate the genre after World War I. Thus, turnof-the-century melodrama can serve as a case study for the intersection of
gender and genre, demonstrating female composers’ transformation of
nineteenth-century practices in creating works that would specifically appeal to
women.
Instead of setting major Victorian poets’ works, female composers drew
heavily on popular poetry found in parlor anthologies. For example, the works of
Phyllis Fergus treat standardized topics: nature, children, or religious sentiments.
While earlier melodramas featured extended narratives set to accompaniments
with gestures that reveal their theatrical roots, many works by women are closer
to popular song; any storied scenarios typically center on domestic events. The
development of recording technology enabled female reciters such as Frieda
Peycke (whose performances of her compositions survive on 78 rpm recordings)
to adopt a more intimate, feminine speaking style, unlike earlier elocutionists,
trained in men’s platform oratory. Ultimately, women composers “domesticated”
melodrama, creating sentimental works that led to the genre’s eventual neglect;
however this does not negate the important historical place melodramatic
recitation held in women’s culture.