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309  CONCLUSION  The Legacy of Melos ​ Melodramatic theatre, as this book demonstrates, emerged out of pantomime and the intersection of legitimate theatrical traditions in the last two decades of the eighteenth century. Staging and music were bound tightly together in this new form, and the conventions established in London’s minor theatres infused the Anglo-­ American popular drama as it branched outward (and upward) into domestic, crime, sensational, historical, romance , national, western, and other subgenres. By the first decade of the twentieth century the popular drama had attained unprecedented levels of prestige, glamour, and commercial success. The basic criteria identified in chapter 1 were still distinctly present in Tree’s Musketeers and Belasco’s Darling of the Gods: (1) some connection to a “true story” or historical characters, (2) a folk hero or outlaw as protagonist, with a formidable rival (= villain), (3) a clear moral message and happy ending, (4) considerable use of special effects, and (5) music to chart the emotional and moral terrain and to underscore the villain’s errors. In the 1920s a new generation of modern playwrights arrived to challenge nineteenth-­ century conventions of the popular drama. But the three-­ act melodramatic form proved incredibly resilient. It thrived in the new popular media, especially in the narrative platforms of film, radio, and television. At the dawn of the twentieth century the concept of “melodramatic music” varied widely. In most provincial stock theatres the musical language seemed not to have evolved a great deal since the old days of Buckstone ’s Jack Sheppard and Davenport’s Oliver Twist.1 But a major transformation had been evident in “high-­ class” Broadway and West End theatres since the 1870s, especially in terms of length of cues, musical styles, instrumental timbres, and manner of application. For George Alexander’s production of Paolo and Francesca at the St. James’s in London (1902), leader Percy Pitt followed the Irving model. He provided musical themes for each of the principal characters as well as four motives that served to reinforce the main “dramatic themes” throughout the play. Others followed the model established by T. W. Robertson. In Eugene Walter’s The Easiest Way (Stuyvesant Theatre, 1909), an onstage organ grinder cranked out an insipid rag- 310 conclusion time tune in the last scene, with the mechanical rendition objectifying the heroine’s collapse into the seedy world of New York’s Tenderloin. Many actors still believed that music—whether from the orchestra or onstage —helped them to hold an audience’s attention. Playwrights and directors still used music to highlight the structure of the play, clarify situations, and emotionalize characters and conflicts. Most audiences still expected moral orientation from the music. Critics claimed that Charles Frohman’s production of Notre Dame (Daly’s Theatre, 1901) failed to overcome Paul Potter’s weak dialogue. But the final sequence of Esmeralda about to be burned at the stake and her dramatic rescue by Gringoire did not disappoint the audience. Frank Howson’s orchestra accompanied the action with nearly continuous music, resembling the musical pantomime for the rescue of Dorothée at the Ambigu-­Comique in 1780. Of course some critics continued to complain about the overuse (or misuse) of music, as they had for decades. Arthur Symons, for example, objected to the music in Alexander’s Paolo and Francesca. This same literary critic, upon hearing actor Ernst von Possart narrate Enoch Arden with Richard Strauss’s powerfully atmospheric accompaniment , considered this latest development in the fusion of dialogue and music “a step further along a downward path.”2 But as late as 1910 the drama critic Clayton Hamily wrote in his Theory of the Theatre that “a running accompaniment of music, half-­ heard, half-­ guessed, that moves to the mood of the play, now swelling to a climax, now softening to a hush, may do much toward keeping the audience in tune with the emotional significance of the action.”3 This opinion was certainly shared by Percy Cross Standing, who wrote a lengthy article in 1906 on all the best “composer-­ conductors” in the London theatres.4 And by the 1920s and 1930s this idea came to dominate the aesthetics of major Hollywood film producers, who insisted on musical accompaniment for exactly these reasons. Until about 1914 the popular drama on the stage was in a continual state of expansion, alongside vaudeville, the musical review, and operetta. Any discussion that would do justice to this medium from the 1890s to 1914 goes far beyond my...

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