Melodramatic Voices: Understanding Music Drama

Sarah Hibberd is Associate Professor in the Department of Music at the University of Nottingham. Her research interests focus primarily on nineteenth-century French opera, and other forms of music theatre including melodrama, pantomime and ballet, and she has published widely on these topics, including French Grand Opera and the Historical Imagination (2009). Current projects include an examination of the cataclysmic denouements of works produced in Paris 1789-1859, and the exchanges and tensions between art, theatre and opera in nineteenth-century France.

• Introduction; I: Melodrama as Genre; 1: Music in Pixérécourt's Early Melodramas; 2: Operatic or Theatrical? Orchestral Framings of the Voice in the Melodrama Sept heures (1829); 3: Reconstructing Greek Drama: Saint-Saëns and the Melodramatic Ideal; 4: In a Woman's Voice: Musical Recitation and the Feminization of American Melodrama 1; II: Melodrama on the Operatic Stage; 5: ‘Si L'Orchestre seul chantait': Melodramatic Voices in Chelard’s Macbeth (1827 ); 6: Melodramatic Spectacle on the English Operatic Stage; 7: Janá?ek and Melodrama; 8: Dismembering ‘Expectations': The Modernization of Monodrama in Fin-de-siècle Theatrical Arts; 9: Opera for the People: Melodrama in Hugo Herrmann's Vasantasena (1930) 1; III: Melodramatic Transformations; 10: Berlioz's ‘Roméo au tombeau': Melodrama of the Mind; 11: Be it [N]ever so Humble? The Narrating Voice in the Underscore to The Wizard of Oz (MGM, 1939); 12: The Voice-Over as ‘Melodramatic Voice'; 13: Dismembering the Musical Voice: Mahler, Melodrama and Dracula from Stage to Screen 1

’This wide-ranging and exciting collection of essays is exactly the kind of interdisciplinary work that we have long hoped would emerge from the new histories of performing arts. Its contributors are at home in musicology and media history, in theatre and in performance studies, and the result is a new conceptualization of a long-despised genre, which is at last beginning to be understood.’ Jacky Bratton, Royal Holloway, University of London, UK 'This is an important and useful book... We venture into the territory of musical melodrama at some peril which is precisely why we should do so, if with as much caution as enthusiasm of the kind that must surely be aroused by this collection of essays.' Music and Letters