Melodramatic Voices: Understanding Music Drama
Title | Melodramatic Voices: Understanding Music Drama PDF eBook |
Author | Sarah Hibberd |
Publisher | Routledge |
Pages | 351 |
Release | 2016-04-22 |
Genre | Music |
ISBN | 1317097920 |
The genre of mélodrame à 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.
Melodramatic Voices: Understanding Music Drama
Title | Melodramatic Voices: Understanding Music Drama PDF eBook |
Author | Sarah Hibberd |
Publisher | Routledge |
Pages | 314 |
Release | 2016-04-22 |
Genre | Music |
ISBN | 1317097939 |
The genre of mélodrame à 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.
The Cambridge Companion to English Melodrama
Title | The Cambridge Companion to English Melodrama PDF eBook |
Author | Carolyn Williams |
Publisher | Cambridge University Press |
Pages | 353 |
Release | 2018-10-04 |
Genre | Drama |
ISBN | 110709593X |
A lively and accessible account of the most popular form of nineteenth-century English theatre, and its continuing influence today.
The Melodramatic Moment
Title | The Melodramatic Moment PDF eBook |
Author | Katherine Hambridge |
Publisher | University of Chicago Press |
Pages | 295 |
Release | 2018-07-16 |
Genre | Music |
ISBN | 022656309X |
We seem to see melodrama everywhere we look—from the soliloquies of devastation in a Dickens novel to the abject monstrosity of Frankenstein’s creation, and from Louise Brooks’s exaggerated acting in Pandora’s Box to the vicissitudes endlessly reshaping the life of a brooding Don Draper. This anthology proposes to address the sometimes bewilderingly broad understandings of melodrama by insisting on the historical specificity of its genesis on the stage in late-eighteenth-century Europe. Melodrama emerged during this time in the metropolitan centers of London, Paris, Vienna, and Berlin through stage adaptations of classical subjects and gothic novels, and they became famous for their use of passionate expression and spectacular scenery. Yet, as contributors to this volume emphasize, early melodramas also placed sound at center stage, through their distinctive—and often disconcerting—alternations between speech and music. This book draws out the melo of melodrama, showing the crucial dimensions of sound and music for a genre that permeates our dramatic, literary, and cinematic sensibilities today. A richly interdisciplinary anthology, The Melodramatic Moment will open up new dialogues between musicology and literary and theater studies.
The Cambridge Companion to English Melodrama
Title | The Cambridge Companion to English Melodrama PDF eBook |
Author | Carolyn Williams |
Publisher | Cambridge University Press |
Pages | 353 |
Release | 2018-10-04 |
Genre | Literary Criticism |
ISBN | 1108606113 |
This newly commissioned series of essays by leading scholars is the first volume to offer both an overview of the field and also current emerging critical views on the history, form, and influence of English melodrama. Authoritative voices provide an introduction to melodrama's early formal features such as tableaux and music, and trace the development of the genre in the nineteenth century through the texts and performances of its various sub-genres, the theatres within which the plays were performed, and the audiences who watched them. The historical contexts of melodrama are considered through essays on topics including contemporary politics, class, gender, race, and empire. And the extensive influences of melodrama are demonstrated through a wide-ranging assessment of its ongoing and sometimes unexpected expressions - in psychoanalysis, in other art forms (the novel, film, television, musical theatre), and in popular culture generally - from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century.
Werner's Voice Magazine
Title | Werner's Voice Magazine PDF eBook |
Author | Edgar S. Werner |
Publisher | |
Pages | 1366 |
Release | 1896 |
Genre | Elocution |
ISBN |
What do you understand by the term melodrama? - Melodramatic components of Jane Eyre
Title | What do you understand by the term melodrama? - Melodramatic components of Jane Eyre PDF eBook |
Author | Reni Ernst |
Publisher | GRIN Verlag |
Pages | 11 |
Release | 2008-01-03 |
Genre | Literary Criticism |
ISBN | 3638883930 |
Seminar paper from the year 2006 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, grade: 1,0, University College Dublin (Faculty of Arts; School of English and Drama), language: English, abstract: In the following essay I will examine the term melodrama and its features. Accompanying I will give an account of the melodramatic components of the 19th century novel Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë. Both, melodrama and Jane Eyre, had their biggest impetus in the 19th century, thus have specific elements in common. Although Jane Eyre is not a drama to be played on stage it still concludes several melodramatic attributes, which will be specified after analyzing the term melodrama. The term melo originates from the Greek word melos, meaning music, which together with the annex drama simply refers to a stage play accompanied with music. Jean Jacques Rousseau is said to have firstly used a method of linking words with music in Pygmalion of 1770. In early 19th century use, melodrama referred to a stage play with interspersing songs and actors supported by music. By the end of the century the term had almost exclusively narrowed down to a dramatic piece marked by sensations, appeals to the emotions and a happy ending. Nevertheless music remained and still remains a crucial element to emphasize and intensify characters and scenes presented on stage and nowadays particularly in films. This musical element can also be found in the novels primarily of the 19th century expressed in a specific literary style, Brooks describes as follows: