Melodramatic Voices: Understanding Music Drama

Sarah Hibberd, Sarah Hibberd

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317097921
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medios de comunicación y artes escénicas
• Subtopic: Música de ópera

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.

PART I
Melodrama as Genre

Chapter 1
Music in Pixérécourt’s Early Melodramas

Katherine Astbury

René-Charles Guilbert de Pixérécourt (1773–1844) is generally recognized as both the inventor of popular boulevard melodrama and its most successful exponent. Music is an integral part of his plays, yet its role has only briefly been considered – and mainly in his works of the 1810s, 20 and 30s. Such studies nevertheless point to the potential riches of a systematic study of the music of melodrama in France in the early nineteenth century.¹ This chapter offers a starting point for a broader study by reflecting on the earliest of Pixérécourt’s melodramas, and their relationship with existing musical theatre traditions. It will focus on the use of music in two works and consider the degree to which the playwright and the theatrical press of the period explicitly recognized music as an essential element in their success.

Pixérécourt started writing for the theatre during the French Revolution, and the play now recognized as the first melodrama, Victor, ou L’Enfant de la forêt (1798), was his first real dramatic success. During the next 30 years or so he would write more than 120 plays, including 94 melodramas, with audience figures totalling 30,000 over the course of his career.² The interrelated political and literary contexts from which Pixérécourt’s melodramas emerged are important for our understanding of the characteristics and the development of the genre – not least its emotional charge, which music helped to articulate. The second half of the 1790s was marked by a counter-Revolutionary backlash following the conclusion of the radical phase of the Revolution, the Terror, with Robespierre’s execution in July 1794. In 1796, a strong executive known as the Directory was installed to maintain order, but it only succeeded in keeping control of the country by systematically rigging votes in the annual elections, and in the end, in 1799, two members of the Directory asked Napoleon to instigate a coup d’état and form a consulate. Napoleon subsequently took control and declared himself emperor in 1804.

The plots of many melodramas were drawn from the successful novels of the day. The genre in vogue in 1797–98 was the Gothic novel – English writers like Ann Radcliffe were hugely successful in France, but French writers such as Ducray-Duminil, who wrote the novel from which Victor was adapted, also found fame.³ While characteristics of the Gothic abounded in French literature and theatre – castles, convents, ruins, underground passages, dastardly villains, forests, and a general mixture of fear, excitement and suspense – the French tended to take the mode a little less seriously than their English counterparts, employing a more tongue-in-cheek treatment. Matthew Lewis’s novel The Monk, for instance, was turned into a comédie and became a box office hit.⁴ And a critic for the Esprit des journaux as early as 1792 mocked the vogue for grim locations ‘prisons, prisons and yet more prisons’.⁵

Given what people had lived through, it was widely recognized that highly dramatic works were required in order to have an effect on readers and theatre audiences. This is evident from prefaces and newspaper reviews of the period, as exemplified by the Marquis de Sade’s assessment of the situation:

To those acquainted with all the evil that the wicked can bring down on the heads of the good, novels became as difficult to write as they were tedious to read. There was hardly a soul alive who did not experience more adversity in four or five years than the most famous novelist in all literature could have invented in a hundred.⁶

This impression was confirmed retrospectively by Charles Nodier, who wrote the critical introduction to the collected works of Pixérécourt in the early 1840s: ‘For these solemn spectators, who could still smell gunpowder and blood, emotions were required akin to those that the return to order had weaned them off’.⁷ A more modern critical approach has been to understand melodrama as ‘re-enacting the trauma’ of the Revolution.⁸

Victor was in fact labelled a ‘drame en prose et à grand spectacle’ [prose drama with grand spectacle] in its earliest editions, though it was first conceived as an opéra comique, and the text bears a number of hallmarks of this original form. We have Pixérécourt’s own account of the genesis of Victor from 1831: he describes the play as ‘the first-born of modern melodrama’, and explains how he had originally written it as an opéra comique (a genre with spoken dialogue rather than recitative linking its arias and other sung numbers) for the Théâtre Favart, with a score by Solié, only for the company of actors to overrule the theatre’s management and insist on rehearsing another play on the same topic.⁹ In a fit of pique, Pixérécourt took the play to the Ambigu-Comique, ‘where it was performed, cutting out only the songs’.¹⁰ He goes on to confirm and reaffirm this sense of what he understood the new genre to be: ‘melodrama is nothing other than a drame lyrique in which the music is produced by the orchestra rather than being sung’.¹¹ Some modern critics have suggested that, despite the etymological roots of the term, melodrama was used as a label as early as 1800 for plays without music of a certain tone, atmosphere and construction.¹² But it is clear that to early nineteenth-century critics, music was central to their concept of the genre. A definition from 1810 supports Pixérécourt’s view: ‘melodrama … is rooted in the lyrical, as the characters talk and act only to the sound of musical instruments’.¹³

It seems that composers found his texts easy to produce music for – Meyerbeer and Méhul both comment on the fact that his plays are ‘all marvellously cut for music’ – and this testifies to the genre’s essential musico-dramatic hybridity.¹⁴ However, as Barry Daniels has shown, until recently modern critics have tended to refer to music only in passing when examining French melodrama¹⁵ – even if some have recognized that Pixérécourt’s dramas were ‘a theatre made for performance much more than for reading’.¹⁶ One of the reasons for this is that, until recently, critics of French melodrama have almost exclusively been literary specialists focusing on the texts. Where reference is made to the music, most of the comments are in fact just a reworking of Paul Ginisty’s assessment from 1910.¹⁷ In his monograph on French melodrama, Ginisty devoted just four pages out of 224 to music. He concluded that music was used primarily to mark entrances and exits, with particular instruments linked to certain character types (a flute for the unhappy heroine, for instance), and to underline climactic moments of drama and emotion. Despite the brevity of this passage, it is in fact one of the most detailed analyses we have of the use of music in French melodrama by a literary specialist. Subsequent critics have done little to further our understanding of the use of music in melodrama. Eise Carel van Bellen summarizes Ginisty’s conclusions in a single sentence in her thesis,¹⁸ Julia Przyboś does at least acknowledge her source when drawing on him in her work, and even adds a page on songs, but concludes that the music was utilitarian and ‘probably unoriginal’ – the ‘probably’ giving away the fact that she was relying on the texts of the plays rather than the scores.¹⁹ Even French musicologists have tended to dismiss melodrama – Jean Mongrédien’s study of music from the Enlightenment to Romanticism makes no mention of melodrama or of boulevard theatres, and confines its coverage of music drama to the more respectable genre of opera.²⁰ Peter Brooks, in his seminal work The Melodramatic Imagination (1976) – the 1995 edition of which stimulated the new wave of interest in the genre and its aesthetic influence across the disciplines of literary, theatre and film studies and musicology – barely acknowledges the role of music in his survey of the genre in early nineteenth-century France.²¹ Nevertheless – partly in response to Brooks’s neglect – Nicole Wild, Emilio Sala, and Sarah Hibberd and Nanette Nielsen have provided us with a more nuanced understanding of 1820s French melodrama by revealing music’s important narrative function in addition to its more obvious role enhancing dramatic effect.²² In this article I shall take their reflections on later melodramas and apply them to the earliest Pixérécourt plays to see if it is possible to trace an evolution in the musical contribution to the genre during the first decade of the century, when the genre was still in its infancy.

While early nineteenth-century definitions of melodrama written by practitioners such as Pixérécourt reinforce the centrality of music, theatre critics of the time are often silent on the matter when reviewing performances. They almost always include comments about the score and singers when discussing operas (though, as literary men, they rarely offer detailed insights), but when reviewing Pixérécourt’s melodramas, although they often name the composer, they rarely acknowledge the music. One of the reasons for this may be that it was often provided by the ‘chef d’orchestre’ [leader of the orchestra] of the theatre where the play was to be performed rather than by a recognized composer. In fact, it has been claimed that despite numerous offers from established and well-regarded composers, Pixérécourt was often too impatient to wait the length of time it would take a ‘proper’ composer to come up with a score,²³ which suggests that there is an unresolved tension at the heart of melodrama between music as an integral part of the performance, and the need to put on plays quickly in order to capitalize on the vogue for ‘drames à grand spectacle’ where music was just one of many elements contributing to the overall effect.

Not all critics remained silent about music, though. The Journal d’indications praises Gérardin-Lacour’s score for La Femme à deux maris, performed in September 1802, his first setting of a play specifically labelled a ‘mélo-drame’ – and the earliest of Pixérécourt’s melodramas with an extant score. The critic Babié comments: ‘a number of his musical items gave real pleasure, and they are well adapted to the situations’.²⁴ Two years later, another of Gérardin-Lacour’s scores received similar approval in the same journal and from the same critic, this time for the melodrama Les Maures d’Espagne: ‘M. Gérardin-Lacour’s music has been crafted agreeably and offers simple and melodious tunes’.²⁵ Babié suggests that, if he continues...