Melodrama (music)
Melodrama (Greek : melos: sound, wise, drama: action) describes a work or a part of it in music in which spoken text, gestures and instrumental music alternate or overlap without being sung, as in opera , apart from possible Accompanying choirs.
Origins
Today, the underlay of spoken texts with music is usually referred to as melodrama. In the 18th century, when modern melodrama emerged, the emphasis was more on a combination of dance or pantomime gestures with music.
In the ancient Greek tragedy , the rhythmic speaking of the actors was possibly accompanied by music. Forerunners of the melodramatic could be the speeches to music in William Shakespeare's plays. A similar tradition existed in the Protestant school dramas, some of which were accompanied by improvised music.
More likely, however, is the origin of ballet music and the pantomimes of the 18th century, as they were heard and seen at the Paris fairs .
The melodrama as an acting experiment
The emergence of modern melodrama since around 1760 is related to a re-evaluation of the arts as overcoming baroque vanitas motifs. The main characteristic of the musical was no longer seen as dying, but rather revitalized (see Vanitas # Modern Change ). Paradoxical overlaps between the newer musical revival and the older “dying” remained common.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Pygmalion (1762, performed 1770) is considered the first independent melodrama. Here the music, still separated from the text, serves as background music for the dramatic pantomime between the spoken sections. The author's imagination is enlivened by the musical illustrations, just as the Pygmalion statue is enlivened. The overture imitates the artist's chisel strokes.
In Georg Anton Benda's melodramas (e.g. Ariadne auf Naxos , 1774), spoken language and movement, similar to a recitative , are accompanied by dramatic music that plays at the same time. Even Johann Wolfgang von Goethe wrote a melodrama Proserpina that of Franz Carl Adelbert Eberwein was set to music.
In the phenomenon of melodrama, media changes of popular material can be observed: the ballad Lenardo and Blandine by Gottfried August Bürger was transformed into a melodrama by Joseph Franz von Götz and set to music by Peter von Winter . The subject was a traditional vanitas motif: Blandine in front of the urn with her lover's ashes. Götz published a series of copperplate engravings with which he illustrated the plot as a picture story . Fashion soon waned, but Benda's melodramas in particular were popular well into the 19th century.
The great public of the Parisian fairground attractions was made the exclusivity of a chamber play in German courtyards and small towns . But this apparent intimacy could not be kept. After the French Revolution , melodrama was absorbed into the under-appreciated, popular theatrical genre of melodrama , which was given on the Boulevard du Temple , and as a result of this commercialization, to a certain extent, lost its experimental appeal. From then on, melodramatic music retained the touch of vulgarity, although its popularity always held a fascination. Many scores of the Parisian melodramas by Pixérécourt , for example, are preserved in the Bibliothèque de l'Opéra there. Their tendency towards discrete background music with a preference for the string tremolo seems to point to the film music.
Melodramatic sections in musical theater
Early 19th century
Theater melodramas as spectacle pieces based on the Paris model, as you could see them on the stage of the Théâtre de l'Ambigu-Comique , were a mixture of ballet, drama and opera (see melodrama (theater) ). They also existed in the German-speaking area, often with a greater emphasis on the musical, but because of their disregard they are hardly known anymore. Her music is particularly interesting where it appears more pantomime and characteristic than dance.
Ignaz von Seyfried ( The Dog of Aubry , 1815: The Orphan and the Murderer , 1817) or Adolf Bernhard Marx ( The Revenge Waiting , 1829) wrote melodrama music for popular pieces on a large scale.
In the 19th century the Theater an der Wien was one of the theaters with the best stage technology and was a suitable location for them. Examples of melodramas premiered there are Franz Schubert's Die Zauberharfe (1820) and Franz von Suppé's Der Tannenhäuser (1852).
It was customary to incorporate melodramatic numbers into operas. The development of melodrama and recitativo accompagnato at the end of the 18th century seems to run parallel. In both cases, what is said is interpreted “ gesturally ” and animated before the inner eye. Already in Mozart's Singspiel fragment Zaide (approx. 1780) two numbers called Melolog appear . Daniel François Esprit Auber's Die Stumme von Portici (1828) was intended as a reaction to popular theatrical melodramas , an opera that contains extensive gestural musical passages to characterize the silent main character, which were understood as social criticism and which are said to have sparked the Belgian Revolution of 1830.
However, two opera melodramas in particular have become famous: One is in the dungeon scene of Beethoven's Fidelio (1806/14), where speaking is used as an enhancement to singing: Leonore is supposed to dig the grave for her own husband - the depressed mood finds no one sung expression. The other is the Wolfsschlucht scene in Weber's Freischütz (1821), where the demonic coldness of Kaspar and Samiel (who has a purely speaking role ) is expressed by not singing .
Since the end of the 19th century
Richard Wagner evidently received essential stimuli for his musical dramas from the melodramas of the Parisian boulevard theaters since the late 1830s . However, Wagner described melodrama in 1852 in his opera and drama as a “genre of the most unpleasant mixedness”.
Regardless of this verdict, there were several composers who succeeded Wagner who experimented with melodrama in operas and theatrical music around 1890. Hans Pfitzner and Engelbert Humperdinck are still known today . Humperdinck used a musical notation for the first time in his work Königskinder , the original version of which was melodramatic drama music in 1897. Here he noted noteheads as crosses. This indicated that these pitches should not be sung but spoken. This notation became famous from 1912 onwards through Arnold Schönberg and his melodrama Pierrot lunaire .
The composers of the Second Viennese School around Schönberg also used this spoken notation in operas . Their aim was to develop a rhythmically fixed chant , the pitches of which should be reproduced approximately as a speech melody. Examples of this can be found in Schönberg's Expectation (1909) and Moses and Aron (1954). There, the title characters are set apart from one another in a characterizing way by chanting and cantilena ; the burning bush is realized by a speaking choir, among other things. Further examples can be found in Alban Berg's operas Wozzeck (1925) and Lulu (1937).
The melodramas by Igor Stravinski Histoire du soldat (1918) and Perséphone (1934) range between ballet pantomime and oratorio . Even Arthur Honegger's Amphion (1929) can be seen in this district.
Melodramas are also often found at the climaxes in operettas or singspiel , mention should be made of the key scene in Franz Lehár's The Merry Widow (1905), as well as in Brecht's and Weill's Threepenny Opera (1928, melodrama between Mackie and Polly). In the musical and the drama (see incidental music ) is the melodrama a common stylistic device.
Concert melodramas
Franz Schubert or Franz Liszt , Robert Schumann and Johannes Brahms also wrote shorter concert melodramas with piano accompaniment. The Bohemian composer Zdeněk Fibich tried to make melodrama an independent musical genre. But it was not until the 20th century that concert melodrama was liberated from its disdain.
Concert melodrama experienced a remarkable boom around 1900. The works of Max von Schillings ( Das Hexenlied ) and Richard Strauss ( Enoch Arden after Alfred Tennyson , Das Schloss am Meere after Ludwig Uhland ) became popular. The most popular concert melodrama after 1900 was Schillings' Das Hexenlied, based on a ballad by Ernst von Wildenbruch , which requires the accompaniment of a large orchestra. Schillings also wrote the melodramas Kassandra , Das Eleusische Fest (after Friedrich Schiller ) and Jung-Olaf (after Wildenbruch); and Franz Schreker's The Loves of Intaphernes (1932-33) is in this context to mention. Most of the melodramas by Strauss and Schillings were written for the famous court theater actors Ernst von Possart and Ludwig Wüllner . All of these works follow a neo-romantic Wagnerian style that was recognized by the establishment of the Wilhelmine bourgeoisie.
In opposition to this, Ferruccio Busoni wrote his anti-war melodrama Arlecchino in 1916 . Arnold Schönberg's Pierrot lunaire (1912) with 21 selected poems from the eponymous cycle of poems by Albert Giraud is considered a key work of modernism and expressionism .
Gerhard von Keussler's An den Tod deserves a mention as one of the most ambitious works of the concert melodrama genre . In this “melodramatic symphony”, which premiered in 1922, based on the composer's own text, several melodrama sections interrelate in many ways with symphonic movements of gigantic proportions.
Film music
In a broader sense, some scenes in the film that are underlaid with gestural film music can be viewed as melodrama. The musical accompaniment in silent films and in popular stage melodrama are closely related: in London theaters, the accompanying pianists of the stage melodramas before the First World War also increasingly played to films.
Richard Strauss put together melodramatic music for the silent film version of his opera Der Rosenkavalier (1926) . The recorded background music in the early sound film was also shaped by composers and theater bandmasters such as Max Steiner from Vienna , who had experience with melodramatic stage music. In this respect, there is a historical connection between stage and film music.
literature
- Ulrich Kühn: Speech-Ton-Kunst: musical speaking and forms of melodrama in drama and music theater (1770-1933). Tübingen: Niemeyer 2001
- Matthias Nöther: Live as a citizen, speak as a demigod. Melodrama, declamation and chanting in the Wilhelmine Empire. Böhlau: Cologne / Weimar 2008
- Jan van der Veen: Le mélodrame musical de Rousseau au romantisme. Ses aspects historiques et stylistiques. The Hague: Nijhoff 1955
- James L. Smith: Melodrama. London: Methuen 1973
- Emilio Sala: L'opera senza canto: il mélo romantico e l'invenzione della colonna sonora. Venice: Marsilio 1995
- Hubert Holzmann: Pygmalion in Munich. Richard Strauss and the concert melodrama around 1900. Erlangen: Mayer 2003. ISBN 3-925978-75-5
- Margareta Saary: melodrama. In: Oesterreichisches Musiklexikon . Online edition, Vienna 2002 ff., ISBN 3-7001-3077-5 ; Print edition: Volume 3, Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, Vienna 2004, ISBN 3-7001-3045-7 .
Individual evidence
- ^ Henri Lagrave: "La pantomime à la foire, au Théâtre-Italien et aux boulevards (1700–1789)", in: Romanistische Zeitung für Literaturgeschichte 79: 1980, pp. 408–430
- ^ Nicole Wild: "La musique dans le mélodrame des théâtres parisiens", in: Peter Bloom (ed.): Music in Paris in the Eighteen-Thirties. Stuyvesant (NY): Pendragon 1987, pp. 589-610
- ^ Emilio Sala: L'opera senza canto: il mélo romantico e l'invenzione della colonna sonora. Venice: Marsilio 1995
- ^ David Mayer: Four Bars of 'Agit'. Incidental Music for Victorian and Edwardian Melodrama. London: Samuel French 1983