Melodrama
A modern melodrama is a dramatic work in which the plot, typically
In scholarly and historical musical contexts, melodramas are Victorian dramas in which orchestral music or song was used to accompany the action. The term is now also applied to stage performances without incidental music, novels, films, television, and radio broadcasts. In modern contexts, the term "melodrama" is generally pejorative,[1] as it suggests that the work in question lacks subtlety, character development, or both. By extension, language or behavior which resembles melodrama is often called melodramatic; this use is nearly always pejorative.[citation needed]
Etymology
The term originated from the early 19th-century French word mélodrame. It is derived from
Characteristics
The relationship of melodrama compared to realism is complex. The protagonists of melodramatic works may be ordinary (and hence realistically drawn) people who are caught up in extraordinary events or highly exaggerated and unrealistic characters. With regard to its high emotions and dramatic rhetoric, melodrama represents a "victory over repression".[5] Late Victorian and Edwardian melodrama combined a conscious focus on realism in stage sets and props with "anti-realism" in character and plot. Melodrama in this period strove for "credible accuracy in the depiction of incredible, extraordinary" scenes.[6] Novelist Wilkie Collins is noted for his attention to accuracy in detail (e.g. of legal matters) in his works, no matter how sensational the plot. Melodramas were typically 10,000 to 20,000 words in length.[7]
Melodramas put most of their attention on the victim. A struggle between good and evil choices, such as a man being encouraged to leave his family by an "evil temptress".[8] Other stock characters are the "fallen woman", the single mother, the orphan, and the male who is struggling with the impacts of the modern world.[8] The melodrama examines family and social issues in the context of a private home, with its intended audience being the female spectator; secondarily, the male viewer can enjoy the onscreen tensions in the home being resolved.[8] Melodrama generally looks back at ideal, nostalgic eras, emphasizing "forbidden longings".[8]
Types
Origins
The melodrama approach was revived in the 18th- and 19th-century French romantic drama and the sentimental novels that were popular in both England and France.
In the 18th century, melodrama was a technique of combining spoken recitation with short pieces of accompanying music. Music and spoken dialogue typically alternated in such works, although the music was sometimes also used to accompany pantomime.
The earliest known examples are scenes in J. E. Eberlin's Latin school play Sigismundus (1753). The first full melodrama was
A different musical setting of Rousseau's Pygmalion by Anton Schweitzer was performed in Weimar in 1772, and Goethe wrote of it approvingly in Dichtung und Wahrheit. Pygmalion is a monodrama, written for one actor.
Some 30 other monodramas were produced in Germany in the fourth quarter of the 18th century. When two actors were involved, the term duodrama could be used. Georg Benda was particularly successful with his duodramas Ariadne auf Naxos (1775) and Medea (1775). The sensational success of Benda's melodramas led others to compose similar works, including Mozart who spoke approvingly of Benda's music and later himself used two long melodramatic monologues in his opera Zaide (1780).
Other later and better-known examples of the melodramatic style in operas are the grave-digging scene in Beethoven's Fidelio (1805) and the incantation scene in Weber's Der Freischütz (1821).[10][11]
After the
Further letters patent were eventually granted to one theatre in each of several other English towns and cities. Other theatres presented dramas that were underscored with music and, borrowing the French term, called it melodrama to get around the restriction. The Theatres Act 1843 finally allowed all the theatres to play drama.[13]
19th century: operetta, incidental music, and salon entertainment
In the early 19th century, opera's influence led to musical overtures and incidental music for many plays. In 1820, Franz Schubert wrote a melodrama, Die Zauberharfe ("The Magic Harp"), setting music behind the play written by G. von Hofmann. It was unsuccessful, like all Schubert's theatre ventures, but the melodrama genre was at the time a popular one. In an age of underpaid musicians, many 19th-century plays in London had an orchestra in the pit. In 1826, Felix Mendelssohn wrote his well-known overture to Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, and later supplied the play with incidental music.
In
In a similar manner, Victorians often added "incidental music" under the dialogue to a pre-existing play, although this style of composition was already practiced in the days of
In Paris, the 19th century saw a flourishing of melodrama in the many theatres that were located on the popular Boulevard du Crime, especially in the Gaîté. All this came to an end, however, when most of these theatres were demolished during the rebuilding of Paris by Baron Haussmann in 1862.[18]
By the end of the 19th century, the term melodrama had nearly exclusively narrowed down to a specific genre of salon entertainment: more or less rhythmically spoken words (often poetry) – not sung, sometimes more or less enacted, at least with some
Opera
The great majority of operas are melodramas. The emotional tensions are both communicated and amplified by the appropriate music. The majority of plots involve characters overcoming or succumbing to larger than life events of war, betrayal, monumental love, murder, revenge, filial discord, or similar grandiose occurrences. Most characters are simplistically drawn with clear distinctions between virtuous and evil ones, and character development and subtlety of situations is sacrificed. Events are arranged to fit the character's traits best to demonstrate their emotional effects on the character and others.
The predominance of melodrama in Donizetti's bel canto works, Bellini, and virtually all Verdi and Puccini is clear with examples too numerous to list. The great multitude of heroines needing to deal with and overcome situations of love impossible in the face of grandiose circumstances is amply exemplified by Lucia, Norma, Leonora, Tosca, Turandot, Mimi, Cio-Cio-San, Violetta, Gilda, and many others.
Czech
Within the context of the Czech National Revival, the melodrama took on a specifically nationalist meaning for Czech artists, beginning roughly in the 1870s and continuing through the First Czechoslovak Republic of the interwar period. This new understanding of the melodrama stemmed primarily from such nineteenth-century scholars and critics as Otakar Hostinský, who considered the genre to be a uniquely "Czech" contribution to music history (based on the national origins of Georg Benda, whose melodramas had nevertheless been in German). Such sentiments provoked a large number of Czech composers to produce melodramas based on Czech romantic poetry, such as the Kytice of Karel Jaromír Erben.
The romantic composer Zdeněk Fibich in particular championed the genre as a means of setting Czech declamation correctly: his melodramas Štědrý den (1874) and Vodník (1883) use rhythmic durations to specify the alignment of spoken word and accompaniment. Fibich's main achievement was Hippodamie (1888–1891), a trilogy of full-evening staged melodramas on the texts of Jaroslav Vrchlický with multiple actors and orchestra, composed in an advanced Wagnerian musical style. Josef Suk's main contributions at the turn of the century include melodramas for two-stage plays by Julius Zeyer: Radúz a Mahulena (1898) and Pod Jabloní (1901), both of which had a long performance history.
Following the examples of Fibich and Suk, many other Czech composers set melodramas as stand-alone works based on the poetry of the National Revival, among them
Victorian
The Victorian stage melodrama featured six stock characters: the hero, the villain, the heroine, an aged parent, a sidekick, and a servant of the aged parent engaged in a sensational plot featuring themes of love and murder. Often the good but not very clever hero is duped by a scheming villain, who has eyes on the damsel in distress until fate intervenes at the end to ensure the triumph of good over evil.[20] Two central features were the coup de théàtre, or reversal of fortune, and the claptrap: a back-to-the-wall oration by the hero which forces the audience to applaud.[21]
English melodrama evolved from the tradition of populist drama established during the Middle Ages by
The first English play to be called a melodrama or 'melodrame' was A Tale of Mystery (1802) by
Supplanting the Gothic, the next popular subgenre was the nautical melodrama, pioneered by
The
The villain is often the central character in melodrama, and crime was a favorite theme. This included dramatizations of the murderous careers of
Early silent films, such as
Generic offshoots
- Northrop Frye saw both advertising and propaganda as melodramatic forms which the cultivated cannot take seriously.[26]
- Politics at the time calls on melodrama to articulate a world-view. Thus Richard Overy argues that 1930s Britain saw civilization as melodramatically under threat - "In this great melodrama Hitler's Germany was the villain; democratic civilization the menaced heroine";[27] - while Winston Churchill provided the necessary larger-than-life melodramatic hero to articulate back-to-the-wall resistance during The Blitz.[28]
Modern
Classic melodrama is less common than it used to be on television and in movies in the Western world. However, it is still widely popular in other regions, particularly in Asia and in Hispanic countries. Melodrama is one of the main genres (along with romance, comedy and fantasy) used in Latin American television dramas (telenovelas), particularly in Venezuela, Mexico, Colombia, Argentina and Brazil, and in Asian television dramas, South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, China, Pakistan, Thailand, India, Turkey and (in a fusion of the Hispanic and Asian cultures) the Philippines. Expatriate communities in the diaspora of these countries give viewership a global market.
Film
This section is written like a personal reflection, personal essay, or argumentative essay that states a Wikipedia editor's personal feelings or presents an original argument about a topic. (May 2019) |
Melodrama films are a
A common point of plot tension sees characters feeling trapped by the typical melodramatic settings of the domestic sphere of the home or small town. Filmmakers often add flashbacks to expand the otherwise constant settings of melodramatic films.
Feminism in film melodrama
Feminists have noted four categories of themes in the film melodrama: those with a female patient, a maternal figure, an "impossible love", and the paranoid melodrama.[8]
Most film melodramas from the 1930s and 1940s, at the time known as "weepies" or "tearjerkers", were adaptations of women's fiction, such as romance novels and historical romances.[8] Drawing from a shared history with women's fiction, melodramatic films often concentrate on female perspectives and desires. From the 1930s until the late 1960s, Hays Code restrictions on the inclusion of "licentious" content in films would restrict the portrayal of female desire in the American film melodrama.[8]
Notable melodramatic films
During the 1940s, the British Gainsborough melodramas were successful with audiences.[citation needed]
In the 1950s, films by director Douglas Sirk, such as All That Heaven Allows (1955) and Written on the Wind (1956), are representative of the genre. Many later melodramatic filmmakers cite Sirk and his works as significant influences.
In the 1970s,
Melodramas like the 1990s TV
See also
References
- ^ Brooks, Peter (1995). The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama, and the Mode of Excess. Yale University Press. p. xv.
- ISBN 978-0-679-40110-0.
- ISBN 978-0-19-539288-3.
- ISBN 978-0-618-70173-5.
- ^ Brooks, Peter (1995). The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama, and the Mode of Excess. Yale University Press. p. 41.
- ^ Singer, Ben (2001). Melodrama and Modernity: Early Sensational Cinema and Its Contexts. New York: Columbia University Press. pp. 44–53.
- ISBN 9780691033921.
- ^ a b c d e f g h i j k Hayward, Susan. "Melodrama and Women's Films" in Cinema Studies: The Key Concepts (Third Edition). Routledge, 2006. p.236-242
- ^ Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). . Encyclopædia Britannica (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press.
- OCLC 21452.
- ISBN 1-56159-239-0.
- ISBN 978-0-521-65040-3.
- ^ Fisk, Deborah Payne (2001). "The Restoration Actress", in Owen, Sue, A Companion to Restoration Drama. Oxford: Blackwell.
- ^ The Foresters Archived 2006-09-03 at the Wayback Machine from Gilbert and Sullivan online archive
- ^ "The Foresters - Act I Scene II". Gilbert and Sullivan Archive. Archived from the original on 3 April 2018.
- ^ Gilbert, W. S.; Sullivan, Arthur. "Ruddigore: Dialogue following No. 24". Gilbert and Sullivan Archive.
- ^ Gilbert, W. S.; Sullivan, Arthur. "The Sorcerer: No. 4: Recitative & Minuet". Gilbert and Sullivan Archive.
- ^ The golden age of the Boulevard du Crime Theatre online.com (in French)
- ^ '3 Ballads for Declamation, Opp.106, 122 (Schumann, Robert)', score at IMSLP
- ^ ISBN 9780521846257
- ISBN 9780300212341.
- ISBN 978-0521348379.
- ^ Jean Tulard (1985) Naploleon: The Myth of the Saviour. London, Methuen: 213-14
- ^ J. Rose, The Literary Churchill (Yale 2015) p. 11-13
- ^ Collins, Wilkie, ed. Julian Symons (1974). The Woman in White (Introduction). Penguin.
{{cite book}}
: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link) - ^ N. Frye, Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton 1971) p. 47
- ^ Quoted in J. Rose, The Literary Churchill (Yale 2015) p. 291
- ^ J. Webb, I Heard My Country Calling (2014) p. 68
- ^ Levy, Emanuel (31 May 1999) "Agnes Browne (period drama)" Variety