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xi  INTRODUCTION  Genres, Concepts, and Terms However it may be defined today, “melodramatic theatre” for the first hundred years of its existence simply meant stage action or dialogue accompanied by music. Audiences may recognize “mood” music, but they typically take this aspect of a production for granted. Why is such music necessary and who is responsible for it? What do we know about this technique of persuasion and how it changed over time? My focus here is on the transatlantic enterprise of Anglo-­ American theatre, where for at least two hundred years—and to some extent still today—authors, managers, and actors relied on music’s unique power to draw audiences into the story world of the drama. The history of this technique undoubtedly stretches far back in time. Documents from the late eighteenth century reveal that theatrical managers were beginning to rely more frequently on orchestras to provide an interpretive role in play production. Typically, the more elaborate the theatre , the more abundant the music. Yet aside from a few later examples by famous European composers such as Felix Mendelssohn and Edvard Grieg, known largely through concert suites, what real evidence do we have of the music written for stage productions? The successor to this practice, music in narrative film, has been a subject of intense interest since the 1970s. Like film directors and composers, nineteenth-­ century theatre managers and their orchestra leaders employed a variety of musical styles and techniques. Also like film, these styles varied depending on the dramatic genre. It was practically impossible to see plays such as Frankenstein, Oliver Twist, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Lady Audley’s Secret, The Corsican Brothers, and The Three Musketeers, if not also historical romances by William Shakespeare and Friedrich Schiller, without hearing some type of background music. Yet the musical dimensions of these productions are almost entirely lost to us. The irony is that good dramatic music—like good film music—was most effective when it was unobtrusive; hence few spectators seemed able to recall it. Yet people in those days heard more music in the theatre than anywhere else. The theatre was to audiences then what radio, film, television, YouTube , and similar platforms are to us today. In the nineteenth-­ century theatre music and storytelling formed an in- xii Introduction separable melodramatic bond. We are going in search of this lost art, particularly the music of the “popular drama,” a once ubiquitous theatrical genre that has now been absorbed into other media. This book is a chronological history, beginning when the popular drama first emerged and ending as a fully integrated art form when it was taken over by the cinema and eventually by radio and television. These nineteenth-­ century dramas were “popular” because they were performed everywhere, from the most elegant theatres in Paris and London to the tiniest outposts in rural English and American towns.The stock characters , complicated plots, heightened emotional situations, and spectacular action sequences have been the subject of many close analyses (not to mention parodies). The form, it is commonly explained, originated with the melodramas of René-­ Charles Guilbert de Pixerécourt and spread quickly to other theatres and countries. But many of the structural characteristics of melodrama emerged well before the late eighteenth century and extend back at least to Roman farce, with its archetypal characters. Its plot devices contributed to the scenarios of the commedia dell’arte and merged with influences from Italian commercial opera, English Restoration tragedy, and French pantomime to form a new and hybrid genre in which instrumental music was deemed absolutely essential for success.The traditional assumption that music eventually became a much weaker (and even expendable) third sister to dialogue and spectacle, however, is based not on facts but on music’s historical “invisibility.” Today melodramas are more likely to be read than seen and heard. It is all too easy to ignore the widespread mandate for mood and action music in most nineteenth-­ century theatrical venues. Popular music, like other commercial products, can easily become outdated . Modern re-­ creations of a play like The Lights o’ London could hardly be expected to use the music of Wilson Barrett’s original 1881 production (if available). Dramatic music then as now was calculated to appeal to the emotions of its audiences. As audiences change, so do musical fashions. And yet we have much to learn about how music was used in this melodrama, which includes when and where music appeared, length, style, instrumentation, order and frequency...

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