Mélodrames by René-Charles Guilbert de Pixerécourt (review)

Pixerécourt is recognized as the inventor and most successful exponent of popular melodrama. The genre emerged in the boulevard theatres of Paris after the French Revolution, presenting audiences with dramas of suspense and heightened emotion conveyed through speech, gesture, music, and stage effects. Since the publication of Peter Brooks’s landmark study The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama, and the Mode of Excess (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976; 2nd edn 1995), the genre and its aesthetic have been the topic of wide-ranging research in literary, theatre, and film studies, and in musicology. Although these dramas are little known today, their influence has been tracked through more familiar plays, novels, operas, and films. The publication of Pixerécourt’s texts in a modern critical edition will therefore be welcomed by a range of scholars, as many of the texts were not published at the time, and are accessible only in manuscript or in later editions. Volume II contains seven melodramas, written between 1801 and 1803: Le Pèlerin blanc, L’Homme à trois visages, La Femme à deux maris, Raymond de Toulouse, ou, Le retour de la Terre-Sainte, Pizarre, ou, La conquête du Pérou, Les Mines de Pologne, and Tékéli, ou, Le siège de Montgatz. Each is prefaced by excellent, detailed mini-essays that sketch out the context and identify the available sources; the volume also includes a bibliography, a chronology, and indexes of names, works, characters, and places. The play texts (as close to the first performance version as possible) are clearly set out, with minimal footnotes, and a discreet endnote system providing all the variants. Spellings have been modernized and errors corrected. A welcome innovation in this edition is the interspersing of the text with the music from the first performance — although the only available scores in this volume are for La Femme à deux maris. Music was essential to melodrama’s aesthetic, creating atmosphere, bringing characters on stage, punctuating dialogue, and accompanying stage action and dance. However, it is not always clear from the sources precisely where the music comes — the available scores (manuscript orchestral parts, featuring errors and many cuts and corrections) and texts do not always agree — and informed guesses are required by the editor. I’m not convinced by all the decisions here, and the provision of a full score, rather than a piano reduction, while appropriate for a critical edition, makes for cumbersome reading. This highlights the greater challenge for the modern reader of melodrama: to imagine the interaction of speech, gesture, music, and effects. The inclusion of more images (of sets as well as costumes, where available) would have been helpful, but a companion website, with colour images and the facility to play musical clips, would give one a better grasp of how a scene from one of these mélodrames à grand spectacle might have come together in performance, and indeed allow one to experiment with the placing of the music. Nevertheless, the texts in this excellent critical edition together reveal the variety and subtlety of Pixerécourt’s art, too often dismissed as formulaic, which helps to explain their popularity at the time, and their frequent adaptation and export.