Foreword / James Chandler -- The melodramatic moment, 1790-1820 / Katherine Hambridge, Jonathan Hicks -- Forms and themes of early melodrama / Ellen Lockhart -- Continental trouble: the nationality of melodrama and the national stage in early nineteenth-century Britain / Diego Saglia -- Between the sacred and the profane: French Biblical melodrama in Vienna / Barbara Babic -- Scenography, "spéculomanie" and soundscape: Pixerécourt's La Citerne / Sarah Hibberd -- Gesture, composition and performance in 18th-century German melodrama: Goez's 160 "passionate" illustrations to Winters's Lenardo und Blandine / Thomas Betzwieser -- Music and subterranean space in La Citerne / Jens Hesselager -- The first English melodrama: Thomas Holcroft's translation of Pixerécourt / George Taylor -- Benevolent machinery: techniques of sympathy in early German melodrama / Matthew Head -- Vienna, 18 October 1814: urban space and public memory in the Napoleonic "occasional melodrama" / Nicholas Mathew -- Afterword / Jacqueline Waeber.
Summary:
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.
This resource is supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act as administered by State Library of Iowa.