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Music for the Melodramatic Theatre in Nineteenth-Century London & New York . By Michael V. Pisani . Iowa City : University of Iowa Press , 2014.
Let me be clear from the start that Michael Pisani's Music for the Melodramatic Theatre in Nineteenth-Century London & New York is a major study. It makes a very significant contribution to our knowledge and understanding of nineteenth-century musical theater in Pisani's two chosen centers, whose cultural relationship during the period was significant. Drama and theater historians have investigated melodrama in a wide range of contexts; however, music historians have only more recently begun to reconsider the form. According to Sarah Hibberd's concise explanation in her recent edited collection, Melodramatic Voices: Understanding Music Drama, the 'mélodrame à grand spectacle' emerged in Parisian boulevard theaters after the French Revolution and presented "the moral struggle between good and evil in dramas of suspense and heightened emotion." With its linkage of "physical gesture, mise-en-scène and music," melodrama spread rapidly across Europe and thence to the United States, influencing a wide range of popular theater and, eventually, film.1
In his introduction, Pisani addresses questions of genre and terminology. Melodrama is clearly a theatrical form that resists easy classification, as well as the methods of traditional musicology. Hibberd observes that musicologists have tended to restrict the term "melodrama" to recitation with musical accompaniment, reflecting their historical lack of interest in a theatrical genre whose scores were often inaccessible or unavailable, its composers often unnamed or multiple. Ephemeral melodrama productions had an uncertain claim on conventional work status and therefore fell foul of most of the tenets of canonic musicology. Given these disciplinary barriers, one can sympathize with Pisani's twice-ventured decision that he will, in fact, address what might more usefully be called "popular drama" than "melodrama" (xii, 73). However, the implications of his book's title, Music for the Melodramatic Theatre, and his own investment in "old" musicological ways, dictate his occasionally excessive concern about genre, originality, authorship, and sources--while eloquently revealing his subject's resistance to them.
These contradictions shadow Pisani's preliminary account of "melodrama" and of the kinds of music that were played between or beneath stretches of stage business. His chapters 2 and 3 describe how, in...