(from Gk. melos, drama; Fr. mélodrame, It. melologo; Ger. Melodram).
A kind of drama, or a part of a drama, in which the action is carried forward by the protagonist speaking in the pauses of, and later commonly during, a musical accompaniment. (It is distinct from the Italian melodramma, meaning simply ‘musical drama’, or opera.) The brief orchestral passages that separate the dialogues are clearly related to, and presumably in a sense derived from, those in accompanied operatic recitative (just as the pantomimic movement and gesture of a scene like Beckmesser’s discovery of the song manuscript in Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, Act 3, has its antecedents in the ballet-pantomime). The term ‘melodrama’ is also used in a less specifically musical sense to denote a kind of play, particularly popular in the 19th century (more commonly without a musical accompaniment) in which romantic and frequently sensational happenings that follow certain conventions are carried through until at the end Good triumphs and Evil is frustrated. This article is concerned almost entirely with the first of these definitions.
Although there is good reason for dating the invention of melodrama to J.-J. Rousseau’s Pygmalion, probably written in 1762, J.E. Eberlin used the speaking voice against a musical accompaniment in his Latin drama Sigismund (Salzburg, 1753), and indeed the use of music as an adjunct to dramatic action is probably almost as old as drama itself. It is more fruitful to consider melodrama as a technique that seeks a particular kind of balance between words and music than to look upon it as an independent dramatic genre, since many of the best-known examples – the dungeon scene in Fidelio, the scene at the Wolf’s Glen in Der Freischütz, or the part of the Majordomo in the revised version of Strauss’s Ariadne auf Naxos – are effective by reason of the contrast they provide with the rest of the work.
Problems of nomenclature existed from the beginning. Rousseau subtitled Pygmalion a ‘scène lyrique’; he often used the term ‘mélodrame’, but always as a synonym for opera, like the Italian melodramma. Although Rousseau’s text of Pygmalion probably dates from 1762, it was Easter 1770 before, at Lyons, he asked Coignet to set it to music. The work was given at Lyons in November of that year, the overture and an Andante probably composed by Rousseau himself, the rest by Coignet. The text was published in January 1771 in the Mercure de France and the Nouveau journal helvétique, and at about the same time as a slender separate publication at Geneva and Lyons; other editions and translations were not long in following. The work was probably staged in Paris (at the Opéra) in March 1772, and was frequently given by the Comédiens Français between 30 October 1775 and the early 19th century. Grimm wrote (Correspondances littéraires) of the ‘effet surprenant’ that the work made, and Rousseau (who refused to acknowledge the work in the 1775 production) summed up his achievement in the piece when he wrote (Fragments d’observations sur l’Alceste italien de M. le Chevalier Gluck) that in his conception ‘la phrase parlée est de quelque sort annoncée et préparée par la phrase musicale’. This clause indeed may further be taken as indicating the principal difference between the French and the German melodrama: the former is divided into a number of generally short, independent musical numbers, to be played between the passages of spoken text, whereas the preferred German form tended towards continuity of musical thought, even where the spoken text interrupted, rather than was accompanied by, the flow of the music.
Despite the popularity in France of the Coignet-Rousseau setting, the influence of Pygmalion must be seen as largely theoretical and textual. Asplmayr set Rousseau’s text to music in 1772; the wording of the title-page of the libretto makes it clear that the work was intended for performance at the Vienna court opera (Pygmalion de J.-J. Rousseau, scène lyrique exécutée sur le Théâtre Imperial de Vienna avec la musique du Sieur Aspelmayer); it was performed there in January 1772. The libretto contains timings of the musical numbers, as well as pantomimic directions, indicating that the work would have lasted some nine or ten minutes. The score does not seem to have survived. Another setting of the Rousseau text, by Anton Schweitzer, was given at Weimar in 1772; Goethe wrote admiringly of it in Dichtung und Wahrheit (iii, 2). Rousseau’s text was known in Italy by 1771; it enjoyed considerable success there and also, from 1788, in Spain, where Iriarte’s Guzman el bueno (Cadiz, 1790) began a Spanish vogue for melodrama. The most famous Pygmalion, the setting of Georg Benda (Gotha, 20 September 1779), used an almost literal translation of the French original, with just one sizable cut, and a few minor alterations and misunderstandings.
In spite of the priority of Asplmayr’s and Schweitzer’s Pygmalion settings, the perfecter of the melodrama in Germany was Georg Benda. If chance dictated that he should set J.C. Brandes’s version of Gerstenberg’s Ariadne auf Naxos in place of Schweitzer (who abandoned work on the project in favour of Wieland’s opera libretto Alceste), he succeeded brilliantly in his task. His melodrama scores show remarkable flexibility and sustained musical invention. Ariadne was first given at Gotha (where the Seyler company had moved after the Weimar theatre had burnt down in May 1774) on 27 January 1775 (see illustration), two months after the same company had given Schweitzer’s Pygmalion. Benda’s Ariadne was immediately successful with public and professional musicians alike (it reached Paris in 1781, translated by Dubois and subtitled mélodrame); it was followed by Medea (text by Gotter) on 1 May of the same year, and his Pygmalion four years later. Theone also dates from 1779 (it was later revised as Almansor und Nadine); in it Benda used the singing voice (solo and chorus) as well as the speaking voice. Although he never again achieved quite the mastery or the success of Ariadne, and indeed wrote more operas and Singspiele than melodramas, the genre he had perfected was eagerly taken up by a host of contemporary and later composers, including Neefe, Reichardt, Zumsteeg, and many of the Mannheim musicians. Goethe’s Proserpina (1775), set by Seckendorff and later (1814) by Eberwein, is a well-known literary example. Some such works were called ‘monodramas’ (with one speaking part) or ‘duodramas’ (with two).
The first great composer to take up the melodrama was Mozart, whose enthusiastic comments on the Benda ‘duodramas’ he had heard (Ariadne and Medea) are to be found in his letters to his father from Mannheim of 12 and 24 November and 3 December 1778, and from Kaisheim on 18 December. Nothing survives of the full-length melodrama Semiramis that Mozart was to write in collaboration with Gemmingen (the repeated inclusion of it in the Gotha Theater-Kalender – in 1779 and 1780 as a work in progress, in 1781 and 1782 as a completed work – is almost certainly just one of the many mistakes contained in that publication). Despite his comment of 3 December 1778 that he was at work on it, he may not have progressed very far, once the chance of a specific performance had passed. Mozart did however write two fine and expressive examples of melodrama in the incomplete Singspiel Zaide of 1779–80, and included one in the contemporaneous music to Thamos, König in Ägypten (no.4). The two Zaide examples are among the most striking and extensive numbers in the score; the second leads into an aria.
Most 18th-century melodramas were serious in tone and classical in subject; by the early 19th century the range of subject matter was widening to include biblical and more general dramatic subjects, and comic melodramas began to be popular. In Vienna Kotzebue parodied Benda’s Ariadne, and Wenzel Müller included comic melodramas, as well as more traditional serious examples, in some of his stage scores. Pugnani’s Werther (c1790), predominantly a series of monologues for the eponymous hero, is an interesting example from Italy.
Beethoven’s interest in the melodrama extended beyond the familiar example of the dungeon scene in Fidelio. There are melodramas in the incidental music to Die Ruinen von Athen and König Stephan, and it is the form he chose for Egmont’s farewell to life, the penultimate number of the Egmont incidental music (which also includes pantomimic passages). Weber used melodrama in Der erste Ton of 1808 and in Preciosa as well as in Der Freischütz, and Schubert’s Die Zauberharfe (d644, begun 1820) is an interesting large-scale venture which includes half-a-dozen melodramatic scenes, seven choruses and a romance that exists in two tenor versions and one for orchestra alone. Schubert also used melodrama in Des Teufels Lustschloss and in a sequence of three numbers near the close of Act 2 of Fierrabras; and he also wrote a lied-like melodrama for piano and speaking voice, Abschied von der Erde (d829, 1826). The genre was indeed particularly popular in Vienna, where examples from the works of Starzer, Paradis, Eberl and Winter may be adduced in addition to those already mentioned.
More generally, Berlioz’s Lélio is an ambitious, if diffuse, example; Marschner included a particularly striking example in Act 2 of Hans Heiling (1833) in Gertrude’s spinning-song, which progresses from melodrama, via wordless humming, to the song proper (‘Des Nachts wohl auf der Heide’, no.12). Mendelssohn, Schumann, Liszt, Wagner and Humperdinck all tried their hand. Indeed, there can hardly be a 19th-century opera composer who did not. It had been a feature of much French opéra comique of the Revolution period, used in works by Méhul, Isouard, Boieldieu and others, and notably Cherubini (Les deux journées, 1800). Rossini introduced a striking passage of melodrama in La gazza ladra, and there were other instances in Auber’s La muette de Portici, Massenet’s Manon and Werther, as well as in Cavalleria rusticana, Pagliacci and La bohème. Verdi found it convenient for the letter scenes in Act 1 of Macbeth and Act 2 of La traviata, as did Smetana similarly in Act 2 of The Two Widows.
The genre thrived in the 19th century in what is now the Czech Republic. Fibich was perhaps the most important and ambitious of all composers of melodrama, his Hippodamia of 1889–91 being a trilogy of full-length works; he had earlier written smaller examples for voice and orchestra or piano. For the use of leitmotifs as an aid to dramatic and stylistic cohesion he needed to look back no further than Wagner, though it is interesting to note that the very first important composer of melodramas, Fibich’s compatriot Benda, had used an elementary form of leitmotif in his works. Čelansky, better remembered as the founder of the Czech PO, wrote several melodramas.
There has perhaps been an increase in the use of melodrama in the 20th century. Schoenberg used melodrama in a wide range of styles and works: Gurrelieder (1910–11) employs notated speech, Pierrot lunaire (1912) strictly notated, pitched speech that is nevertheless not to be sung, Die Jakobsleiter choral recitation in Sprechgesang. Die glückliche Hand (1910–13) employs relative pitches and precise rhythms, Moses und Aron (1930–32) has partly spoken choruses, and Moses’ Sprechstimme is notated. There are other forms in Kol nidre (1938), Ode to Napoleon (1942), A Survivor from Warsaw (1947) and Modern Psalm (1950). Walton famously set Edith Sitwell’s Façade for speaker and chamber ensemble, Busoni used unpitched rhythmic speech in Arlecchino, and Berg made various use of melodrama in Wozzeck and covered the entire gamut of styles of vocal delivery in Lulu. Richard Strauss used melodramatic passages in several operas and in Enoch Arden (1897). Composers of the inter-war years who exploited melodrama include Weill in Happy End, Stravinsky in Perséphone, Claudel and Milhaud in Le livre de Christophe Colomb, and Claudel and Honegger in Jeanne d’Arc au bûcher. More recent examples may be found in works by Britten and Henze, among others. A large selection of melodramas was readily available, published for domestic performance mainly with piano accompaniment, but some also with orchestra or chamber ensemble. The desire for experiment is constantly producing fresh ways (or the return to old ways) of combining the spoken voice with music (see also Sprechgesang).
ES (J. Subirá)
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PETER BRANSCOMBE