Melodramatic Voices: Understanding Music Drama

Melodramatic Voices: Understanding Music Drama PDF Author: Sarah Hibberd
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317097920
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 351

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Book Description
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

Melodramatic Voices: Understanding Music Drama PDF Author: Sarah Hibberd
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317097920
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 351

Get Book

Book Description
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 Melodramatic Moment

The Melodramatic Moment PDF Author: Katherine G Hambridge
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022656309X
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
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

The Cambridge Companion to English Melodrama PDF Author: Carolyn Williams
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 110709593X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 353

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Book Description
A lively and accessible account of the most popular form of nineteenth-century English theatre, and its continuing influence today.

Melodrama

Melodrama PDF Author: Jonathan Goldberg
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822374048
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 224

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Book Description
Offering a new queer theorization of melodrama, Jonathan Goldberg explores the ways melodramatic film and literature provide an aesthetics of impossibility. Focused on the notion of what Douglas Sirk termed the "impossible situation" in melodrama, such as impasses in sexual relations that are not simply reflections of social taboo and prohibitions, Goldberg pursues films by Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Todd Haynes that respond to Sirk's prompt. His analysis hones in on melodrama's original definition--a form combining music and drama--as he explores the use of melodrama in Beethoven's opera Fidelio, films by Alfred Hitchcock, and fiction by Willa Cather and Patricia Highsmith, including her Ripley novels. Goldberg illuminates how music and sound provide queer ways to promote identifications that exceed the bounds of the identity categories meant to regulate social life. The interaction of musical, dramatic, and visual elements gives melodrama its indeterminacy, making it resistant to normative forms of value and a powerful tool for creating new potentials.

The Elocutionists

The Elocutionists PDF Author: Marian Wilson Kimber
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 025209915X
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 352

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Book Description
Emerging in the 1850s, elocutionists recited poetry or drama with music to create a new type of performance. The genre--dominated by women--achieved remarkable popularity. Yet the elocutionists and their art fell into total obscurity during the twentieth century. Marian Wilson Kimber restores elocution with music to its rightful place in performance history. Gazing through the lenses of gender and genre, Wilson Kimber argues that these female artists transgressed the previous boundaries between private and public domains. Their performances advocated for female agency while also contributing to a new social construction of gender. Elocutionists, proud purveyors of wholesome entertainment, pointedly contrasted their "acceptable" feminine attributes against those of morally suspect actresses. As Wilson Kimber shows, their influence far outlived their heyday. Women, the primary composers of melodramatic compositions, did nothing less than create a tradition that helped shape the history of American music.

Liszt and the Symphonic Poem

Liszt and the Symphonic Poem PDF Author: Joanne Cormac
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107181410
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 381

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Book Description
A fresh evaluation of Liszt's symphonic poems, based on contextual, philosophical and musical evidence.

Werner's Voice Magazine

Werner's Voice Magazine PDF Author: Edgar S. Werner
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Elocution
Languages : en
Pages : 1364

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Book Description


What do you understand by the term melodrama? - Melodramatic components of Jane Eyre

What do you understand by the term melodrama? - Melodramatic components of Jane Eyre PDF Author: Reni Ernst
Publisher: GRIN Verlag
ISBN: 3638883930
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 11

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Book Description
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:

Music for the Melodramatic Theatre in Nineteenth-Century London and New York

Music for the Melodramatic Theatre in Nineteenth-Century London and New York PDF Author: Michael V. Pisani
Publisher: University of Iowa Press
ISBN: 1609382307
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 415

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Book Description
"Featuring dozens of musical examples and images of the old theatres, Music for the Melodramatic Theatre charts the progress of music in the theatre form its earliest use in the eighteenth century to the elaborate stage productions of the very early twentieth century"--Back cover.

Playing the Race Card

Playing the Race Card PDF Author: Linda Williams
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691201331
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 419

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Book Description
The black man suffering at the hands of whites, the white woman sexually threatened by the black man. Both images have long been burned into the American conscience through popular entertainment, and today they exert a powerful and disturbing influence on Americans' understanding of race. So argues Linda Williams in this boldly inquisitive book, where she probes the bitterly divisive racial sentiments aroused by such recent events as O. J. Simpson's criminal trial. Williams, the author of Hard Core, explores how these images took root, beginning with melodramatic theater, where suffering characters acquire virtue through victimization. The racial sympathies and hostilities that surfaced during the trial of the police in the beating of Rodney King and in the O. J. Simpson murder trial are grounded in the melodramatic forms of Uncle Tom's Cabin and The Birth of a Nation. Williams finds that Stowe's beaten black man and Griffith's endangered white woman appear repeatedly throughout popular entertainment, promoting interracial understanding at one moment, interracial hate at another. The black and white racial melodrama has galvanized emotions and fueled the importance of new media forms, such as serious, "integrated" musicals of stage and film, including The Jazz Singer and Show Boat. It also helped create a major event out of the movie Gone With the Wind, while enabling television to assume new moral purpose with the broadcast of Roots. Williams demonstrates how such developments converged to make the televised race trial a form of national entertainment. When prosecutor Christopher Darden accused Simpson's defense team of "playing the race card," which ultimately trumped his own team's gender card, he feared that the jury's sympathy for a targeted black man would be at the expense of the abused white wife. The jury's verdict, Williams concludes, was determined not so much by facts as by the cultural forces of racial melodrama long in the making. Revealing melodrama to be a key element in American culture, Williams argues that the race images it has promoted are deeply ingrained in our minds and that there can be no honest discussion about race until Americans recognize this predicament.