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This essay was meant to be an introductory paragraph or perhaps a page on the way to an analysis of Douglas Sirk's All That Heaven Allows (1955) and two films widely recognized as being in its orbit, Rainer Werner Fassbinder's Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (1974) and Todd Haynes's Far From Heaven (2002).1 My aim was to read these melodramas in terms of the ways in which sexual identity affected possibilities of agency. In the course of thinking about that question, it occurred to me that it also might be asked about a much earlier example of melodrama. This essay takes up that point; it stands as a prolegomenon to an investigation that would lead to Sirk and the melodramas in his debt. That future path is, at times, indicated.
In the score of Beethoven's only opera, Fidelio (1814), the duet between Leonore and Rocco in the second act is introduced by what the heading for musical number 12 calls a "Melodram."2 This is the appropriate technical term for this brief two-minute stretch of the opera: the two characters speak, their utterances punctuated with musical phrases. Beethoven's opera is formally a Singspiel or opéra comique; everywhere else in the score, we find either speech or concerted numbers. If the orchestra is playing, the singers will be singing. If not, the singer speaks. Music and speech never interact except in this melodrama. This raises some obvious questions: Why does Beethoven introduce melodrama into his opera? Why at this point in his score does he violate the rules of composition about speech and song? In his stunning 1972 essay "Tales of Sound and Fury: Observations on the Family Drama," Thomas Elsaesser has pointed to melodrama of the kind we find in Fidelio as a "system of punctuation" through which the emotional weight of the moment is underscored.3 For Elsaesser, this formal feature lies at the heart of all melodrama, in the work most readily associated with melodrama in the twentieth centurythe films of Douglas Sirk, most notably. What it might be doing in an opera, where, it is easy to presume, the singing voice heightens emotion, is a question that Elsaesser does not ask.
Elsaesser's point is not about opera but does help to remind us...