Melodramatic Voices: Understanding Music Drama ed. by Sarah Hibberd (review)

With its title, this volume makes a fairly bold claim: that inquiry into the melodramatic contributes not only to a deepening of our knowledge about the unique historical genre of melodrama itself but also to our wider grasp of music drama as a whole. As editor Sarah Hibberd notes in her introduction, scholarly interest in melodrama has been trending for about two decades, and the years since the 1995 republication of Peter Brooks’s seminal The Melodramatic Imagination have witnessed a stream of inquiries into the genre from fields of literary, film, and theatre studies. Despite the importance of music’s role in the creation of melodramatic effects, music itself has rarely received much notice in this vein of scholarship, and attention to melodrama from musicological regions was much scarcer for quite a while, for various reasons. Even when a musical score was available for a historical melodramatic work – and often enough, it simply wasn’t – the formulaic nature of much of the music furnished for these dramas, rife with stock tremolos and diminished sevenths, seemed to provide little fodder for “serious” study. Only recently has there been significant consideration by music scholars of the musical components of melodramas and, notably, melodramatic traces that can be sensed in the sonorous and gestural features of operas as well. Thus, another addition to the literature on melodrama that makes music its explicit focus, as this collection does, is timely, and must be valued, in various disciplines, for its efforts to fill the gap that remains in our understanding of the genre’s sonic dimensions. But Hibberd and her colleagues aim to do more, looking well beyond the realm of melodrama as a genre – albeit an extremely flexible one – and considering it, instead, in Hibberd’s terms, as a broader “aesthetic mode” of music drama (7). As this volume amply demonstrates, the effects of this mode – of structure, of expression – may be heard across a historical and geographical span from the boulevards of late-eighteenth-century France, through the operatic stages of central Europe around the fin-de-siècle, to the film screens of the American twentieth century and beyond. In a landscape where the conception of music drama has been overwhelmingly defined in terms of opera, a fuller consciousness of melodramatic music reshapes our perception of the theatricality of sound, including its potent sensual effects, which have so often been dismissed in favour of a more “intellectual” inquiry into “meaning.” As Hibberd argues, the “visceral power” of melodrama “in the moment” is surely what “gives force to its political, social and moral significance, and music is central to this alchemy” (8).

Despite the book’s title, voice per se is not the primary preoccupation of most of the essays collected here; rather, “voices” should be considered a sometimes literal and sometimes metaphorical designation for the sounding elements – sung, spoken, or instrumental – of drama with music. One of the most significant recognitions to emerge from the collection as a whole is the variability of the function performed by each of these elements within and across generic contexts and the flexibility necessary in approaching an understanding of how the relationships between sounds – vocal and instrumental – might be construed. While, in many instances, the sonic languages of melodrama may be cliché, the configuration of gestural action, spoken or sung text, and affective musical accompaniment is by no means dictated by convention, even within the context of a single dramatic work, let alone across a genre. Some of the more revealing pieces in this volume, then, pay analytical attention to musical content (the inclusion of examples from musical scores is very welcome here) while interrogating the shifting, experimental, and often innovative configurations among orchestral and vocal sounds, text, gesture, and dramatic narrative, all aiming for a richer understanding of the sheer variety of roles that sound performs in the creation of melodramatic effect, sensation, and meaning.

The volume is arranged in three sections, respectively...