The Melodramatic Moment: Music and Theatrical Culture, 1790–1820 9780226563091

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The Melodramatic Moment

The Melodramatic Moment Mu sic and The atr i ca l Cultur e , 179 0 – 1820 Edited by Katherine Hambridge and Jonathan Hicks

The University of Chicago Press

Chicago and London

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 2018 by The University of Chicago All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th St., Chicago, IL 60637. Published 2018 Printed in the United States of America 27 26 25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18

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ISBN-13: 978-0-226-54365-9 (cloth) ISBN-13: 978-0-226-56309-1 (e-book) DOI: https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226563091.001 .0001 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Hambridge, Katherine, editor. | Hicks, Jonathan, 1984– editor. Title: The melodramatic moment : music and theatrical culture, 1790–1820 / edited by Katherine Hambridge and Jonathan Hicks. Description: Chicago ; London : The University of Chicago Press, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Non-Latin script record Identifiers: LCCN 2017038273 | ISBN 9780226543659 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780226563091 (e-book) Subjects: LCSH: Melodrama— History and criticism. | Music— 19th century— History and criticism. | Music— 18th century— History and criticism. Classification: LCC ML2050 .M43 2018 | DDC 781.5/52— dc23 LC record available at https:// lccn.loc.gov/2017038273 ♾ This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

Contents

Historical Newspapers and Journals Cited * vii Foreword * ix James Chandler

Ch a p te r 1

The Melodramatic Moment * 1

Katherine Hambridge and Jonathan Hicks Ch a p te r 2

Forms and Themes of Early Melodrama * 25 Ellen Lockhart Ch a p te r 3

Continental Trouble: The Nationality of Melodrama and the National Stage in Early Nineteenth-Century Britain * 43 Diego Saglia

Ch a p te r 4

Between the Sacred and the Profane: French Biblical Melodrama in Vienna c. 1800 * 59 Barbara Babić Ch a p te r 5

Scenography, Spéculomanie, and Spectacle: Pixerécourt’s La citerne (1809) * 79 Sarah Hibberd

Ch a p te r 6

Compositional Gestures: Music and Movement in Lenardo und Blandine (1779) * 95 Thomas Betzwieser Ch a p te r 7

Music and Subterranean Space in La citerne (1809) * 117 Jens Hesselager Ch a p te r 8

The First English Melodrama: Thomas Holcroft’s Translation of Pixerécourt * 137 George Taylor Ch a p te r 9

Benevolent Machinery: Techniques of Sympathy in Early German Melodrama * 151 Matthew Head

Ch a p te r 10

Vienna, 18 October 1814: Urban Space and Public Memory in the Napoleonic “Occasional Melodrama” * 171 Nicholas Mathew

Afterword: Looking Back at Rousseau’s Pygmalion * 191 Jacqueline Waeber Acknowledgments * 199 Notes * 201 Bibliography * 247 Contributors * 265 Index * 269

Historical Newspapers and Journals Cited English The Anti-Jacobin Review and Magazine Le Beau Monde The Drama The Edinburgh Magazine, or Literary Miscellany The Lady’s Monthly Museum The Mirror The Monthly Magazine The Monthly Mirror The Monthly Register The Monthly Visitor The New Monthly Magazine The New Universal Magazine The Poetical Register The Repository of Arts, Literature, Fashion, Politics The Satirist, or Monthly Meteor The Theatrical Inquisitor The Theatrical Observer

French Courrier des spectacles Gazette de France Le globe: Recueil philosophique et littéraire Journal de l’empire

Journal des dames et des modes Magasin encyclopédique, ou Journal de sciences, des lettres et des arts Le ménéstrel Revue et gazette musicale de Paris

German Allgemeine deutsche Bibliothek Allgemeine deutsche Theaterzeitung Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung Allgemeine Theaterzeitung und Originalblatt für Kunst, Literatur, Mode und geselliges Leben Baierische Beyträge zur schönen und nützlichen Litteratur Berliner allgemeine musikalische Zeitung Haude- und Spenersche Zeitung Hesperus: Encyclopädische Zeitschrift für gebildete Leser Intelligenz Blatt Jahrbücher der preußischen Monarchie London und Paris Magazin zur Geschichte des Deutschen Theaters Morgenblatt für gebildete Stände Der Sammler Vossische Zeitung Wiener Theaterzeitung Wiener Zeitschrift für Kunst, Literatur, Theater und Mode Wiener Zeitung

Foreword Ja me s Ch a ndl er

Melodramatic names an aesthetic category that has a varied history extending back two and a half centuries and considerable currency in our own time, a currency that bridges ordinary language and more specialized disciplinary discourse. Even within its more technical usage, however, one has difficulty delineating precisely what the term means— this despite our being able to chart in great detail the early circulation of melodrama and its cognates across several national contexts over the last third of the eighteenth century. The story of origin for this category, indeed, appears to be surprisingly straightforward. It can be traced to Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Pygmalion, an innovative composition in words and music of the early 1760s, the same remarkable two-year span in which he produced three diverse literary masterpieces: La nouvelle Héloïse, Le contrat social, and Émile. Rousseau’s Pygmalion was first staged in 1770 and then retroactively christened with the neologism mélo-drame by its author in 1774. So far, so good. The first difficulty that arises is that even in the period of melodrama’s emergence— the period on which this book focuses— the term was already associated very explicitly with two distinct kinds of composition and performance, a fact that is central to the conception of the current volume. One was a generally recognizable form of (mostly German) opera that put together composed music and spoken words in a way influenced by Rousseau’s innovation in Pygmalion. The other was a form of (mostly French) boulevard theater that featured new combinations of pantomime, speech, and musical accompaniment. As Katherine Hambridge and Jonathan Hicks make clear in their excellent introduction, the first is most strongly associated with the German composer Georg Benda, the second with the French playwright René-Charles Guilbert de Pixerécourt. Neither was confined to the Continent. German melodrama circulated in Britain, for example, and Pixerécourt’s 1800 play Cœlina gave rise

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to the first English play to be called a melodrama, when Thomas Holcroft pirated it for his 1802 A Tale of Mystery. Yet an even greater difficulty with the term melodrama arises from its extraordinary adaptability in later decades. Perhaps in part because melodrama was from its inception a hybrid form, mixing media and practices of representation in new ways, it readily migrated into other domains. Yes, early melodrama gave rise to later theatrical developments, such as the massively popular productions of Adolphe d’Ennery in Paris, a key figure in the post-1848 efflorescence of the mode. D’Ennery’s work, with features recognizable from Pixerécourt’s template, was in fact widely staged and published across Europe and America through much of the second half of the nineteenth century. Over time, however, the term melodrama came to be associated with a range of other media and media practices, including many that had not been imagined in the late eighteenth century. These would extend beyond the arts of live theater to include print fiction (not least the new realist novel), silent cinema, radio, sound cinema, television, and, more recently, graphic novels and contemporary digital media forms. Some lines of transmission over the course of these long decades were more direct and discernible than others. The connection between nineteenth- century theatrical melodrama and the exaggerated acting styles of early cinema, with its musical accompaniment, is an obvious place to look. More specifically, in a film like Orphans of the Storm (1922), to take just one of D. W. Griffith’s silent film melodramas, Griffith explicitly adapted d’Ennery’s great stage success of 1871, Les deux orphelines, and he also drew less explicitly but no less demonstrably on Dickens’s melodramatization of the French Revolution in A Tale of Two Cities (1859). Griffith, the self-proclaimed “man who invented Hollywood,” in turn left his mark on others. There was no more influential figure in early cinema than Griffith, and directors in his tracks like King Vidor and John Stahl were able to recast silent melodrama into sound melodrama in such 1930s talkies as Stella Dallas (1937) and Imitation of Life (1934). Films of this kind were seminal in their turn for European emigré directors who came to Hollywood after the war and who gave us films like Letter from an Unknown Woman (1948, Max Ophuls) and All That Heaven Allows (1955, Douglas Sirk), not to speak of Sirk’s studied remake of Stahl’s Imitation of Life (1959). And by the 1970s, the German New Wave was producing NeoSirkian films like Fassbinder’s Ali, Fear Eats the Soul (1974). Melodrama, once seen as a popular form, had become avant-garde— or avant-garde again, as in a sense it first had been, for Rousseau and his early followers. Not coincidentally, the 1970s marks the time when, in a number of quarters, melodrama began to gain serious critical attention. Peter

Foreword

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Brooks’s influential book The Melodramatic Imagination (1976) showed the exaggerated moral extremes of Pixerécourt’s boulevard melodrama at work in the great realist fiction of novelists like Balzac and James. Already in the early 1970s, there had appeared some thoughtful work by Thomas Elsaesser beginning to trace cinematic melodrama to its nineteenthcentury theatrical origins, a scholarly inquiry into cinematic melodrama that would soon be taken up by feminist scholars interested in the politics of gender and affect. Some of this work would be collected in Christine Gledhill’s landmark set of essays Home Is Where the Heart Is (1987), which was introduced with a provocative “investigation” of the “melodramatic field.” Important as it is, this growing and diverse body of late twentiethcentury scholarship on melodrama— which sometimes emphasizes the connection of theater to literature, sometimes that of one or the other to cinema— has tended to make connections along the line of descent from the early boulevard theatrical tradition of Pixerécourt. It is perhaps not until Monique Rooney’s Living Screens (2015) that we find an attempt to reach from contemporary screen arts all the way back to the very origin of melodrama— not, that is, to Pixerécourt s Cœlina but to Rousseau’s Pygmalion. Out of her engagement with Rousseau’s prototype, Rooney develops a notion of “plasticity” (not unlike that of the contemporary French philosopher Catherine Malabou) and demonstrates how such a concept might be construed as central to the melodramatic line, even as far along as the television series Mad Men: Don Draper on this reading is a character melodramatically malleable to the shaping hand of society. What Rooney’s book does not do, however, is to connect Rousseau to that other early set of works called melodrama, the more ambitiously musical line in which Georg Benda figured so prominently. This, in a sense, is the opportunity seized by this timely collection of essays. It is true that in the years between the first wave of serious critical attention to cinematic melodrama in the 1970s and the current moment, the so-called German melodramatic tradition that developed from Rousseau has attracted considerable interest among musicologists. That work is often cited in the current volume, both in the editors’ introduction and in the fine essays it introduces, and Jacqueline Waeber, who has written compellingly about German melodrama, has provided an afterword. What is distinctive about this volume, however, is that it brings both dimensions of this first “melodramatic moment” together in a single collection of scholarly inquiries. In doing so, it enables us to see new genealogies of melodrama in its varied forms. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), for example, was quickly

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adapted as a stage melodrama in the Pixérécourt mold with Richard Peake’s Presumption (1823). That is how her voluble creature becomes the mostly speechless figure played famously by Boris Karloff in the James Whale film of 1931. Yet in Shelley’s novel we are never far from Rousseau, in whose work she and her Geneva circle were deeply immersed in 1816. Rousseau’s descriptions of his own self-alienation in late writings anticipate the rhetoric of both the creature and his maker, and his views on music seem to shape the creature’s sensibility across its many incarnations. Rousseau wrote in one of his reveries that, amiable as he was, he was widely viewed by others as un monstre. Does the language of melodrama as monstrosity, mentioned more than once in this collection, also lead us back through Frankenstein to Rousseau? This is just an example of the many such fascinating questions raised directly or indirectly by the essays that follow. Taken as a whole, the collection tracks the impressive mobility of melodramatic forms and practices across nations. The journey of Pixerécourt’s Cœlina from Paris to London is only one of many crisscrossing itineraries traced here. To map such movements well, it takes a village— a range of disciplinary and linguistic expertise as broad as what we see represented in these contributors. Finally, and above all, this volume restores the melo to melodrama. In returning us to the richness of the first “melodramatic moment,” to the way in which melodrama circulated as an “actor’s category” through diverse national contexts, the collection fixes our attention on sound and music, crucial dimensions of melodrama that often get lost even in the best work on the subject. These essays “sonify” melodrama in ways that should have rich implications in melodrama studies and beyond. Indeed, they provide a model for how we might go about the task of sonifying cultural history itself.

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Ch a p t er 1

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The Melodramatic Moment Kather ine H a mbr id ge a nd Jonat h a n Hick s

In his Vocabulary of Culture and Society, first published in 1976, Raymond Williams listed dramatic as one of a “group of words which have been extended from their original and continuing application to some specific art, to much wider use as descriptions of actual events and situations:” his other examples included picturesque, theatrical, tragic, and role.1 Any update of Williams for the twenty-first century would surely have to include melodramatic. There is no question that the word has currency far beyond any specific musical-theatrical art: not only is it commonly used in relation to a wide range of entertainment, from Hollywood films to Brazilian telenovelas, but it is also deployed in the context of political action and everyday life. Within the academy, which is our focus here, it can refer equally to art music and stump speeches, courtroom scenes and sporting incidents.2 We are by no means the first to note this tendency. In 2000, Rohan McWilliam observed that “the uses of melodrama by historians have become so elastic that almost any form of modern culture is said to have a melodramatic dimension,” draining the term of “its explanatory power and hence of its utility.”3 Without a sensitivity to the subjects and workings of actual performed melodramas, the melodramatic is always in danger of running away with itself. Faced with so much opening out and loose association, we want to make the case here for a strategic restriction of melodrama studies. In fact, we want to suggest that “melodrama studies” is in danger of overreach. The vast literature that clusters around the M-word is fundamentally undisciplined; it is a meeting point, not a place of tenure, and it ought to be approached as such. The present volume stages one such meeting, an encounter in which literary and theater historians, although present and of great importance, are outnumbered by musicologists. This weighting of interests reflects an ongoing attempt to “sonorize” the study of melodrama while maintaining

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a lively dialogue among disciplines.4 Without wishing to downplay the insights of scholars who have looked for melodramatic acts outside the theater, we suggest that a return to the period of the genre’s inception, and close attention to the place of music therein, is an important and necessary contribution to a fuller understanding of melodrama’s complex status in social and political life. Our focus is the years 1790–1820, when popular melodrama first came to prominence in the metropolitan centers of northern Europe. It is these cities— chiefly London, Paris, Vienna, and Berlin— that coordinate a busy, multilayered account. What we are calling “the melodramatic moment” is, of course, already known by other names and staked by other claims: revolution, cultural nationalism, imperial ambition, Romanticism, and urban growth have been foregrounded in histories of European culture in this period; within musicology, the rise of the work concept is perhaps the most familiar recent frame of reference, albeit still less prevalent in the popular imagination than the muchcriticized idea of the “Romantic Era.” In renaming these decades we are not so much seeking to overwrite existing accounts as to engage them in conversation. The aim of this introduction, then, is not to locate the present book in an artificially discrete field of inquiry, despite our ambition to limit and restrict; on the contrary, we want to embrace our topic’s many indiscretions and make sense of its multiplicity by insisting on historical specificity. In what follows we outline a method informed by notions of cultural circulation and adaptation. At the largest level, this helps us build a picture of the continent-wide network of people, objects, and ideas that enabled the rapid spread of a new form of musical theater. At the same time, it gives fresh impetus to microhistories of composition, performance, and reception that show how early melodrama functioned in particular times and places, within particular regimes of regulation and critical comment. Rather than advance an abstract model of what melodrama is or how it works, we propose a history of melodrama that is intricately bound up with the aesthetics and circumstances of performance. Our task is to understand how it was identified at the time and what its structure meant to those who made it and those who paid to see it. This is no easy undertaking. Anyone familiar with the topic will attest that early melodrama is a categorical nightmare.5 Most obviously, there are two distinct myths of origin to take into account: one that proceeds from philosophy, the other from politics; one concerning Rousseau, the other revolution. Before going any further, we should revisit these two myths, as well as the distinct traditions of performance and scholarship they have come to underwrite.

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Origins Rousseau comes first, at least chronologically. His Pygmalion was written in 1762, one year after the successful reception of his sentimental novel, Julie; ou, La nouvelle Héloïse, and the same year as the controversy surrounding Du contrat social. His self-styled scène lyrique, on the ancient theme of an idol brought to life, was overshadowed by the furore caused by his radical philosophy. Indeed, Rousseau would spend much of the rest of the decade in exile, his work censored and even banned for its perceived assault on religious and government authority. Only in 1770, when back in France, did Rousseau turn once more to Pygmalion. At this point he enlisted a silk merchant and amateur musician called Horace Coignet to prepare instrumental interludes for his text, the first performance taking place in private rooms at Lyon’s Hôtel de Ville. Despite the relatively low-profile premiere, Pygmalion became an object of international curiosity and a model for theatrical reform.6 The key feature of the work— its frequent, small- scale alternation of speech and music— was already implicit in the 1762 manuscript, which included asterisks as placeholders for something supplementary to language. These small stars on the page can be read as traces of Rousseau’s aspiration to find a form of expression both ancient and modern: one informed by theories of Greek declamation and suspicious of established theatrical convention. His goal was not song, opera, or pantomime but something purposely alternative: an expressive medium that did not compromise textual expression by setting it to music (particularly problematic in French, Rousseau thought) nor limit musical expression by setting text to it. Although Rousseau rarely used the word mélodrame, that was the term that stuck.7 To the extent that Pygmalion constituted a point of origin for the history of melodrama, it was one that led to a series of intensely serious compositions. As Ellen Lockhart discusses in the second chapter of this volume, Rousseau’s technique was a decidedly avant-garde affair. The constant interruption of the speaker by music was thought to suit only the most extreme subject matter, those points of high emotion that threatened to undo the efficacy of conventional language: life, death, madness, and passionate suffering were the keynotes of early melodrama, without a hint of comic relief. The best- known examples modeled after Rousseau were by the Bohemian composer Georg Benda, who adapted classical subjects to eighteenth-century sensibilities. The titular heroines of his Ariadne auf Naxos and Medea (both 1775) descend into states of manic distress: they struggle to express themselves under the burden of rapid, consuming emotions; speech and music falter, syntax is undone,

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the psychodrama of the modern self plays out in bursts and fragments. These were the hallmarks of early German- language monodrama, as it was also known, which typically revolved around the tragic fate of a solo (generally female) protagonist. These monodramas featured some of the most idiosyncratic music of the day: their scores were packed with bold gestures, sudden gear changes, and prolonged harmonic uncertainty; they were also obliged to pass the baton back and forth between orchestra and orator, with music and text constantly interrupting or overtaking one another. As Thomas Betzwieser shows in his chapter here, late eighteenthcentury monodrama was as much an experiment as an entertainment. It elaborated complex codes across multiple media, requiring specialist actors and sympathetic audiences. It was relentlessly cerebral in its quest for emotional authenticity and became, perhaps inevitably, an acquired taste.8 While Rousseauian melodrama enjoyed some thirty years of currency in German lands, with new melodramas composed up to the 1820s, there was ultimately a limited appetite for extended soliloquies of devastation. However, the temporary suspension of sung delivery promised a striking addition to the atmosphere of serious opera, and a number of opera composers inserted melodramatic scenes into their works at moments of heightened tension. These moments typically corresponded to either the hypernatural or the supernatural: in the first case, the broken breaths of a frightened protagonist might interrupt the ordinary passage of song (Beethoven’s Fidelio and Le Sueur’s La caverne are two examples discussed by Jens Hesselager in this volume); in the second, a similar interruption was caused by the appearance of the otherworldly (the Wolf ’s Glen scene in Weber’s Der Freischütz is the classic case). Here we find old experiment put to new effect as the fractured, febrile atmosphere of the stand-alone monodrama found fresh purpose in the shiver-inducing moments of Romantic opera. By this point, though, another sort of melodrama was taking Europe by storm. In the years after 1789, the portrayal of violent acts of virtue dominated many Parisian theaters. The ultimate boulevard incarnation of this phenomenon is now associated with one genre in particular— mélodrame— and even one author: the aristocrat- turned- playwright René-Charles Guilbert de Pixerécourt (1773–1844), who had proved exceptionally adept at navigating the choppy waters of post-Revolutionary cultural politics. Beginning with Victor; ou, L’Enfant de la fôret in 1798, Pixerécourt would write a further ninety- three melodramas over the course of his career. Often adapting the plots of novels, often gothic novels, these melodramas tended to be historical, peopled by innocent

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maidens and evil tyrants, bravehearts and banditti, and were structured around stark moral certainties, historic injustices, bloody acts of vengeance, family reunions, and climactic tableaux. Pixerécourt and his peers combined these plot devices with pantomime techniques, spectacular scenery, the occasional song, and the extensive use of short music cues to accompany and characterize the actors’ entrances and exits, and to underline and express key moments, sometimes in conjunction with, sometimes between, spoken textual statements.9 It was in Pixerécourt’s “mélodrames à grand spectacle” that Peter Brooks famously located a “mode of excess.” Melodrama’s excess lay, according to Brooks, in the “heightened dramatization:” the overstatement through overlapping media (text, music, gesture, scenery) of the character’s deepest feelings and of the “basic psychic conditions” of the plot. This “mode of the bigger-than-life” was itself a function of the “cosmic ethical drama” that Brooks saw being played out explicitly on Paris stages: he read melodramatic texts not only as a response to the social and psychological trauma of the Revolution but also as an appropriation of the sacred at a time of shaken faith.10 What the boulevards staged, Brooks suggested, was an almost involuntary response to pain and upheaval. These works were spectacular and emotionally extreme because the world that made them was more so; they reveled in peril because that was the affective currency of the day. Compared with the monodrama practiced north of the Rhine, which grew out of an intellectual preoccupation with the aesthetics of human suffering, Brooks saw these Parisian spectacles as less a study in grief, more as shock therapy after the fact. The essence of mélodrame, according to this interpretation, was its cathartic function, which also served as a form of coercion: there was relief to be had in the villain vanquished, and an ideological message that order is best maintained. Although Brooks was primarily concerned with later nineteenthcentury literature and its debt to Pixerécourt’s generation, his work has been influential in connecting the poetics of early Parisian melodrama with the Revolution and an emerging “popular” culture. Or rather, it has become a model for looking beyond questions of genre to questions of mode, and to the functioning of the melodramatic beyond the world of the stage. Brook’s “melodramatic imagination” and “mode of excess” are at least in part responsible for the adjectival proliferation within the academy we observed above.11 However, and more important for our purposes here, his emphasis on the political and interpersonal conditions of postRevolutionary Paris has been one of many factors that have maintained the scholarly separation of the twin traditions of “French” and “German” melodrama. One of the agendas of this book is to challenge such an

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assumption of difference. To borrow from the musicologist Kofi Agawu, we prefer to proceed via a strategic “assumption of sameness.”12 We know that boulevard melodramas traveled beyond the city limits and jostled for room in the theaters of Berlin, Vienna, and London; there is also evidence that aspects of the monodrama tradition were influential well beyond the German-speaking lands.13 But in order to understand the contemporaneity, if not the codependency, of the two traditions in performance and discourse, we must first address in more detail the historiographical practices that have tended to keep them apart.

Disciplines In the last two decades, melodrama and the melodramatic have been increasingly brought to scholarly attention, and a number of musicological publications have made the case for melodrama’s historical importance and lasting influence.14 Broadly speaking, the intellectual roots of these publications are twofold. On the one hand, we can trace the influence of Continental European scholarship, primarily in music and opera studies, which has seen discussions of the stage works of Benda et al. since the first half of the twentieth century.15 On the other, Anglophone studies of literature, theater, and film have addressed French and English “boulevard” melodrama on and off since the 1960s.16 There is, then, a substantial body of work that predates the current interest in the topic. As Brooks suggested in 1995, “the melodramatic mode no longer needs to be approached in the mode of apology.”17 Yet the fact that we can now be postapologetic about our topic does not guarantee its mainstream status, perhaps especially within musicology.18 Indeed, in part owing to the lack of modern editions for French and English repertoire, some of the most valuable recent work has been directed at enhancing our familiarity with melodramatic musical materials and practices.19 One of the more widespread and persistent assumptions that has been contradicted by the recuperation of musical scores is the idea that melodramatic music for boulevard theaters was improvised or assembled during rehearsals of the text.20 We now know that much of it was composed in advance of the rehearsal period and was sometimes specified in great detail: in other words, the text and the stage action were designed with music in mind, often specific music. As well as shedding new light on the performance history of early melodrama, this new documentary material counteracts the persistent historiographical problem that underlay the idea of melodramatic improvisation, namely a reverse-teleological approach that extrapolated back to melodrama from early cinematic

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sound practices such as quasi-improvised accompaniment; this reverse teleology has also contributed to the relative neglect of early melodrama in favor of the more immediate predecessors of film music.21 When we look at the early nineteenth century, however, we find a lively debate regarding the definition and dissemination of melodramatic practices. This debate, which sometimes touched explicitly on the notion of parallel traditions, posed fundamental questions about the nature of music theater, the relations between various media, the place of the stage in shaping national character, and the emergence of categories of high and low art. In other words, melodrama was far more central than we have hitherto acknowledged in discussions about music’s expressive potential and social function. Yet we can make little sense of these primary sources without first addressing the disciplinary history of melodrama scholarship. For if the history of early melodrama can be read in terms of a string of stubborn binaries— elite and popular, musical and literary, reflective and reactionary— the persistence of these binaries is partly a function of prevailing historiography. Not only have the German and the French/ English traditions been treated as more or less unrelated phenomena, but they have also been addressed by different disciplines: the repertoire represented by Benda has been largely the preserve of musicology; that of Pixerécourt and Co. has been studied by scholars of literature, theater, and film. This disciplinary division is not unvarying: recent musicological work by Emilio Sala, Sarah Hibberd, and Michael Pisani addresses the latter tradition, and there has been some valuable German literary scholarship on melodramatic librettos in the Benda tradition.22 But the divide was sufficiently entrenched for the musicologist Christine HeyterRauland to refer to “the ‘other’ melodrama” in her work on German translations of French melodramas.23 To this day, there is still very little interest in the Benda tradition among literary scholars of popular melodrama.24 This disciplinary distinction was grounded in the perception of one tradition as a literary or spoken genre and of the other as musical, a stance formulated in no uncertain terms by the Dutch scholar Jan van der Veen in 1955: “Around 1800 melodrama ceased to be of interest to musical history; henceforth the genre belonged more to literary history.”25 It is not difficult to see the reasoning behind this: the German tradition as represented by Benda contains abundant music— in fact, the constant alternation and sometimes superimposition of music and text— while the French and English versions typically contain discrete musical moments or sequences surrounded by longer sections with very little or no music. Reviewers did not comment in detail about French/English melodrama scores, whereas Benda’s music received in-depth consideration in the

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German press (a factor that also reflects the relative state of music criticism, of course; the German press also commented on the music of translated French melodramas). Similarly, French melodrama librettos tended to circulate without music, leaving it to local composers to supply a score; French melodramatic music was rarely printed, while the English printing of melodrama scores only lasted a few years.26 The music to Benda’s melodramas, by contrast, circulated widely: it is certainly no coincidence that these works—works in the strong sense of the word— have long been more closely associated with composer than with librettist. While musicological attention to the boulevard genre is now well under way, the tendency to view the German/Rousseauian and French/ English traditions as separate is nevertheless maintained, whether explicitly or not. Brooks, once again, can be representative: he remarked in an endnote that he considered Rousseauian melodrama as “belonging to a separate history,” although he conceded that it was “not entirely irrelevant” to the boulevard tradition.27 The German literary scholar Wolfgang Schimpf was rather more emphatic, stating that it “is in no way acceptable to suppose a close connection between melodrama of the eighteenth century and works called by that name in the nineteenth century.”28 Part of the problem is that Benda’s works are in many respects not representative of wider German melodrama practice c. 1800: we find texts published in journals, without musical settings, and a significant number of melodramas performed in German lands received multiple musical settings. Wolfgang Ritter von Kempelen’s melodrama Andromeda und Perseus (1780), for example, was set to music by Anton Zimmermann for performance in Vienna in 1781, and then again by Benda for Munich in 1794.29 The melodrama discussed by Nicholas Mathew in this volume does not even include a vocal part. Thus German melodrama was more flexible in its conception than has usually been acknowledged. Conversely, even if the music for melodramas performed in Paris or London was not as fixed as for those performed in Berlin or Vienna, its inclusion was undoubtedly central to contemporary understandings of the genre. In his 1806 Dictionary of Music, Thomas Busby defined “melo-drama” as “a modern species of drama in which the powers of instrumental music are employed to elucidate the action and heighten the passion of the piece.”30 On the other side of the Channel, in 1817, the famous Traité du mélodrame, which codified the genre in order to ridicule it, likewise described music as an integral part of the whole effect.31 None of this removes the reasons why the two traditions have been held apart in scholarship. If some German commentators at the time saw continuity between the new Parisian import and venerable Benda

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melodramas, others were quick to distinguish between them. Reporting on Joseph-Marie Loaisel de Tréogate’s Roland de Monglave in 1803, Johann Friedrich Reichardt, himself a composer of melodrama on the German model, poured scorn on the nature, placement, and overuse of music in the French import: Roland was “a complete parody of melodrama as it appeared in the small suburban theater in Berlin during the time that Benda defined the era for us with his masterly Ariadne.”32 In 1810, a reviewer for the German journal London und Paris began by stating that “the so-called mélodrame of the French is worlds apart from that of the Germans.” The latter, according to the reviewer, is defined by spoken recitative accompanied by instrumental music, a simple narrative, and brevity; it is, furthermore, exemplified by Benda. The French tradition is instead compared to the medieval chivalric plays on the German stage, where the hero and heroine are constantly in moral and mortal peril, only triumphant at the final moment.33 More pronounced still is Schlegel’s famous remark from his lectures of 1809–11 on melodrama as the “miscarriage [Fehlgeburten] of the Romantics.” With reference to the huge number of performances in Parisian boulevard theaters, Schlegel had to qualify that by melodrama you should not understand, as with us, a theater piece in which monologues alternate in the pauses with instrumental music, but one in which in emphatic prose, the wonderful, the adventurous, or even the sensuous, are brought together with decorations and processions to form a spectacle; for unfortunately most melodramas are crude to the point of absurdity.34

But it wasn’t only outraged Germans who saw the differences between their established tradition and the newly emerging French upstart. In 1809, Armand Charlemagne linked “old” and “new” melodramas as two types of drama, or dramatic action, in which the words are “coupée” (spliced) by music, before distinguishing them: Rousseau and his imitators represent the old melodrama, while contemporary understanding of the word, Charlemagne suggested, relies on a magical or heroic plot, in which people do not move without music announcing entrances, exits, and the range of sensations felt. Unlike Reichardt, Charlemagne did not denigrate the “new” melodrama but rather celebrated it as “l’opéra du peuple.”35 Apart from the structural differences recognized in these contemporary responses, another perceived distinction emerges, that of social level. Charlemagne’s nomination of melodrama as the opera of the people indicates the popularity of melodrama in Revolutionary-era Paris, where it

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was available at the boulevard stages more cheaply than works performed at the opera house. Reichardt’s term parody— a genre typically found on the suburban stages, which mocked more serious fare— also suggests a popular cast. Benda’s melodramas, on the other hand, had been performed at court theaters, and Benda was already a canonical composer in the burgeoning German music histories of the period. This high- low split has been sustained both implicitly and explicitly by more recent scholarship.36 Perhaps, like Reichardt, musicologists have been keen to shore up Benda’s status as a composer. The implied defense of “good” music may also explain why musicologists have been slow to consider the surviving scores of boulevard melodramas: in general, musicologists have been slower than literary and theater scholars to attend to the histories of popular culture. Whatever the scholarly motives, the division of the two traditions is hard to maintain in the face of historical evidence regarding the local conditions of performance, particularly in this early period, when the German model remained an active feature of theatrical programs. In short, many of the rationales for treating boulevard and German traditions separately are at the least debatable. In itself, that justifies an experiment in thinking them together. But there are also more positive reasons: Sarah Hibberd, for instance, has modeled the relationship between the traditions as one of two lineages, both descendants of Rousseau, which she sees combining in Chelard’s opera Macbeth (1827).37 In similar vein, Emilio Sala’s book L’opera senza canto has shown how melodrama becomes one technique among many on the boulevard stage, mixed with pantomime and ballet d’action in order to relieve the monotony of Rousseau’s model. Sala concludes that both the original notion and the later bricolage are noncanonical experimentations with word-text relations. We might also seek to deepen our awareness of the “German” tradition beyond Benda, who has, to a certain extent, distorted and limited perceptions of monodramatic practice. This is not just in terms of the unrepresentative status and circulation of Ariadne and Medea but also in terms of form, including plot/dramaturgical structure: Benda’s later melodrama Theone (1780) was conceived with an aria for the heroine and with a chorus interspersed; the publication of Reichardt’s Cephalus und Prokris (1781) came with an appendix containing songs to replace certain sections of melodramatic setting, while his Der Tod des Herkules (1802) was a “melodrama with chorus”; and Gerstenberg’s Minona oder die Angelsachsen (1785) was a “melodrama in four acts,” which included both incidental numbers and melodramatic (monodramatic) episodes by Johann Abraham Peter Schulz, with a historical plot rather like those identified by German critics in French melodramas.38 This last example might seem

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very similar to the lineage that established itself in France, but the point is to demonstrate the parallel experimentation with the melodramatic technique in both traditions. In each case we find that melodramatic technique is employed to convey extremes of emotional experience; melodramatic episodes within German and French stage works often coincide with the presence of the supernatural or the imaginary (such as the Egmont dream sequences). Jacqueline Waeber has convincingly argued that this is one of the closest points of contact between (German) “musical melodrama” and (French) “theatrical melodrama,” with “the use of music as a mark of irrationality” becoming a “mark of the extraordinary: the supernatural, but also situations of excess.”39 In order to proceed from these isolated observations of common practices, the next section of this introduction advocates a rubric of transnationalism and translation in order to gain insight into the historical interdependence of traditions that have for too long been treated in isolation.

Crossings Let us consider a close-up: the premiere of Salomons Urtheil at the Berlin Nationaltheater in 1808. By this point, following the defeat of the Prussians by French forces in 1806, the city had been occupied for two years. However, the arrival in the city of the first boulevard melodrama— an adaptation of Louis-Charles Caigniez’s Le jugement de Salomon, first performed at the Théâtre de l’Ambigu-Comique, Paris, in 1802— marked a recovery of theatrical ambition rather than any shift in Franco-Prussian relations. French repertoire in translation had been a staple of the Berlin Nationaltheater since its founding in 1786; this changed relatively little throughout the war. One prominent Berlin journal greeted the event with studied insouciance: “Voltaire says somewhere: ‘In literature I welcome every genre with the exception of the boring.’ But now among all genres of drama there is none more boring than melodrama.”40 Considering all the complaints that could be (and were) made about the genre, monotony seems one of the more unlikely. As we have already seen, boulevard melodrama was more typically accused of providing excessive stimulation in the form of spectacular stage effects and costumes, frequent moments of moral or physical peril, and sudden plot twists. Indeed, just two years later, that very same Voltaire epigram would be derided elsewhere in the German-language press for its overemployment in defense of melodramas emanating from Paris.41 Equally puzzling is the fact that the reviewer assumes his readers will know what he is talking about. There is no acknowledgement that Salomons Urtheil was a new kind of dramatic work for the

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city, even though its faults were laid squarely at the door of the “suburban stages of the Paris boulevards” (Pariser Winkelbuhne der Boulevards) from whence it came (via Vienna). Instead, the reviewer seems to suggest a continuity between this latest import and German melodramas already known to Berliners.42 The latter sort of melodrama had been associated with boredom for decades and was famously described by Goethe as a play in which a person acts with himself, to the tedium of the spectators.43 If the local theatrical context helps explain the Berlin journalist’s statement about melodramatic monotony, it is worth observing that Salomons Urtheil displayed a dramatic construction that was some distance from the Benda model: it featured multiple characters, three acts, and two grand stage processions. The connection made between the twin styles of melodrama is all the more remarkable in that the translation of the Paris mélodrame by the Viennese writer Matthäus Stegmayer was advertised in Berlin as a “historical-musical drama with dance in 3 acts” and not, explicitly, as a melodrama. But the reviewer, clearly aware of French and German genre designations, chose to group the two versions of melodrama together, even as other commentators continued to hold them apart. Another reviewer even linked the use of music “breaking in” to the dialogue of Salomons Urtheil to recent local discussions of (Benda-derived) melodrama technique.44 Notions of circulation and adaptation provide both a description of events on the ground and a methodology for a more nuanced understanding of the complex international marketplace of early melodrama as well as the varied expressive multimedia vocabularies employed. Le jugement de Salomon, for instance, became not only the historical musical drama Salomons Urtheil in Vienna (1804) and Berlin but also a two-act play with chorus and new music by Kapellmeister Peter Winter in Munich (1808); by this point it had also crossed the Channel as The Voice of Nature, a play in three acts translated by James Boaden and performed at the King’s Theatre, Haymarket (1802); and from there it crossed the Atlantic in William Dunlap’s version for the Park Theater, New York (also called The Voice of Nature, 1803, with music by Victor Pelissier). These variations on a theme attest to far more than the dissemination of Parisian drama; they hint at the overlayering of diverse influences and practices across a range of performance contexts. Common to Le jugement de Salomon in Paris and Salomons Urtheil in Vienna and Berlin was the small-scale alternation of words and music that is often used as a shorthand definition of melodramatic technique. In London, however, The Voice of Nature featured only incidental music, although it retained other dramaturgical similarities. This case study demonstrates how such a mode of inquiry might

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serve to challenge the binaries that have come to characterize melodrama scholarship: Solomons Urtheil was, for example, performed in Berlin for the crown prince’s birthday; contrary to received wisdom, this suggests that its Parisian boulevard origins posed no barrier (at this time) to a prestige location and occasion in Berlin. Such moments invite us not only to think about the commonalities of the two traditions from the perspective of the present day but also to pay attention to moments when they were brought together by historical actors. In practice, this means tuning in to the movements of plays and performance techniques around the theaters of Europe, as well as to responses by the local press to imports and adaptations. Of course, there has already been a good deal of work in this direction: a collection of essays on “music, theater, and cultural transfer” in nineteenth-century Paris, edited by Annegret Fauser and Mark Everist, draws attention to “the fluidity and complexity of artistic and administrative agency, aesthetic meaning, and legal frameworks.”45 Although the focus here is on a single city— in an attempt to undo the partitioning of operatic history that had long held the Palais Garnier apart from the Opéra-Comique (never mind the Porte Saint-Martin, where Pixerécourt consolidated his career)— the editors explain that the status of Paris as a standard-bearer for fashionable modernity made the business of music in the French capital of more than local significance. Indeed, one of the principal insights of recent work in music and cultural transfer has been to stress the importance of “hubs” in or through which ideas and practices are passed on and debated. Paris is an obvious example but by no means the only one. A more recent study by Christina Fuhrmann unpicks the intricacies of British responses to Continental imports.46 What comes through clearly is not only the depth of contact between urban centers (Paris to London and on to New York) but also an often rich local awareness of where new shows originated. At times, Fuhrmann identifies the sorts of xenophobic reactions to the foreignness of opera in London that lead us back to national models of music history, but she also reminds us of the nuances at play. In London (as in Berlin and Vienna), objections to Italian opera were as often directed toward local class enemies as toward a presumed foreign foe. And even when we do detect aesthetic arguments drawn along national lines, it is often unclear how these lines correspond to political or military divides: France, not Italy, was the opponent across the sea that set London teeth chattering, yet throughout the long period of the Napoleonic Wars we find a regular stream of stage shows from Paris. Clearly the meaning of these works— and their composers and performers— was not reducible to any notion of simple national identity.

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One theoretical point of reference here is the notion of histoire croisée (entangled history) put forward by Michael Werner and Bénédicte Zimmermann.47 In the broadest terms, they advocate a perspective that is not just comparative but is also attentive to the processes of cultural transfer: one that engages not just with the modification of the intercrossed parties but with the novel and original elements thrown up by such intersections. From the perspective of tangled history and cultural mobility, the 1789 Revolution unsurprisingly offers a watershed. Clearly the motives and resources for moving around in Europe did not remain the same through the various coups, campaigns, and Continental wars of the period up to Napoleon’s final defeat in 1815. This was a time in which travel and trade were more than usually affected by diplomatic and military maneuvers. As the historian of migration Robin Cohen observes, the revised French constitution of 1793 contained “a ringing declaration inviting those ‘escaping tyranny’ to find a haven in the territories of the French republic.”48 While this call was taken up by some, there were many who went in the opposite direction. London in the 1790s was home-in-exile for many French aristocrats, who naturally frequented operas at the King’s Theatre. The same was true for musicians whose employment met the same fate as the aristocratic institutions in Paris: the violinist Giovanni Battista Viotti, one of the most celebrated instrumentalists of his day, left the French capital to find work at London’s Hanover Square Concerts and in that city’s opera orchestra.49 The theatrical world Viotti entered was well accustomed to talent from across the Channel: both the scenic designer Philippe-Jacques de Loutherbourg and the ballet master Jean-Georges Noverre, to name two of the best-known exemplars of their respective trades, were working in London in the 1790s after having launched their careers on the Continent. The figures named above rubbed shoulders with social and cultural elites, but there were others with less freedom of movement: recent research at the University of Warwick has documented the activities of French prisoners of war, held in detention in England, who arranged their own theatricals, including performances of melodrama.50 In the course of this book, further examples will suggest how melodrama was subject to the opportunities as well as the limits of wartime mobility. As George Taylor sets out in his essay on Thomas Holcroft’s A Tale of Mystery (Drury Lane, 1802), commonly considered the first commercially produced melodrama performed in England, the play was adapted from Pixerécourt’s Parisian original during the Peace of Amiens, when hostilities between England and France were temporarily suspended. Whether Holcroft could have so easily imported French melodrama from Paris (with-

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out political censure) prior to this moment is a matter for conjecture; that the staging of A Tale of Mystery coincided with a pause in international hostilities surely merits our attention. By a similar token, Barbara Babić considers the case of biblical melodramas transplanted from Paris to Vienna at a time when Austria was under Napoleonic occupation. What both studies demonstrate is the importance of considering the circumstances under which particular melodramas traveled to particular locations, and why melodramatic techniques seemed appropriate for certain occasions. This last question is particularly important in Nicholas Mathew’s chapter, which deals with a score designed for private performance in memory of a public commemoration, one that in turn remembered a victorious battle. Matthew Head similarly asks the question of why melodrama was appropriate for a stage work planned as a charitable response to the suffering engendered by recent floods. The aim, in all cases, is not simply to chart the abundance of melodrama on European stages but to ask how this musical-theatrical phenomenon played into broader patterns of human and cultural mobility, voluntary or otherwise. To continue with the example of London: we know that the eighteenth century witnessed an increased reliance on foreign musicians, especially high-profile singers from Italy who attracted virulent condemnation in the contemporary press. Yet there was an equally significant trend for bringing instrumentalists from the German- speaking lands.51 Handel and Haydn are famous cases, but hardly unique: according to the historian Margrit Schulte Beerbühl, musical performance and instrument making was one of three fields in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century England in which Germans were particularly well known, the other two being sugar refining and pork butchery.52 This is a more striking fact to reconcile with the patterns of melodrama circulation than the migrations from France. In the years after Holcroft’s A Tale of Mystery made its debut, there was an exponential increase in melodramatic imports from Paris. The same cannot be said regarding melodramatic imports from the German-speaking lands. Indeed, another reason why French and German melodrama have traditionally been held apart is that the former seems to have traveled far more than the latter. Yet there may be clues concerning a more complex English reception of German ideas and techniques. We know, for instance, that as early as 1777— only seven years after the premiere of Rousseau’s Pygmalion— there was an attempt by the English author Edward Jerningham to create a “historical interlude” with alternating speech and music. The result, Margaret d’Anjou, was successfully staged at Drury Lane. Although the score does not survive, the play text leaves asterisks indicating points of

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instrumental interjection. Many years later, in 1812, we find a letter to a London periodical that both testifies to the prevalence of boulevard melodrama on British stages and hints at a broader knowledge of the German tradition. “Some days ago,” the correspondent begins, “I had the resolution to risk my life in fighting my way through a brutal pit- door mob, in order to see the performance of a horse-drama. I am correct in the expression ‘to see’; for, had I been deaf, I really believe my gratification would have been infinitely greater, so wretched were both dialogue and music.” We then read of “an elderly gentleman” who shared the same sense of exasperation: “His notion of a melodrama . . . was derived from the miserable exhibitions announced under that title in our play-bills; he had . . . no idea of the proper melodrama, that beautiful and original species of theatrical production, which owes its being to Benda.”53 While the dominant tone here is one of contempt for Parisian melodrama and preservationist adoration of the Benda model, the letter does indicate an awareness in England, however limited, of the German tradition: an awareness, moreover, that would be entirely consistent with the significant number of German musicians active in London throughout the period. Like Berlin, the British capital offers a distinctive perspective on the melodramatic moment. What we find is a city already marked by decades of musical migration. The lure of London for German musicians is a function of differences in size and cultural economy between European cities, although most were expanding dramatically, fueled not only— indeed, not mainly— by migration across national borders but by internal migration, especially in the wake of reforms to agricultural production. Much of the Irish population in London, for instance, was a result of changing labor patterns. And much of the audience for melodrama, especially in the so-called illegitimate theaters, consisted of new arrivals to the city.54 According to the theater historian Frederick Burwick, London’s population increased from 700,000 in 1700 to 958,863 in 1801, and thereafter by roughly 20 percent each decade: by 1821, it was at 1,378,947.55 This boom occasioned a marked increase in the number of metropolitan theaters. In Paris the expansion of the theatrical economy was all the more noticeable for its relative suddenness: the relaxation of licensing laws in 1791 led to both the proliferation of venues (as many as fifty-one at one point) and to the establishment of new genres. Vaudeville and low pantomime, which had been found mostly in temporary fair theaters, became fixtures of Parisian theatrical life, along with a whole range of apparently hybrid genres:56 Fournier’s Les Français à Java; ou, Bantam sauvé (Théâtre de la Gaîté, 1805), for instance, was described as a “Mélodrame héroïque en

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3 actes, à grand spectacle, orné de chants, danses, combats, evolutions militaires, explosion, etc.” As the term grand spectacle would indicate, it was not only the number of theaters that increased in this period. Burgeoning audiences led to larger spaces in which to perform. While it would be simplistic to posit a direct correlation between the population of cities and the volume of their auditoria— not least because this would sidestep important questions about the increased subdivision of audiences in the nineteenth century, and the desire for spaces of intimacy amid the urban melee— the overall trend is significant. The theater most associated with Pixerécourt is the Porte Saint-Martin, built in 1781 for the Paris Opéra. Partly because of the Revolution, the company only remained in the building until 1794, at which point it moved to the newly built Théâtre des Arts. If the Porte Saint-Martin was a large venue, with a capacity of over two thousand, the Théâtre des Arts was even larger, with an extra five hundred seats. We find a similar upscaling in the case of London’s Covent Garden theater, which was rebuilt first in the late eighteenth century and again in 1808— both times after destruction by fire. The conventional account of the expansion of theater auditoria c. 1800 is that it facilitated— even demanded— a more spectacular mode of address as well as a more visually striking approach to staging. The correspondent cited above complained that there was much to see in melodrama yet little worth listening to. Recent work in theater history has sought to complicate any narrative that pits sight against sound, and spectacle against the august tradition of spoken drama.57 A number of the chapters in this volume— particularly those by Thomas Betzwieser and Sarah Hibberd— similarly seek to add new layers to our understanding of the relationships between text, music, and gesture in early melodrama. However, at the turn of the nineteenth century there was certainly a strong vein of criticism, in cities across Europe, that associated spectacle with a degrading form of popular culture. Indeed, critics and authorities alike were anxious to address both the artistic and political status of contemporary performance. In 1806–7, Napoleon reintroduced strict regulation of the theatrical economy by distributing particular genres among only eight theaters: the rest were closed. His desire to protect the privilège of classical tragedy at the Comédie-Française and tragédie lyrique at the Paris Opéra was closely bound up with the emergence of “mixed” forms such as melodrama that threatened (by sheer popularity) the aesthetic hierarchies of the ancien régime. In Berlin, some critics were even more alive to the amorphous threat of the popular on account of everything

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appearing on the same stage, at the city’s Nationaltheater; Vienna, on the other hand, like Paris, attempted to enshrine a hierarchy of genres by venues, using the suburban theaters to put distance between the activities of the court and the performance of melodrama. A similar anxiety can be observed in London, although obviously under different political circumstances. The declining status of the British patent theaters and the “legitimate” repertoire they were expected to represent was a flash point for social tension no less than the more directly political equivalents across the Channel. The clearest example of popular politics in the London theater was the Old Price Riots following the reopening of Covent Garden in 1808. The riots were ostensibly an expression of outrage at the new ticket prices and the increased presence of private boxes in a public theater— boxes apparently marketed to wealthy foreigners during a time of Continental conflict. Yet, as Jane Moody and others have shown, they were also a response to changing notions of legitimacy in both its political and aesthetic senses.58 On the one hand, the theater stood accused of vested interests, and its manager was pilloried as a partisan Tory. On the other, the repertoire programmed at Covent Garden seemed so far removed from the “national drama”— a term that emerged in this period and was indelibly linked to Shakespeare— that it could not be justified on merit either. Once again, we find melodrama in the middle of this story. As Diego Saglia sets out in his contribution to this volume, British critics were deeply conflicted about this fashionable import taking over British stages, not least because of its apparent hybridity and “monstrosity.” Nevertheless, the management at Covent Garden sought to appease the rioters by programming works much closer in style to those found at the illegitimate theaters south of the Thames. In a revival of George Colman’s Bluebard and in the horse spectacle Timour the Tartar, the theater found temporary success but eventual terminal decline— at least in terms of any claim to special status among the capital’s theaters. Looking beyond the local context, the case of Covent Garden invites us to consider melodrama not only as a set of shifting cultural practices but also as a more stable sort of assemblage or genre, one with the potential to provoke fierce reactions and effect long-term change.

Readings Given our emphasis on destabilizing scholarly narratives by showing historical and geographical variability as well as processes of contestation and (re)definition, it seems timely to ask whether a history of this genre is possible without making claims about essential characteristics and in-

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fluential developments. If contingency is the watchword, then why invoke genre at all? The challenge, we suggest, is to pursue a genre- sensitive history that avoids the reductive, teleological traps of old-fashioned histories of genre evolution. One means of doing this is to trust further in the vocabulary of our historical informants: if repertoire or techniques were routinely identified as “melodramatic,” then we can assume that the word meant something to those who used it. At the same time, we might consider the prevalence of genre as a framing device for discussions about all kinds of theater in this period. The Napoleonic regulations of 1806–7, for example, famously designated particular genres to particular institutions, with the Porte Saint-Martin dedicated to the “genre known as melodrama, to pieces with grand spectacle.” However, if this appellation gives the impression of a neat distribution of performance practices, we would do well to remember that one of the commonest complaints against melodrama was its apparent mixing of genres. This brings us to one of the central paradoxes of early melodrama: on the one hand, it was accused of combining elements from multiple genres; on the other, it was decried as predictable and formulaic. To take the first point: the idea of melodrama as a generic transgression was apparent in the reception of the earliest melodramas, from Rousseau onward. When Benda’s setting of Rousseau’s Pygmalion arrived in Berlin in 1797, almost twenty years after its composition, the travesty of the technique was expressed by at least one review in terms of genre: “Melodrama is a play that should be lyric, and isn’t; it seeks to replace the lack of tragic power with the magic of music, and destroys this magic, in that it avoids song; it doesn’t have the passionate conviction of tragedy or opera.”59 Clearly melodramatic technique, already a “media-bastard,” as one recent collection has called it, is not the only type of music found in the range of stage works called melodrama in the period covered by this volume.60 We have already shown how this was the case even within the German tradition of Benda’s imitators: attempting to vary the monotony of pure melodramatic technique, Reichardt, Schulz, and even Benda introduced arias and choruses. In England, without such regulation, melodrama found the greatest musical eclecticism. The young Meyerbeer’s diaries, for example, record him in London, on Sunday, 16 December 1815, attending a “melodrama with song.” This formulation would have been unremarkable for English audiences, who were used to melodramas that maintained many of the conventions of ballad opera, with the addition of musical cues along the lines of the French or German models.61 But such hybridity was distasteful to many critics. The Monthly Mirror opined that melodrama was “an olla podrida [Spanish stew] of tragedy, comedy, opera,

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farce, and pantomime, partaking more or less of any of the qualities of these, as the whim and judgment of the writer pleases.”62 In a volume on modern British drama edited by Walter Scott, melodrama’s eclecticism is linked to the decline of a more elevated tradition: “The English Opera seems now in its wane before a still more unregulated anomaly, the modern Melo-Drama, in which all that can mingle, may.”63 But if melodrama has always been considered by some a bastard of mixed origins, how did it also come to be considered so excessively generic and conventional? The Traité du mélodrame, for example, takes as its premise that the genre can be entirely codified, like a recipe, since it contains no internal logic but is merely an assemblage of shopworn elements. But by now any simple dismissal of repertoire as “formulaic” should make us suspicious. As Emanuele Senici has observed, “mere” conventionality is an accusation wielded in defense of a high-art canon sustained by Romantic claims of exceptionalism.64 Early melodrama— particularly the boulevard variety— is a case in point. However, we can benefit from recent scholarship addressing the uses of musical formulae: Nicholas Mathew has shown that it is as possible to find off-the-peg tropes in Beethoven’s Eroica as it is in his Wellingtons Sieg, despite the fact that the former has long been valued much more highly than the latter.65 Jens Hesselager’s chapter in this volume seeks precisely to complicate the high/low divisions that have often prevented us from seeing the musical formulae shared between opéra comique, mélodrame, and German-language opera (in this case, Fidelio); he further suggests that quotations and stock devices may have been used ironically as part of a complex intertextual web of reference and allusion. His examples might go some way to suggest how melodrama could be both mixed and formulaic, an olla podrida of conventions from a variety of genres, including not only opéra comique but pantomime, chivalric drama, farce, and, as Sarah Hibberd suggests, spectacles d’optique.66 If we were to claim that melodrama did function as a particular stabilizing force in relation to musical meaning, we might look again at the description of music in the Traité du mélodrame: If the whole orchestra, acting together, produces muted lugubrious sounds, it is the tyrant who approaches and the whole auditorium trembles; if the harmony is sweet and soft, the unfortunate lover will appear before long, and all hearts become tender; but if the movement becomes lively and playful, the naïf is not far away. . . . In fights, it is the orchestra that makes some of the loudest noises. In effect, when the heroes come to blows all the instruments thunder, whistle or roar

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in unison: in massed fights, the sounds deliver, as it were, battle; in individual fights, the clashing of arms is heard under the bows of the musicians.67

This employment of clichés of musical meaning could, of course, be explained by modes of production. Like Italian opera, melodrama scores were often produced quickly, with composers relying on musico- dramatic conventions; like Italian opera, melodrama scores sometimes recycled material. For Pixerécourt’s Robinson Crusoé (1805), for example, the music for the Parisian premiere was a collaboration between Louis Alexandre Piccinni and Gérardin-Lacour. In act 1, at the point when Friday is reunited with his father, the cue reuses music from the Parisian score of Pixerécourt’s La femme à deux maris (1802)— music by Gérardin-Lacour.68 Following Hesselager, we could make a case for deliberate intertextuality here: the recycled musical cue came from an analogous situation of filial/parental emotion in La femme à deux maris: the entrance of the main character, Eliza’s son, from a previous marriage, whom she cannot acknowledge. Was it Gérardin-Lacour’s intention in Robinson Crusoé to refer directly back to this earlier moment? And/or did the reuse provide grist to the mill of melodrama’s critics, indicating that scores were an assemblage of conventions, moments of generalized semiotic content rather than dramatically specific ones? We might also think about the stabilizing of musical meaning within melodrama from another perspective, by viewing melodramatic technique as an extreme of a more general form of small-scale, short-term musical communication, whether with text or gesture. This is the territory explored by Waeber in her study of melodrama from Rousseau to Schoenberg. Although Waeber’s argument is primarily addressed to the German tradition of melodrama, her concern for the existence of music and text on the same communicative plane may nonetheless be instructive when considering the “other” sort of melodrama. One of Waeber’s principal contributions is to dislodge the expectation that analysis should address thematic processes of development; more important, she says, is to consider how musical communication relied on the associations of instruments, melodic figures, and harmonic effects. When we abandon the expectation that a work should be viewed as a unified, organic whole, the musical language of melodrama— boulevard melodrama included— could in fact be thought of as avant-garde, released from the formal rationales and conventions of a “closed work.” Conversely, we might do more to acknowledge how the German tradition of melodrama was— like its boulevard cousin— sometimes criticized

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for being overdetermined in relation to textual or dramatic content. In his 1808 Der Gang nach dem Eisenhammer, for example, Weber used the orchestra to accompany declamation as well as to alternate with speech. In the weeks after the premiere in Berlin (and just before the premiere of Salomons Urtheil) the work became the object of intense discussion in two of the main Berlin papers. Even for admirers, Weber’s employment of musikalische Mahlerei— a category increasingly mentioned in relation to Benda’s works— was problematic.69 With some special pleading, the sound of the hammer portrayed by the orchestra was claimed by one reviewer to be an expression of the Count’s passion; as an alternative strategy, while admitting that the work contravened the “rules of aesthetics,” the same reviewer excused Weber on the basis that geniuses should not be rule-bound, and that such effects had been well received by the audience.70 Another critic asked what the words were doing, if the music was following the narrative so exactly.71 A third was prompted to weigh in with a three-page article about text setting, genre mixing, and melodrama. Arguing against the musical setting of poetry beyond simple strophic composition, and against melodramatic setting in particular, this last writer found it “intolerable” that instrumental music should accompany speech in order to “translate one art into the other”; this was hardly better than the “musicalization of paintings.” Melodrama, he concluded, “is quite out of fashion, although Benda was a splendid musical translator.”72 The leaking of the respective roles of the musical, visual, and textual into each other— so that none could fulfill its role adequately— was a large factor in the Berlin reception of Benda and Rousseau’s Pygmalion in 1797/98. Many in the press responded not so much to the particular melodrama as to the genre itself, and to aesthetic problems from twenty years earlier. But objections to the constant switching between text and music now take on a particular inflection, one reviewer arguing that the interruption of music by speech takes the audience away from the “ideal world” into which they had been transported, returning them to their own presence, and into the conversation of the auditorium.73 Another evoked similar terms, remarking that “the actor speaks in poetic prose. . . . Only the orchestra sounds in language of the ideal and dances in the beautiful rhythms of passion.”74 Here we find a familiar thread of German musical rhetoric c. 1800, spun against melodrama’s formal construction: the subordination of musical logic, and specifically musical communication in melodrama, sits uncomfortably with the increasing emphasis on music’s capacity to reach beyond, to express profoundly rather than directly. It seems possible that objections to melodramatic music’s formulaic structures and devices were objections to a specificity or directness of musical

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meaning that was already falling out of fashion by the end of the eighteenth century.75 But to listen for the meanings of early melodrama music only through the critical commentary of a select group of aesthetic modernizers is to take one of various sides in an extremely complex debate. As Waeber has shown, the “excessive” media play of the Rousseauian tradition did not entirely lose its luster in the nineteenth century: on the contrary, her study traces the afterlives of a particular technique in the “imaginary theater” of Berlioz and the “speaking bodies” of Auber. By the end of the century, when Zdeněk Fibich was working in the melodramatic tradition, it was unclear whether his debt was to Benda (a fellow Bohemian) or to Pixerécourt, whose plays had become so popular that they were, by the long process of cultural osmosis, part of the stage vocabulary of the day in both sung and spoken genres. What the Berlin critics do underscore, however, is the importance of music in the production of melodramatic meaning. Rather than taking this as a cue to berate the shortcomings of boulevard composers, or to redraw a line between the high-art tradition of Benda’s followers and the hack work undertaken by sub-Piccinnian arrangers, we might instead consider how a focus on melodrama music allows for alternative readings of expressive culture in general. Instead of assuming that all nineteenth- century audiences recoiled from the dead hand of instrumental mimesis, we might pursue the contours of an inherently multimedia aesthetics of music. The critical pitfalls are, once again, familiar— we know how later generations of elite musicians (Wagner is the best known) detested the apparent redundancy of melodrama, in which lighting, sound, text, and gesture seemed to repeat one another without any synthesis or transcendence of their brute effects. But the distaste of a few should not lead us to write off the experience of the many. Following Waeber, we might explore the formal fixation on the momentary and the transitory, without necessarily relating this to any overarching structure. Musicologists have become used to reading the c. 1800 moment in terms of increasing concerns for cohesion, increasing complaints about pastiche, and increasing expectation of novelty in musical language. But in many ways melodrama appears to be a contradiction of this model: even the supposedly “high” German examples are strangely fragmented and old- fashioned in their affective vocabulary. Perhaps the problem is not so much with melodrama as with our models of historical inquiry. By suspending or resisting existing historical narratives (melodramatic and otherwise) we can reopen the question of what early melodrama might have meant to audiences and others at different times and different

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places. This, in turn, allows us to lead from local questions to broad reflections on music theater and early nineteenth-century aesthetics. If the period was supposedly one in which the work concept became regulative, when the authority of genius gained a decisive foothold, and the fixed text began to organize beneath it a hierarchy of actors and audiences, the melodramatic narratives contained in this volume reveal a more complex set of stories. Since there was so much concern surrounding melodrama, and so much written in the wake of its popular and academic success, the genre presents a unique opportunity to think again about the musicotheatrical sphere during a pivotal moment in the history of European art.

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Ch a p t er 2

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Forms and Themes of Early Melodrama El l en L o ckh a rt

“Je forme une entreprise qui n’eut jamais d’exemple,” wrote Jean- Jacques Rousseau in the late 1760s: “I undertake a project that has no precedent.” The project in question was, of course, his Confessions, of which this is the famous opening gambit. Much ink has been spilled about this and the subsequent lines, wherein Rousseau claims uniqueness also for his person: the passage is the very “incipit of modernity,” Peter Brooks has suggested; it contains the seeds of romanticism itself, according to Richard Taruskin.1 But Rousseau could just as well have been referring here to another of his projects, a slighter work that was also unprecedented; he had begun to draft it a few years before he began the Confessions, and it saw the light in 1770, shortly after he had finished them. This was Pygmalion, a short drama based on Ovid’s fable about a sculptor in love with a beautiful statue. The novelty of this play (or scène lyrique, as Rousseau called it) lay partly in its materials: the actors alternately spoke and mimed, and their movements were accompanied by music. Like the Confessions, this Pygmalion inspired countless imitators. It was (as we will see) once understood to be the first melodrama— and is still accorded that status by musicologists.2 Yet in his seminal study of nineteenth-century melodrama Peter Brooks awarded originary status to the Confessions and not to Pygmalion. Brooks ignored Rousseau’s second foray into musical theater, as have most of his fellow literary historians. If melodrama is understood to be a theatrical genre featuring speech, gesture, and music— as has long been the case in the discipline of musicology— this is an incomprehensible omission. But it is a reasonable one if, like Brooks, we understand the term to denote a hyperbolic dramaturgy popular in the Parisian boulevard theaters just after the Revolution. After all, the Paris of Pixerécourt was the cradle of modern life, its melodrama a draft of purest romanticism— while a play on an ancient Greek source, for which the main actor wore both a peruke and a toga, would seem to be suffused with the stale odors of the ancien

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régime. And Brooks certainly had his sights set on modernity. He was interested in the dramas of Pixerécourt, Caignez, and Ducange not for their aesthetic value but because they presented the distilled version of a melodramatic mode within the prose of Balzac and James, and within modernity more broadly. “We might . . . do well to recognize the melodramatic mode,” Brooks concluded, “as a central fact of the modern sensibility.”3 In the final pages of his study, psychoanalysis itself is identified as a “systematic realization of the melodramatic aesthetic,” with the id, superego, and ego as psychic manifestations of melodrama’s stock characters. Brooks made these claims by asserting a kinship between melodrama’s golden age and his own: “I take Romanticism to be the genesis of the modern, of the sensibility within which we are still living.”4 My purpose here is not to expose the datedness of Brooks’s account, or to register (again) that he gave short shrift to music. Indeed, his study remains hugely valuable for its account of boulevard melodrama during the period 1800–1830, its influence fully merited. I would suggest, though, that Brooks caught Pygmalion’s shadow more often than he realized. After all, Pixerécourt and his colleagues knew Rousseau’s scène lyrique, and it was named as the prototype of their kind of drama, despite the significant differences in dramaturgy between it and the later repertoire.5 In his 1832 essay on le mélodrame, Pixerécourt himself defined the genre in explicitly musical terms, as “nothing other than a drame lyrique in which the music is produced by the orchestra rather than being sung”; one of his first apologists, Armand Charlemagne, similarly described melodrama in 1809 as “a drama, or in other words a dramatic action, for which the words are interspersed with melody or music,” and he identified Pygmalion as the first such work.6 If the term melodrama (broadly) means two different things now, in other words, it was not so bifurcated then. This chapter asks, then, what became of Pygmalion and its concerns in the years between 1770 and the first years of the nineteenth century; it asks what points of continuity there were between what I will call “early melodrama” and the golden-age or boulevard melodrama Brooks studied. The historical scope of this chapter is necessarily broad, then, and so is its geographical range. We begin in France, and end there too. But we will take account of other national traditions as well— particularly the English and the Italian, which have been neglected by historians of all disciplinary allegiances.7 This history spans from the final years of the reign of Louis XV through to the Napoleonic Wars: from high Enlightenment to high Romanticism, if you will. And it offers a unique opportunity to observe just how the “modern” transformed or supplanted earlier concerns.

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Rousseau Can a new genre be created by a single unique work, or do novelty works lead to new genres only after a shared practice emerges? This is a question of semantics, but a revealing one. New-historicists— who tend to prefer accounts of cultural practice and consensus to narratives of individual innovation— would give precedence to the latter notion. Yet many musical genres, including the most popular and resilient, were at one time conspicuous inventions, presented with all the fanfare of a magician pulling a white rabbit from a hat. Take opera, for instance. The “discovery” of monody by members of the Florentine Camerata, and their creation of the first all- sung dramas—Dafne (1598) and Euridice (1600), with texts by Ottavio Rinuccini and music by Jacopo Peri— are too well known to merit rehearsal in these pages. What is worth emphasizing here, though, is the extent to which subsequent attempts (Euridice, also 1600, with music by Giulio Caccini; Claudio Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo, 1607; Marco da Gagliano’s La Dafne and Monteverdi’s L’Arianna, both 1608) replicated not only the musical techniques set forth in the first two but nearly every aspect of their dramaturgy as well, even recycling much of their texts. The 1770s witnessed a strikingly similar process in the case of melodrama, with practitioners relying on many of the same fables as had the creators of opera, and touting a similar rhetoric of classicist revival. The first new work made in the model of Rousseau’s Pygmalion appeared on the Venetian stage in 1774, a year before Pygmalion itself was seen or heard in Paris. This was Orphée/Orfeo, a “lyric scene” performed in French with a dual-language libretto that also supplied the text in Italian. While this work is for all intents and purposes the second melodrama, it is virtually unknown even in the musicological literature, which has largely ignored the Italian melodramatic tradition.8 The text of Orphée/Orfeo is attributed to “L.B., pastore arcade.” Many have assumed that these initials referred to the Arcadian name of Tommaso Grandi, a playwright and actor who was a dedicated champion of Rousseauian melodrama on the Italian peninsula during the 1770s. But it seems more likely that “L.B.” was Louis Bursay, the French translator and actor who had performed Pygmalion to great acclaim both in French and in German in the two preceding years. (The topic he chose would prove popular among Pygmalion’s imitators: Grandi’s Orphée, scène lyrique had its premiere in 1784; Tommaso Puccini wrote the words for a Euridice melodrama in 1801.) Noting in a preface the success enjoyed by Rousseau’s Pygmalion among Venetian audiences, Bursay admitted to being a little disappointed in his own efforts; the only

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similarity between his scene and Rousseau’s (he suggested) was that of kind: genere.9 But what did genere mean here? After all, Rousseau had not specified which of Pygmalion’s qualities were “generic” and which were unique to the work, and Bursay did not elaborate. Thus we can only look for similarities. To begin with the obvious: Orphée/Orfeo was made from Pygmalion’s distinctively heterogeneous materials— its disjointed texture, its alternation of broken prose with mime and musical interludes. More surprising, though, is the extent to which Bursay also imitated the dramaturgy and form of his model. This Orphée/Orfeo comprises only a single scene, the lovers’ doomed walk out of the underworld; its proportions are identical to those of Pygmalion. About fifteen minutes long, the work is almost entirely composed of a long, tormented monologue for the hero, in which he tries to resist looking at his beloved. Both scènes lyriques feature only two actors: the hero named in the title and a woman whom he describes as his other half, who remains mute for most of the scene. The prose of Orphée/Orfeo, like that of its model, is broken up by italicized passages that tell the actors what to do with their bodies. Since there is little action in either scene, this is mainly a telegraphy of affect: for instance, Eurydice is first “fearful,” then “inquisitive,” then “patient,” and so on. Like Galatea in Pygmalion, Eurydice is mostly a silent, physical presence; both women spend the first third or so of the drama covered in veils. Galatea speaks in short bursts after she has come to life: “Moi / Ce n’est plus moi / Ah! Moi encore.” Orpheus’s beloved first speaks, in similarly truncated fashion, near the end of the drama, when his disobedience has ensured her demise: “Caro sposo / Dei, oh dei / Orfeo! / Io muojo.” Pygmalion concludes happily after an unseen deity gives life to the statue; perhaps more surprisingly, Orphée/Orfeo does likewise, as a bolt of lightning reanimates Eurydice. And then, of course, there was the musical component. No score survives for Orphée/Orfeo, but Bursay (if indeed it was he) promised that “the silences were filled by music,” and that this music was “analogous to the pantomimic expression of the actors.” The libretto does not describe it any further and fails even to name a composer; indeed, perhaps one had not yet been located by the time it went to print. The author admitted that he wrote the piece in some haste. In any event, the music was probably by the same composer who wrote for the ballets at the theater where this second melodrama saw the light (the libretto is silent on the latter point as well).10 After all, as we will see in greater detail below, the requirements of “pantomimic expression” were much the same in early melodrama as in pantomime. Orphée/Orfeo was performed between the acts of the main

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operatic entertainment, where, in the Italian tradition, freestanding pantomimes were usually given. This arrangement— in which a melodrama took the place of one of the dances— would become relatively frequent on the Italian peninsula. Orphée/Orfeo was labeled a scena lirica, after Pygmalion. Rousseau’s was a bland appellation, to be sure, but it accomplished a couple of important things. First of all, it asserted that the work was a piece of musical theater without an established (i.e., preexisting) genre. What was more— and this was almost unprecedented— it declined to lay claim to either the comic or the serious mode. To be sure, there was nothing comic about either Pygmalion or Orphée; nor was there any significant tradition of comic melodrama before later in the nineteenth century, except in the realm of parody. But neither could these works be described as serious, for the serious mode in both spoken drama and opera was regulated by sets of conventions establishing length, structure, characters’ social stature, and what might broadly be called tone. Ultimately, and with a few exceptions noted below, Pygmalion and its first imitators dwelt in that increasingly fertile space between the comic and the serious. When Georg Benda’s Ariadne auf Naxos was performed in Paris in 1781, the translator, Jean-Baptiste Dubois, used the designation scène lyrique interchangeably with another: mélo-drame. “Since we have not yet coined an expression for the new genre in question here,” Dubois claimed, implying that Rousseau’s own label was a mere placeholder, “we have decided to use a term already known.” That familiar term literally meant “musical drama” and was a translation of the Italian melodramma, for opera. Dubois justified this recourse to a term already in use by noting a similar case in spoken theater, which similarly involved a kind of generic middle-ground: “Larmoyante plays, which were neither tragedies nor comedies, came to be called dramas, as the word drama [drame] was applicable to all pieces of theatre.”11 This comparison was prophetic: as we will see, boulevard melodrama of the period 1800 to 1830 paired a dramaturgy descended from the drame larmoyante with the textual and musical conventions set forth in Pygmalion. In its first years, though, melodrama remained a classicist genre, drawing its story lines primarily from ancient Greek and Roman texts. Tragic fables were an important source: Benda’s most famous melodramas were Ariadne auf Naxos and Medea (both 1775). Among the Italians, Francesco Maria Pagano wrote an Agamennone (1787), Girolamo Masi supplied an Andromaca (date unknown), and Camillo Federici began his career with a Meleagro (1788), in which the hero burns to death onstage. But the most popular source by far was the Metamorphoses of Ovid. The stories

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of Pygmalion and Eurydice, of course, are told in book 10 by Orpheus himself. We have already noted the spate of Orpheus melodramas in the 1770s through the 1790s; during that same period, Rousseau’s Pygmalion remained a repertory piece in German and Italian territories, where it was translated, adapted, and parodied probably close to a hundred times. There were other Ovidian melodramas too. A catalogue of the earliest melodramas reads almost like a dramatis personae of the Metamorphoses: there were Echo and Narcissus, Hero and Leander, Atys and Cybele, Niobe, Prometheus, Pandora, Andromeda, Proserpina, Ino, Hercules, and Pyramus and Thisbe. It might seem odd that the first melodramatists turned toward the Greeks and Romans just as the iron grip of classicism was finally loosening in other stage genres— even the most staunchly conservative of all, opera seria. After all, by almost any measure, early melodrama was conspicuously avant-garde (or “anticonvenzionale, provocatorio e quasi sperimentale,” as Emilio Sala termed it).12 Its novel textures and jarring shifts were likely to please only those of a self-consciously modern sensibility, and irritate or bore most everyone else.13 Horace Coignet, who was conscripted to write most of the interludes for Pygmalion, reported to La Mercure de France that his famous collaborator “wished to give an idea of Greek Melopoea, of the ancient theatrical declamation.”14 Rousseau’s modern exegetes have been skeptical about the truth of this claim— indeed, perhaps more skeptical than they have reason to be— but the early audiences of Pygmalion seem to have accepted it without reserve. Promoting the work as a positive example for Italian theaters, Francesco Milizia repeated the claim verbatim (and without citation); so did Pietro Napoli-Signorelli.15 But there were other reasons for Pygmalion’s imitators to rely on ancient sources. First of all, in its earliest incarnations the genre was not capable of telling new stories, only retelling known ones. This was in part because of its tiny proportions. The first melodramas lasted between ten and twenty minutes in their entirety and featured only one or two characters; there was no time to sketch unfamiliar situations. The topic of a melodrama had to be chosen carefully so as to furnish a ready-made context for psychological conflict, in order to allow the central character to experience a variety of conflicting emotions. With a few exceptions, all early melodramas were soliloquies, interrupted by other characters only briefly, and only for the purpose of plot advancement. Indeed, one early theorist, A. Martineau, called for dialogue to be expunged entirely from the genre, lest it lose its purity.16 Jean-Baptiste Dubois, whose Ariadne translation was mentioned above, suggested that writers of melodrama

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avoid not only conversation but action as well. Early melodrama’s emphasis on the monologue may come as a surprise to devotees of Brooks’s study of the boulevard repertoire, which asserted that the only soliloquies in melodrama were creeds, devoid of emotional conflict and inner complexity. But many of Rousseau’s first imitators eschewed his term scène lyrique in order to identify their works explicitly as monologues: the English used monodrama and the Germans Monodram; the Italians preferred monodramma, monologo, or monologo lirico; and the first Spanish melodrama was Tomás Luis de Iriarte’s Guzmán el bueno (1791), which he labeled a soliloquio, u escena tragica unipersonal. Ovidian myth also supplied early melodrama with a trope of bodily animation, which was utterly central to the genre in its first decades. Galatea was a statue, given life in the final moments of the drama. The Pygmalion fable received several other melodramatic adaptations, including a scène lyrique entitled L’Anti-Pygmalion; ou, L’amour Promethée by PoultierElmotte (Paris, 1780; Napoli- Signorelli referred to this as Lagrime di Galatea and admitted that it did not fail to move).18 A similar theme may be found in the many Prometheus melodramas, which focused on that god’s creation of humans out of clay. In Pandore (Paris, 1789; d’Aumale de Corsenville, music by Franz Beck), Prometheus finds himself in front of the inanimate body of Pandora, whom he made. The Venetian Pygmalion fanatic Alessandro Pepoli wrote a Pandora (1787) for Prometheus, Epimetheus, and Pandora. Frank Sayers’s Pandora (1790)— the first work in English to be labeled a monodrama— is a soliloquy from the point of view of the animated statue, expressing her thoughts as she passes through the heavens toward earth. We have already noted how Eurydice is brought back to life at the end of Bursay’s L’Orphée, thanks to a well-aimed lightning bolt; a similar miracle reanimates Narcissus in the anonymous Echo et Narcisse, which played at the Ambigu-Comique in 1786. Federici’s Meleagro likewise concludes with a spreading of fire through the veins— though this time the added warmth is fatal. The hero’s mother has been protecting a piece of firewood that she stole from the Fates, because she has learned that her son will die when it is burned. After she learns that her son has killed his uncle and brothers, she places the brand in the fire. In a final monologue, Meleager meticulously describes the sensations of being burned to death from within. In 1814, the Venetian Troilo Malipiero adapted Salvatore Viganò’s pantomime Il Prometeo into a melodrama of the same name, subtitled La prodigiosa civilizazzione delle genti; after Prometheus brings the celestial electric fire down to earth, the first men and women are animated and rendered compliant by the spread of current through their veins. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, meanwhile, was given 17

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multiple melodramatic adaptations. Perhaps the most notable of these was Richard Brinsley Peake’s Presumption; or, The Fate of Frankenstein (1823), in which the creature was a pantomime role.19 Right from its inception, then, early melodrama was chock-full of people who hovered between animacy and inanimacy, the material artwork and the human. However— and this is important— this theme was not manifest in its story lines alone. Indeed, we might go so far as to say (paraphrasing Adorno on music) that early melodrama was a genre about animation, which meant that animation was never self-evident for it.20 To begin, the characters who dwelt on the borders of animacy— the Galateas, Pandoras, and other made humans— could cause a kind of empathetic transubstantiation among other characters in the drama. In love with Galatea, Pygmalion notes that his own viscera slacken and revive. Echo is similarly paralyzed by her observation of Narcissus, who is perishing of self-love before his own reflection. The hero in Malipiero’s Prometeo dies and is reanimated by the same fire that quickens the first humans. What was more, even during its first decades, in performance melodrama seemed to hover between the dramatic and the plastic. It is possible to link this phenomenon to the style of acting, which relied on a broad association between affect and actorly position that was codified by gestural manuals or acting alphabets. In his manifesto of 1781, for instance, Dubois noted that the series of diverse affects experienced by the central character in a melodrama “gives rise to nuances of position,” and these nuances offer the spectator “a new tableau at each moment.” 21 As Dubois’s account implied, and as is abundantly attested both by other verbal accounts and by melodrama texts themselves, performers often delineated the legible or paradigmatic attitudes from the transitional or accidental with a brief pause.22 Of course, the tableau was not unique to melodrama. In broad terms, though, the acting style of early melodrama departed from that of other genres in the sheer number of extreme emotional states to be portrayed within a relatively short time. A still more significant difference lay in the fact that in melodrama these affects were carefully listed in, and preinterpreted by, the libretto. In one sense, this system rendered always already redundant both the telegraphic way that these emotional states were performed and the engravings— such as Goez’s for Lenardo und Blandine (1783)— that were produced in abundance to codify them further.23 Modern historians of melodrama have rarely failed to make the most of these striking illustrations, or to draw comparisons to paintings and sculpture on the basis of the histrionic style they represented. Take Brooks’s formulation on the melodrama, for example: “Acting style was

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predicated on the plastic figurability of emotion, its shaping as a visible and almost tactile entity.”24 But melodrama’s affinity for tableaux was more than a matter of legibility— more, indeed, than a mere invitation to interpret. What semiological system could explain the tendency to freeze-frame even within action sequences, where there is no series of conflicting affects to be read? Take, for instance, Arnould- Mussot’s instruction for the chase scene in La forêt noire (c. 1795)—“after several tableaux, he captures Tony”— or Malipiero’s suggestion that the savages’ brawl in the first act of his Prometeo offered the actors an opportunity for “vigorous attitudes” (robusti Tablò). A few melodramas reproduced actual paintings: for example, act 1 of Cammaille-Saint-Aubin and Destival de Braban’s La fausse mère (1797) concluded with characters posing in an arrangement modeled after David’s Le serment des Horaces.25 It might be tempting to suppose that through such devices melodrama aspired to the permanence or even the status of the visual artwork. Yet this hypothesis is not borne out by the archive, which attests to few attempts to preserve any melodramas for future performance, anthologize them, or protect them from reworking. Indeed, quite the opposite. Rather, the periodic, concerted posing of the actors invited the spectator to momentarily heightened awareness— awareness of the paradigmatic moment— even though such moments damaged the dramatic fiction by constantly interrupting it.

Melodramatic Techniques Momentary cohesion, broader disjointedness: the formula accounts just as well for the music of most early melodrama as for its style of performance. This repertoire is notoriously unsatisfying as an object of aesthetic attention. Its modest ambitions were acknowledged as early as 1834, with Le ménéstrel famously suggesting that the music of melodrama should be “heard but not listened to.”26 This music also confounds historical attention through sheer scarcity: most of it is lost. Yet where scores are absent we may learn about the music of early melodrama from its printed texts, which supplied an unprecedented level of detail about how and when in the drama music was supposed to sound. By the time of Pixerécourt, playwrights had ceased to document the musical component so assiduously— but that does not mean that music was no longer an essential part of the drama. Rather, it means that the conventions that regulated its role within the drama were so firmly ensconced that such instructions were no longer useful. Indeed, surviving scores attest to an extraordinary

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degree of continuity between the earlier repertoire and the later. In other words, if the period from 1770 to the 1820s represents perhaps Western art music’s most significant watershed, both in the stylistic narrative and in terms of aesthetic status, these developments scarcely registered within the music of melodrama. In musical matters (as in most others), Pygmalion’s model was followed closely. The original scène lyrique interspersed the actor’s lines, given in regular typeface, with italicized passages that signaled the intervention of the orchestra and described what the actor should be doing as the music sounds. Most of the first melodramatists followed Rousseau in indicating a tempo for each interlude as well as the appropriate emotion. The following lines from near the middle of the first Spanish melodrama, Guzmán el bueno, are representative: [Guzmán] sits with a listless and dismayed gesture. He remains there as if absorbed, while the orchestra plays a largo affetuoso e lamentabile. This concludes with four or six bold strokes, in time with which guzmán rises, and then resumes in a more animated tone.27

Such instructions gave writers like Iriarte a pretense of control over a medium with which they often had little experience, and, in conveniently circular fashion, they provided audiences (should they have access to a libretto) with an easy guide to interpreting what they saw and heard. What was more, this language— and its attendant assumptions about how musical expression worked— persisted into the 1820s. In Peake’s Frankenstein melodrama, for instance, music accompanied the actors’ motions and, more importantly, “translated” the mute creature’s feelings for the audience; the libretto confidently names surprise, pleasure, conciliation, understanding, and more, as if such emotions could be acquired, experienced, and interpreted discretely. The language of affect in melodrama libretti was so much a given that the early theorists considered in this essay never mentioned it. However, two other characteristics were worthy of frequent notice. The first was that the music could serve specifically to prefigure the verbal utterance. We can see this principle at work in the passage from Guzmán el bueno quoted above: before the Largo the hero has become dejected, contemplating his imminent death; when the monologue resumes, he has regained courage. Iriarte instructed that the change of heart be signaled by four to six loud strokes at the end of the movement; it was then confirmed by Guzmán’s next words. Rousseau’s Observations sur L’Alceste italien de M. Gluck reflected on this preparative function: with Pygmalion, he

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claimed, “I imagined a genre of drama . . . in which the spoken phrase is somehow announced and prepared by the musical phrase” (j’ai imaginé un genre de drame . . . où la phrase parlée est en quelque sorte annoncée et preparée par la phrase musicale). While perhaps apocryphal— the autograph letter breaks off after “un genre de drame,” and it is suspected that an editor might have written the rest— the remark was often repeated. Martineau prefaced his Ariane by noting that in this sort of work “the music is but a preparation or announcement of what we will later hear and feel” (la musique n’y est qu’une préparation ou l’annonce de ce que l’on va entendre et sentir).28 The preparative function of music was one of the oddest features of early melodrama: it embedded a temporal disjunction of sorts for which there were no real analogies within other genres of musical theater. After all, while the overture or aria ritornello might signal what was to come, such moments were a musical foreshadowing of a musical eventuality. In other words, in opera, the music that prepares is repeated; the music that warns of an eventuality then returns with it. In melodrama, it falls silent and resumes transformed, over and over again. Perhaps, in theory, as Jacqueline Waeber has suggested, this strategy of preparation and sharing attempts to make music and text into one continuous medium. In practice, it held Pygmalion and its imitators open to the same critique of heterogeneity that was often applied to opéra comique for its alternation of spoken text with singing, and that Rousseau himself had directed at drames lyriques that included pantomime.29 This criticism was especially pronounced among the Italians, who even faulted their own serious opera for the stylistic disparity between recitative and aria. “One cannot imagine a greater lack of verisimilitude than accompanying or preparing with an instrumental ritornello the declamation of an actor who speaks rather than sings”: so wrote Francesco Saverio de’ Rogati upon witnessing Pygmalion’s premiere in Naples. For his colleague Ferdinando Galiani, it made Pygmalion a chimera, “half prose, half music”: Rousseau’s “monster creature” divided fell.30 If the music of early melodrama was out of sync with the spoken text, it was coordinated very carefully to the stage action. The rhythmic events and melodic contours were supposed to “represent” the physical motion of the actors— and the actors in turn were instructed to time their movements to the music. Note how the performer in Guzmán el bueno was told to stand up “in time to” the loud strokes (al compas de los quales se levanta) at the end of the Largo. For isolated actions such as this, the effect was one of indexical emphasis: the music pointed up the gesture, underscored it. Often, though, entire series of movements and gestures

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were quite literally measured in advance by their bespoke musical interludes. The 1771 Viennese version of Rousseau’s Pygmalion, for instance, calls for analogous music as the sculptor “tosses away his tools with disdain, becomes restless, walks, stops, reluctantly turns his gaze toward the bottom of his atelier where the pavilion hides a statue, turns away, and falls into a deep reverie.” In this case a score survives, by the Viennese pantomime composer Franz Asplmayr. He supplied chords for the tossing of the tools, a quarter- note walking bass for the promenade— overlaid with “restless” syncopations in the upper strings— and a written-out ritardando depicting the final stages of the pantomime.31 However committed in theory to pure representation, in practice this technique could bring about a kind of falseness— particularly when action sequences were performed in an unusually segmented and rhythmical manner. In a 1794 drame lyrique based on the novel Paul et Virginie, for instance, the performers are told to descend a mountainside in 4/4 time, matching their steps to the strong beats of the measure. The composer, Jean- François Le Sueur, encouragingly supplied rhythmical, downward-sloping melodies for their descent.32 The rhythmicity of early-melodramatic acting owes much to the reliance upon such simple musical ostinati. In the parent genre of freestanding pantomime ballet, as practiced by such figures as Jean-Georges Noverre and Gasparo Angiolini, repeating rhythms and melodies correlated to the repetitive stylized motions of “dance”: techniques, primarily of the legs and feet, that were notionally separate from expressive gesture or narrative mime. Of course, though, the actors in early melodrama did not dance; thus these ostinati were the noise of the medium, a kind of static (if you will) that crackles through nearly every bit of music. Dubois even suggested that melodrama texts could never be written in verse— because musical rhythm replaces poetic rhythm. In practice, versified melodrama was relatively common; Pygmalion was adapted into poetry by Arnaud Berquin in 1775, and its translations were as often versified as not.33 But Dubois’s formulation still captured an important distinction between melodrama and operatic recitative. In the former, but not the latter, the musical interventions were almost always allowed just enough time to establish their own meters, and these meters were independent both of the text and of each other. Paul et Virginie marked one of the first times that the techniques of melodrama came to be used within an opera. Le Sueur labeled this passage a scène hypocritique, an earnest reference (it has been assumed) to the Greek hypokritēs, stage actor, by way of the Abbé Dubos’s notion of musique contrefaiseuse.34 Yet Le Sueur might equally have chosen the term precisely for its ambivalence, acknowledging the way that melodramatic

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techniques suddenly changed the rules of musical representation: the very means by which its figures are made. If music is required to match the movement of a body or bodies onstage, it usually becomes radically simpler by necessity; plain scales and bald arpeggios move up or down as required. Another opera marked by melodramatic rupture is, of course, Beethoven’s Fidelio. In addition to the spoken dialogue in the dungeon scene, the opera contains many scripted movements and gestures that are depicted simultaneously by musical figures: one of these— the rolling of the boulder, matched by a rising chromatic scale in the orchestra— was famously singled out by no less a figure than Hector Berlioz as an example of the kind of risible musical depiction that serves no expressive purpose.35 These considerations bring us to the thorny problem of agency in early melodrama. A cliché of theater historiography holds that every new acting style was proclaimed to be truer to nature than that of the previous generation: thus acting techniques were always, impossibly, getting more natural. It seems significant, therefore, that such claims were rarely made about the acting in early melodrama, even though they were omnipresent in writing about the cousin genre of pantomime.36 Instead, it was said that the melodramatic performance did not require any intelligence or sensitivity— that any clod could do it. Remarkably, what enabled this was the presence of music; Dubois noted that the music “captures the actor and guides him, however little feeling he has” (entraîne l’Acteur & le guide, pour peu qu’il ait de sensibilité). Goethe struck a similar note in Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship: the actor Laertes tells how when he acts to the accompaniment of music, his movements are “animate[d]” and “control[ed]” by what the composer has supplied and not by himself; similarly, he is not responsible for determining the manner of delivery, or even the appropriate expression.37 Such accounts suggest that the actors relinquished control of their movements to the figures supplied by the orchestra. Yet when we turn to the music that supposedly did their thinking for them, the matter of agency only recedes further. This is partly a function of the profound disjointedness of the melodrama score: the brevity of most of its pieces, and the way these pieces are beholden to a verbal text, but unconstrained by the requirements of a musically coherent whole. Individual interludes— perhaps they should be called fragments— might last a mere couple of measures, containing only two or three chords. These can be interspersed in the monologue with something approaching the frequency of orchestral interventions in recitativo obbligato (though it bears remembering that they are not usually so frequent, nor so short).38 An extreme example is

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represented by Il Meleagro, some of whose monologues are interspersed with alphabetic indices of musical devices and preceded by headers noting that “the music precedes, and briefly expresses the following phenomena represented by the letters (a), (b), (c), (d), (e), (f),” and so on. There is something oddly positivist about this apparatus: it gives the impression that music is operating under a new legislation, binding it to phenomena, and curtailing its tendency to disrupt the unfolding of text (note Federici’s adverb briefly).39 Neither the short interludes nor the longer ones were required to supply any kind of musical closure. Indeed, they could either resolve tension or create more of it, depending on the context provided by the text— that is, depending on what gestures they needed to mirror, and what subsequent affect they needed to announce. Even the longest pieces of music within melodrama could conclude without musical resolution. Perhaps the most striking instance of this principle can be found in Coignet’s score for Pygmalion: the last movement, a gigue in the key of D major, fades permanently into silence after a half- cadence in E minor. The significance of this moment should not be overlooked: it makes Pygmalion the first music- theatrical work to end without a full cadence. If subsequent composers for the melodrama did not neglect closure to quite this degree, they took no pains to answer unresolved local events on a larger structural level. In other words, the analyst searching for musical coherence in this repertoire cannot establish it by ignoring the pauses between movements, or by searching remotely. A segment that concludes on an open cadence of F (for instance) is almost certainly going to be followed by any key other than F. Tonal consistency in a melodrama score is more likely to be the result of orchestration— for instance, the need for wind instruments or timpani to play in a set of related keys— than longrange tonal planning. The interludes that presage the return of Eliza’s first husband in La femme à deux maris (Paris, 1802; Pixerécourt, with music by Gérardin-Lacour) are mostly in G minor, but that is because this music featured what seems to have been an extraordinarily limited pair of horns in G. Indeed, harmonic disjointedness remained even when the music itself became continuous— that is, in melodrama repertoire in which the text was declaimed simultaneously with the accompaniment, and there were thus no pauses to accommodate speech. I do not mean to rehash the old adage that music bound to depict extramusical phenomena does not behave like music. Indeed, in the case of melodrama it behaves too much like music, laying bare its scales and arpeggios like a schoolroom exercise, while mimicking phenomena with the promiscuity of a plastic art form. I would suggest, though, that it gains

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a new syntax, and that is not merely because of the burden of representation but also because this music unfolds within a newly fractured kind of time. This temporality is unique to its genre. It is perhaps most clearly manifest in those attitudes that made early and golden-age melodrama alike unfold in a kind of stop-and-go metameter: a constant stutter in the diegesis. Also striking in this context is the three-column libretto printed for the 1771 Viennese premiere of Pygmalion and used in subsequent decades for most editions of Rousseau’s scène lyrique. Spoken prose and stage directions are on the left, descriptions of the music on the right— and in the middle column, the length of the interludes is recorded precisely in minutes and seconds. No such lengths— it is worth emphasizing— were given for the segments of monologue. One is compelled to ask what use could be made of these details. Were audience members encouraged to time the orchestra on their pocket watches and then lay the watches down when the actor resumed? Or was it a contract of attention, promising that no movement would tax listeners’ patience for more than two and a half minutes? No audience account survives to enlighten us; nor did the anonymous designer of this strange libretto explain himself. (It was not Rousseau.) I would suggest, though, that when clock time registers within or alongside the musical text, it registers as a resistance and not a complement to more usual kinds of musical unfolding. In recent Marxist historiography, this mode is referred to as “industrialized time,” which contrasts with the “rhythms” of a natural or task-oriented one. It emerged (so this line of criticism holds) alongside the pocket watch and the train schedule as indices of a soulless modernity. Time segmented by the minute and second is always already “homogenous and empty,” a means merely by which labor is measured and paid.40 And while the middle column in that Viennese libretto for Pygmalion was not imitated in other early melodramas, we might consider it a precursor of the innumerable grandfather clocks, pocket watches, and bell towers that count hours and minutes in the more modern dramaturgy of boulevard melodrama. Opera had aria time and recitative time; melodrama’s musical time was also clock time.

Modern Nature We began this chapter by asking whether new genres can be invented, or whether the term genre requires a genuine shared practice. Let us conclude by moving from typology to historical narrative, and trace the route from early melodrama— a self-consciously invented, experimental genre— to the boulevard repertoire, an extraordinarily popular genre

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whose conventions were determined to a large degree by success and demand. (Emilio Sala has suggested that there were perhaps a few dozen melodramas written before 1800, while the early nineteenth-century repertoire numbered in the thousands.41) In the 1780s and 1790s, librettists began to experiment with more recent literary and historical inspirations. Gaetano Pugnani wrote a series of movements representing monologues from Goethe’s Werther. The hero of Guzmán el bueno was a thirteenthcentury Spanish nobleman. Among the five Italian scene liriche published in 1785 by the Jesuit Manuel Lassala was Il misantropo, a monologue inspired by Molière. (The others were a translation of Pygmalion, a Didone abbandonata, a Partenza d’Enea, and another Andromaca.) Religious melodramas were more rare, but they did exist: Francesco Zacchiroli’s doubtless-entertaining scena lirica for Judas Iscariot was one (Giuda all’albero, 1795). A few writers attempted to write longer melodramas that included substantial dialogue and action— Federici’s Meleagro, for instance, was a tragic drama in five acts— but they had to confront the problem that musical interjections in the style of Pygmalion were not well suited to most sorts of dialogue. (Why, after all, did characters not simply answer one another immediately?) Two little plays written for the Théâtre des Beaujolais in the mid- 1780s, Annete et Basile and Alexis et Rosette, were labeled mélodrames and featured an alternation of spoken prose and music, but the latter consisted of instrumental snippets of popular airs, placed strategically in order to provide humorous commentary on the action.42 Thus it is difficult to consider these melodramas in any familiar sense. Rather, their authors— playwright Charles-Joseph Guillemain and composer Chardiny— fused some of their characteristics with traits that Rousseau endorsed elsewhere. The pastoral naïveté of these plots and characters, and the heard-it-before tunefulness of their interludes, mark both as closer in spirit to Rousseau’s first music- theatrical success, Le devin du village (1754). Intriguing though these may be, all of these experiments were false starts, giving rise to no larger tradition. More promising was L’élève de la nature (1781), with a text by Mayeur de Saint- Paul and music by Rochefort, based on the famous novel of 1761 by Gaspard Guillard de Beaurieu. It tells the story of an orphan boy who became the object of an experiment: for the first eighteen years of his life he was left in an underground location in an isolated village, with “only nature as his master.” The work was given first at the boulevard Théâtre des Grands Danseurs du Roi as a comédie en une acte, melée de musique; it was published again in 1787, newly labeled mélodrame. (The work seems to have been extraordinarily popular: a third edition appeared in 1791.) Perhaps the most important in-

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novation in L’élève de la nature was its ingenious excuse for the Pygmalionesque alternation of speech and pantomime: raised away from the civilized world, the main character communicates in the “natural” language of gestures.43 But the indebtedness of L’élève to Pygmalion went deeper than an engagement with its techniques. In mid- eighteenth-century French thought, the animated statue was cousin to the wild child: both were a means of considering the effect of sensory stimulation on the “natural” or untutored mind. Condillac’s Traité des sensations (1754), on which Rousseau closely modeled the animation scene in Pygmalion, described in detail how a statue could gain all the higher mental faculties through a progressive activation of its sensing organs; then the author tested his conclusions by relating the history of an orphan boy found in the Lithuanian wilderness. Also in this curiosity cabinet of empiricist objets-trouvés were people with missing sense organs— the blind, the deaf, the mute— who were seen as forcibly estranged from the civilizing process, and thus closer to the state of nature.44 In the 1790s and earliest 1800s there emerged a substantial body of works in the model of L’élève de la nature, which paired the techniques of early melodrama with a highly sentimental dramaturgy focused on wild children, deaf-mutes, and the blind. The hero of Pixerécourt’s first melodrama was found abandoned in the woods (Victor; ou, L’enfant de la forêt, 1798); his next success, Cœlina; ou, L’enfant du mystère, featured a central character, Francisque, who was mute. Pixerécourt returned to this formula memorably with one of his most popular melodramas, Le chien de Montargis of 1814, and again in 1828 for La muette de la forêt. The hero and heroine of Paul et Virginie (1792) are children of nature. Thomas Dibdin’s popular melodrama Valentine and Orson: Creatures of Clay (Covent Garden, 1804) tells of twins separated at birth: Orson, raised in the forest by a bear, was played in the premiere by the celebrated mime and acrobat Jean Baptiste DuBois. One of the first American melodramas was A Blind Boy (1807), by W. B. Hewetson. These works represent the mere tip of the iceberg. In all of them, the challenge of adapting the melodramatic techniques (namely, substantial mime, music-gestural mirroring, and music-speech alternation) to a long, multicharacter dramaturgy is answered with a character who does not or cannot speak, or who is otherwise estranged from society. It was in this repertoire that Pygmalion’s materials first came to be fused with the dramaturgy of the drame. However, as should now be clear, its preoccupations remained, along with many of its tropes. In some cases the afflicted personage is cured in a climactic onset of speech or vision, which takes the place of the animation scene in Pygmalion: the removal of Adelinda’s

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bandages following cataract surgery in Federici’s La cieca nata (1798), for instance, prompts her to exclaim Galatea’s first word, Io, over and over, as a new energy surges through her veins. Elsewhere, the trope of the “speaking” artwork is rendered metaphorically: in Il quadro parlante e la muta orfanella (1834), an opera with staunchly melodramatic roots, a young woman rendered mute by trauma creates an oil painting to identify her parents’ murderer. As noted above, the most influential Frankenstein melodrama made the creature mute, a role for a mime dressed all over in monochrome gray as if he were a marble nude. One could take Brooks’s approach and interpret this body of work as supplying a “text of muteness” that reaffirms the expressionistic rule of melodrama precisely in its breaking. For him, it is further proof of the impetus toward total disclosure manifest in those famous lines of the Confessions. But in this matter, and as with so many of the other features of nineteenth-century melodrama identified by himself and later scholars— tableaux, and ideas figured as if in plastic; a confidence in the legibility of nonverbal signs, the speaking or telling object; the constant forcing of verbal tone toward the extreme; and last but not least, the constant presence of music— it seems equally productive to understand them as inheritances of a different Rousseauian legacy.

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Ch a p t er 3

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Continental Trouble

The Nationality of Melodrama and the National Stage in Early Nineteenth-Century Britain Diego S agl i a

In the advertisement to his translation/adaptation of René-Charles Guilbert de Pixerécourt’s Cœlina; ou, L’enfant du mystère as A Tale of Mystery (Covent Garden, 13 November 1802), Thomas Holcroft openly acknowledged the foreign provenance of his text by pointing out “the aid received from the French Drama, from which the principal incidents, many of the thoughts, and much of the manner of telling the story, are derived.”1 The success of this play, performed “about 37 times” in its initial run, contributed to popularizing the French term mélo-drame (usually spelled melodrame) as the customary denomination for this type of entertainment in early nineteenth-century Britain.2 The foreign term was still in use in the early 1830s, when John Genest, in his monumental account of the English stage, described Holcroft’s as “the first of those Melo-drames, with which the stage was afterwards inundated.”3 This distinctly un- English label brings into focus the pervasive foreign influence of Romantic-period theater in Britain, and the role of melodrama in this process. For early nineteenth- century commentators, the genre was most immediately problematic as a hybrid that, in Jacky Bratton’s words, wove “its meanings from music, mime, comedy and spectacle” and relentlessly contaminated a variety of other theatrical modes.4 Yet, as this chapter will suggest, the question of its transnational features and dependence on foreign models and sources was just as vexed— indeed, held a central place in debates on its nature and significance. Focusing on the reception of melodrama in early nineteenth-century periodicals, I want to explore here how British reviewers and commentators discussed in terms of an invasive alien phenomenon what Matthew Buckley calls its “culturally polyglot” status.5 Repeatedly, the periodical press cast the imported yet also partly indigenous melodrama as a threat to the fabric and subsistence of national theater in the period: one of intense cultural and ideological instability, framed by the war-torn early

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1800s, when Holcroft’s A Tale of Mystery first appeared onstage, and the tense run-up to parliamentary reform in the early 1830s, by which time melodrama had become a staple of London’s theatrical seasons.6 During these decades, critical commentary in periodicals initially cast the genre as an outlandish “monster” and then gradually developed an attitude of tolerant resignation toward an inevitable, though highly controversial, component of the national stage. Some caution with regard to periodical criticism is in order. As Roger Parker has remarked in the context of opera and ballet discourse from the French Revolution to the mid-nineteenth century, reviews from this period constitute notoriously slippery sources for studies of reception: they tended to be written “to routine formulae” and express “agendas” prescribed by “financial and/or political interests.”7 With such caveats in mind, this chapter expands current perspectives on early nineteenthcentury theater by looking at its international and transnational features. Specifically, it examines the ways in which— in a milieu of rapidly mutating historical, social, and theatrical conditions— reviewers and other critics addressed the nationality of melodrama in relation to such themes as the decline of the stage, the solidity of the national tradition, and the moral and didactic value of spectacle at a time when, in Frederick Burwick’s words, theater in Britain “was at once an international venue and a showcase for national prejudice toward other countries, other customs.”8 Between the turn of the century and the early 1830s, a highly tendentious debate on the nationality of melodrama was attuned both to changes in relations between Britain and the Continent and to internal sociopolitical transformations; and, in more directly theatrical terms, it contributed to complicating contemporary debates about the national stage, in particular the impact of foreign contaminations on its status as a pillar of national cultural identity.

Melodrama and National Theater In his landmark history of English drama, Allardyce Nicoll reassuringly observed that, “in essence,” the late eighteenth-century stage was “thoroughly English,” for “its chief sources of inspiration are to be discovered in the works of Shakespeare and of his successors.”9 However, if Elizabethan and Jacobean models variously informed dramatic writing of this period, they did so within the confines of a legitimate theatrical culture that was steadily losing ground.10 By contrast, Continental drama was widespread and influential: Nicoll provided sizable lists of foreign adaptations in tragedy and comedy for the period 1750–1800.11 Similarly, for the

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subsequent half century, he noted that the French influence was so pervasive that “fully one-half of the plays written between 1800 and 1850 must have been suggested by Parisian models, and many were literally adapted by English authors.”12 The vast majority of these plays were melodramas or melodramatic adaptations of Continental originals. It is far from controversial to assert that many of the most popular plays on the London and British stage were either translations and adaptations of, or directly influenced by, foreign sources— from John Philip Kemble’s Lodoiska (1794) and George Colman’s Blue-Beard (1798) to James Robinson Planché’s The Vampire (1820), John Howard Payne’s Clari; or, The Maid of Milan (1823), or Henry M. Milner’s Masaniello (1829). Testifying to the diffusion and popularity of Continental plays, these and countless other works make the idea of an intrinsically English stage appear precarious at best. If theater in these years was, in Julie Carlson’s apt phrase, an “unsettled territory” fraught with multiple dangers, paramount among them was that of losing one’s national and cultural identity through collective cultural amnesia abetted by a deluge of foreign entertainments of questionable aesthetic and moral quality.13 As Katherine Newey remarks, ideas of the national stage as “a repository for a set of largely unarticulated but nevertheless powerful ideas about national identity” were recurrent throughout the long eighteenth century.14 Yet it was at the outbreak of war with France that discussions about the stage as a repository of national cultural capital emerged with renewed strength, and they gathered momentum after the Peace of Amiens in 1802– 3 and the arrival of mélodrames from across the Channel. The key problem in these debates was that Covent Garden and Drury Lane were officially royal and unofficially national playhouses. Moreover, Crown patronage extended to the Italian opera with its foreign repertoire and performers, the latter indignantly described by the Theatrical Inquisitor in 1812 as “the disgusting appendages of French dancers and Italian singers.”15 At a time when both opera in English and “English Opera” were in fierce competition with Italian opera, the London headquarters of the latter was the King’s Theatre in the Haymarket, a venue whose very name was a frequent cause for complaint.16 In 1824, the Theatrical Observer still lamented that the “Italian Stage in our British metropolis . . . has with so anti-English a feeling, been honored with the title of ‘the king’s theatre’ ” and informed its readers that its own relative neglect of the opera reflected an intention to “promote the interests of that native talent which we conceive is as worthy of admiration as any of foreign growth.”17 Matters did not improve when it came to assessing the nation’s dramatic repertoire. The legitimate playhouses were the appointed guardians

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of a canon centered on Shakespeare—“our great national Dramatist,” as Joanna Baillie wrote in her preface to Plays on the Passions (1798)— that might provide inspiration for new and original dramatic productions.18 Renaissance and, to a lesser extent, Restoration plays were the pivot of the national dramatic canon, which Samuel Taylor Coleridge identified with “Shakspeare, Jonson, and Otway” in his well-known critique of Charles Robert Maturin’s Bertram, published in the Courier in 1816.19 Both statements, however, are fraught with complications. In his attack on Maturin’s melodramatic tragedy, Coleridge saw the national tradition as an endangered species rather than as a staple of English (or British) culture. Baillie, as a Scottish playwright, had to balance the notion of a collective, English-language national dramatic tradition with the idea of a Scottish national theater, which inspired her to write The Family Legend, produced at the Edinburgh Theatre Royal in 1810 under the patronage of Walter Scott.20 More generally, London’s patent theaters were routinely accused of shunning the national canon in favor of lucrative, and often foreign, entertainments. During the Old Price Riots at Covent Garden in the autumn of 1809, protesters vociferously defended the national drama against foreign works and forms such as that “new species of mummery called melo-dramatic writing.”21 Over a decade later, the Drama for May 1821 leveled a similar accusation at the theater, charging it with promoting foreign works and performers and mangling the Bard for mere financial gain: “Lo! where uprears its head— yon splendid dome / (To which all foreign outcasts roam) / Falsely term’d ‘classic!’ and where shakspeare’s page, / Is turn’d and twisted— said—‘to please the age.’ ”22 Characterized by unofficial national playhouses, a foreign or foreigninfluenced repertoire, and audiences greedy for exotic fare, the conditions of a national theater seemed altogether unpromising. By contrast, when looking at Continental Europe, British commentators thought they perceived an enviable panorama dominated by discourses about, and official support for, national drama and theater.23 A particularly significant case was that of Germany, where the question of a dramatic canon had been a central theoretical preoccupation among critics since at least Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s Hamburgische Dramaturgie (1767– 68).24 As for playhouses, the first “National Theatre” in the German states opened in Hamburg in 1767, while Vienna inaugurated its own venue at the Burgtheater in 1776, and William Frederick II of Prussia founded Berlin’s “Royal National Theatre” in 1786. In actual fact, given the relative scantiness of the German-language repertoire, these theaters often resorted to staging foreign works. In addition, as the Monthly Magazine noted in

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February 1800, Germany was politically fragmented and thus could not sustain a truly national playhouse— an institution that could only exist in a unified state and a metropolis such as London or Paris. Nevertheless, the fact remained that the German states boasted “four chief theatres” which “lay[] claim to the honorary name of National Theatre . . . those at Vienna, Berlin, Hamburg, and Frankfort.”25 Also, although recent and comparatively less rich than the British, the German dramatic tradition was interpreted as thoroughly national after the anti- Teutonic theatrical hysteria of the 1790s and early 1800s subsided: German drama started attracting appreciative commentary in, for example, the groundbreaking series of “Horae Germanicae” essays published in the Tory Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine between 1819 and 1828.26 Paris, however, was the crucial point of theatrical comparison throughout the period. There the Théâtre-Français (the present-day ComédieFrançaise) was the official home of the national canon of tragedies and comedies. In 1802, the Lady’s Monthly Museum informed its readers that this prestigious playhouse was “now called the National Theatre,” its preeminence eventually sanctioned by Napoleon’s imperial decree for reorganization of the theaters in 1806–7.27 Further comparisons with France, especially with the resumption of normal communications after Waterloo, made flaws in the British theatrical system even more conspicuous. In his Notes on a Journey through France and Italy (1826), the Francophile William Hazlitt extolled the Gallic stage as “the Throne of the French character, where it is mounted on its pedestal, and seen to every advantage,” and made the healthy state of a national theater coextensive with the public’s awareness of the national import of its own dramatic heritage. Whereas the French “have . . . a national theatre and a national literature, which we have not,” Hazlitt despondently noted, in Britain “if a person has a fancy for any of our elder classics, he may have it to himself for what the public cares.”28 With his knowledge of the French dramatic tradition and contemporary theatrical scene, Hazlitt was, of course, an unusual commentator. When reviewers looked abroad and drew parallels with the situation at home, their observations habitually replaced familiarity with foreign drama with ideologically charged preconceptions and clichés. From the early 1800s to the end of the war, engagements with the idea of national theater and the nationality of that “new species of mummery called melodramatic writing” tended to reflect prevalent wartime hostility against foreign and especially French culture, as well as a lack of accurate information on other traditions. Indeed, in Jane Moody’s words, as “the meeting point between a rich variety of British and continental dramatic

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traditions,” its “foreign origins” intensifying its problematic role as a “dangerous dramatic virus,” melodrama was a controversial point of intersection of ideas of cultural nationalism and protectionism on one side and the intrinsically cosmopolitan nature of theater on the other.29 Far from becoming redundant, notions of melodrama as an alien body retained their pertinence in the Napoleonic aftermath, although with some significant modifications: in the 1820s and early 1830s, for example, aversion to French melodramatic imports became more specifically attuned to the climate of cultural and theatrical competition between London and Paris.

The Monstrous Foreignness of Melodrama The earliest critical reactions to Holcroft’s A Tale of Mystery, which were mostly appreciative, tended to stress its innovations, among which was its combination of legitimate, illegitimate, and musical features. For instance, while illustrating the function of music in melodrama, the Monthly Register clearly differentiated A Tale of Mystery from opera (“a dramatic composition, set to music, and sung on the stage”) and “what St. Evremond [Charles de Saint-Evremond] calls a chimerical assemblage of poetry and music,” while also praising Holcroft’s avoidance of “the absurdities of the recitativo” thanks to his blend of “the powers of eloquence” and “the magic of harmony.” Reviewers also noted the foreign credentials of melodramatic spectacle, producing assessments that were relatively free of xenophobic overtones, since the play appeared during the short interruption of hostilities decreed by the Peace of Amiens (March 1802 to May 1803). The Monthly Visitor called Holcroft’s work “as masterly a combination of all the requisites which are essential to fascinate the public as any production of a similar nature that has been brought forward for many years on the boards of a London theatre.” Mixing praise with a degree of caution in its allusion to the “nature” of melodrama, this commentator found nothing wrong with the fact that the play was “adapted from the French to the English stage.” Similarly, the Poetical Register did not censure Holcroft’s attempt “to introduce on the British stage, a species of entertainment hitherto unknown to it”; still more overtly, the Monthly Register extolled him for “transplanting the beauties of the exotic into the British garden.”30 Nevertheless, as melodramas began to multiply on the London stage, their composite makeup went from a matter of fascination to a byword for incoherent jumble, the word itself becoming a term of censure for plays that were “neither completely tragical, nor comical, nor burlesque, but rather a species of confused melo-drame.”31 In addition, as products of Napoleonic France, melodramas posed serious ideological

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problems after the Peace of Amiens: adverse critics started to denounce their deformed and deforming foreignness, beginning with that of their progenitor, Holcroft’s Franco-British mongrel. Emblematic in this respect was a piece entitled “The Monster MeloDrame,” published in the Satirist of January 1808 together with a striking cartoon.32 The question of national provenance plays a central role in this depiction of a chimera-like creature; the monster itself declares: “How I came into the world, or to whom I am indebted for my birth, appears to be a tale of mystery. I partake, as you see, of the combined natures of Tragedy, Comedy, and Pantomime.” If shameless disregard for the dramatic genre system is one side of the bastardized nature of this extraordinary creature, transcultural hybridity is another. The monster goes on to explain: “I am occasionally visited by writers of every description and country,” since if “Germania’s sons, perhaps, are most indebted to me,” they in turn influence “your countrymen, who, from some strange and unaccountable impulse, delight to imitate their foibles, immorality, and prejudices.”33 Whereas neoclassical poetics promoted imitatio as a revered practice ensuring continuity with Greco-Roman precedents, here it is seen as unacceptably drawing on ideologically and aesthetically unsuitable models, contradicting the principles of originality and ethics pervading patriotic cultural criticism during the anti-Napoleonic conflict, and powering the uncontrollable proliferation of melodrama. The piece also testifies to a conception of German theater as inherently melodramatic, this based on the controversial popularity of such playwrights as Friedrich Schiller and August von Kotzebue in 1790s Britain.34 As a construct combining the perceived gothicism, sentimentalism, and disregard for social and moral conventions of their output, this idea of “German melodrama” circulated well into the nineteenth century, despite the fact that it was not much supported by the actual production of melodramas from Germany on the contemporary stage. In the same year as “The Monster Melo-Drame,” the German label reappeared in another humorous attack on melodrama as a foreign excrescence. This was a piece in Le Beau Monde entitled “Managers and Melodramas,” a tongue-in-cheek remonstrance against the supposed rejection by the London theaters of a “most admirable, and . . . effective performance”: a drama with impeccably foreign credentials thanks to its “German tinge,” foreign “characters and circumstances,” and its status as a translation, which, as the author ironically remarks, could raise “no objection with modern managers.” The article then reproduces this unfairly rejected masterpiece, aptly titled Steali; or, The Lady of the Gaol, a oneact melodrama set in Alsace and recounting the evil Count von Snarl’s

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thwarting of the love of Count Steali for Miss Bluffenberg. The short text is peppered with bombast, implausible situations, pantomime, the use of banners, and suggestions for songs and incidental music. Interestingly, it also features a metatheatrical reference to the vogue for melodrama in the form of Miss Bluffenberg’s “ode” to the power of sleep: “Sleep, that like a melodrama, stupifies the brain, and fills the mind with incoherent visions— that like a Tale of Mystery, perplexes the understanding— that binds our sense as fast as a Lady on a Rock— that holds reason as in a Fortress, and deceives while it seems to tickle ye [i.e., Tekeli].”35 The list also hints at Lumley Skeffington’s Sleeping Beauty (Drury Lane, 6 December 1805), Matthew G. Lewis’s The Wood Daemon (Drury Lane, 1 April 1807), and James Kenney’s The Blind Boy (Covent Garden, 1 December 1807). Yet the most telling references are those to Holcroft’s foundational work and Theodore Hook’s Tekeli; or, The Siege of Montgatz (Drury Lane, 24 November 1806): the title Steali; or, The Lady of the Gaol presumably was also intended to refer to the latter, which was Hook’s adaptation (or indeed theft) from Pixerécourt’s original Tekeli; ou, Le siège de Montgatz (1803). With its multiple Germanic traits, Steali manifestly channels the stigmatization of German drama as a source of moral and political corruption; as Michael Gamer suggests, such attitudes had replaced its enthusiastic reception between 1788 and 1794, owing to the climate of “obsessive vigilance . . . over linguistic purity and cultural inviolability” caused by the Terror and the outbreak of war.36 In point of fact, Steali reads like an updated reprise of The Rovers, the parody of Germanized gothic drama published over two issues of the Anti-Jacobin in June 1798, and essentially a hodgepodge of controversial German plays such as Schiller’s Die Räuber and Kabale und Liebe, Kotzebue’s Graf Benyowski and Menschenhass und Reue, and Goethe’s Stella.37 Adapting this parodic formula, Steali shows how, a few years after the first performance of A Tale of Mystery, the reception of melodrama and its foreign provenance reworked the language and forms of counterrevolutionary attacks on German drama, a form that still enjoyed currency at the time of the rise of Napoleon and the intensification of invasion scares. In the year of the premiere of A Tale of Mystery, anti- German and more generically Europhobic sentiments flared up in William Preston’s “Reflections on the Peculiarities of Style and Manner in the late German Writers, whose Works have appeared in English; and on the Tendency of their Productions,” published in installments in the Edinburgh Magazine between November 1802 and February 1803. A stalwart of counterrevolutionary propaganda thanks to his play Democratic Rage (1793), Preston

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depicts the German theatrical invasion as “an extraordinary revolution” caused by the “extraordinary degree of avidity, and almost exclusive attention, with which the public has of late received every coruscation of fancy, from the north, however pale and lurid.” Charging Goethe, Schiller, and Kotzebue with an “irruption of Gothic barbarism and ferocity” into the nation’s theaters, he finds them guilty of making “a shambles and charnel-house of the stage,” filling audiences with a “distempered rage for the gloomy, the horrible, the disconnected, the disproportioned, and the improbable.”38 Peter Mortensen appropriately emphasizes the intensity of anti-German feeling in Preston’s piece, yet also reads it more broadly as a “perfect summa of Europhobic grandiloquence,” in keeping with anti-Jacobin and counterrevolutionary discourse.39 An attack on hybrid theatrical productions combining German texts and French ideas, Preston’s “Reflections” anticipates Coleridge’s denunciation of the German “modern jacobinical drama” in 1816.40 As such, it bears valuable witness to the manner in which commentators conflated different European dramatic, theatrical, and cultural traditions into a construction of Otherness that sacrificed accuracy in favor of ideological expediency in ways that reemerged, with all due modifications, in early discussions of the foreignness of melodrama. A reprise of this type of aggressive discourse, now cast in the mold of The Rovers, the spoof melodrama Steali provided a formal and ideological critique of the invasion of Continental melodrama. At the same time, the rabid tone and aggressive imagery of Preston’s piece reappeared elsewhere— for example, in articles such as that published by Le Beau Monde later in 1808, which attacked melodramas as expressions of “the corruption of the French and German school,” plays that were, with an obvious nod to “The Monster Melo- Drame,” “rightly represented as monsters.” In addition, this piece clarifies the ideological reasons for the demonization of melodrama’s foreignness: it establishes a link between the importation of alien theatrical fare and ideological treason, and although the author refers specifically to French plays, their noxious effects are compounded by the Teutonic influences enshrined in the enduring stereotype of “German melodrama.” As its author remonstrates, while “our warriors shed their blood to keep our foes from our shores,” dramatists impudently adapt French plays that “cannot be entirely purified from the Gallic opinions they contain,” and deceive audiences into believing they are applauding British patriotic sentiments while in fact they are being treated to expressions of veneration for Napoleon in English translation. Equating the public’s appetite for “foreign delicacies” to a betrayal of the patriotic cause, this commentator makes explicit the ideological

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and political import of melodrama’s foreignness between 1802 and the end of the war in 1815— a foreignness which, over these years, was still consistently read in light of the ideological conflicts of the revolutionary decade.41

The Hybrid Nationality of Melodrama With the return to peacetime relations between Britain and the Continent, the foreign provenance of melodramas retained its centrality in theatrical debates, although with different ideological concerns at stake. These become visible from a review in the Theatrical Inquisitor about Samuel James Arnold’s comic opera The King’s Proxy; or, Judge for Yourself, with music by Thomas Cooke (Lyceum, 1 August 1815). Finding fault with nearly every aspect of the work and its performance, the critic also stresses its lack of originality, since Arnold “has probably read a French Melo Drame entitled Edgar, ou la chasse aux loups”; and announces that, in order to counteract such deceptions on the British public, the periodical plans to offer readers regular reports on French drama, which “will give them fresh cause to admire the originality of our dramatists.” The next issue duly provides accounts of Louis-Charles Caigniez’s Edgar and La pie voleuse (respectively adapted for the London theaters by Arnold as The Maid and the Magpie and by Isaac Pocock as The Magpie or the Maid?, 1815) and condemns the contemporary passion for “all the trash produced at the innumerable Parisian theatres.” Alerting readers to the fact that “during the two last months we have continually heard of the visits of Messrs. [Alexander] Rae and [Charles] Farley to Paris for the purpose of culling the choicest fruits of French drama to adorn our English Theatres,” the reviewer identifies the resumption of communications between the two capitals as a main cause for the unprecedented numbers of inferior French plays on the London stage.42 Performers, dramatists, and musicians traveling to Paris to bring back the latest hits were nothing new. In 1784, Holcroft attended several performances of Beaumarchais’s Le mariage de Figaro in order to memorize the jealously guarded text, which he then transcribed and translated as The Follies of a Day (Covent Garden, 14 December 1784). Again, in 1791, Michael Kelly traveled to Paris to attend performances of Lodoïska, with music by Luigi Cherubini (on a libretto by Claude-François FilletteLoraux), the score of which he brought back to London, where the play premiered in 1794. However, this established practice saw an exponential increase after 1815, when unimpeded travel to the Continent resumed and both the patent houses and a new breed of illegitimate theaters such as

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the Coburg, the Surrey, and the Adelphi required constant new materials to satisfy audiences and stave off competition. In this context, as the Theatrical Inquisitor highlights, melodrama continued to constitute a major and intensely controversial object of importation. By the mid-1820s, the genre was resolutely gaining ground: theaters (especially the minors) could draw on a substantial repertoire of texts by a swelling cohort of playwrights, many of them translations and adaptations.43 True enough, an outstanding place in this output was held by new domestic and nautical melodramas, such as William Thomas Moncrieff ’s The Lear of Private Life (Coburg, 1820) and Douglas Jerrold’s Black-Ey’d Susan (Surrey, 1829), which offered popular, homegrown, resonantly patriotic entertainment. Yet more generally the genre retained its suspiciously foreign character, although this was now not so much because of its associations with trouble of an ideological, political, or military kind but rather for reasons of cultural rivalry. Even if Britain had gained military, political, and economic supremacy in post-Napoleonic Europe, France and Paris retained their cultural primacy and were still the main suppliers of theatrical entertainment, and thus a serious threat to national drama and theater at home. In this context of competition and comparisons with the Continent, critical discussions of the nationality of melodrama after 1815 began to outline profiles of the different national melodramatic schools. Whereas the articles and reviews examined in the previous section combined subversive French and German features into a single melodramatic “monster,” post-Waterloo interventions opted for a discriminating approach aimed at verifying (or denying) the existence and place of English melodrama in the composite map of European melodrama. In March 1818, the Theatrical Inquisitor published a piece entitled “On Melo- Drama,” which rehearsed the idea that the genre’s success lay in the “inertness in the minds of the spectators,” but refused to “pronounce against that, which evidently possesses so exclusive an influence over the imagination of the public.” The author also hastened to add that “this species of drama is not indigenous to our stage,” although it was unclear whether it originated “on the French, or on the German theatre.” This opening remark was then followed by a brief survey of these melodramatic types: A considerable difference . . . may be marked between the German and the French melo-drama. The former seizes the imagination with more force, contains more of character, its incidents are more striking; wonder and horror its principal objects; the French is more gentle and

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delicate; it rather fascinates and insinuates, its character is wild, and its incidents please, rather from a delicate and fanciful construction; the surprise it excites is mingled with mild and pleasing sensations, and it addresses the milder feelings.

These models are seen as responsible for the recent evolution of melodrama in Britain: “As imitated from the one or the other, the English melo-dramas vary; the German was our first model, which is now entirely superseded by the French.” By invoking imitation, the author parries accusations about the indigenous birth of melodrama, highlighting its disheartening unoriginality and “non-nationality.” When it comes to melodrama, the British stage is either French or German— never really English. At the same time, the article is an important testimony of a fait accompli: although defective and extraneous, melodrama is a dramatic and theatrical reality that cannot be disregarded. Neither an “insignificant, spurious offspring of the drama,” nor a pernicious growth that might cause irredeemably “great dangers to our stage,” it is “an innocent and transient substitute for the drama,” bound to vanish as soon as the public’s taste and intellect improve.44 Hard put to find a via media between acceptance and condemnation, the Theatrical Inquisitor registers melodrama and its problematic international origins as inevitable realities in present- day culture, even as it voices a pious hope about its rapid demise. Commentators regularly continued to denounce melodrama as a corrupting spectacularization of “vehement feeling, and wild adventure,” as well as “the marvellous and the extravagant” infecting and eroding the repertoire of “the great national theatres.”45 Yet, as the Theatrical Inquisitor intimates, increasingly tolerant assessments began to appear alongside rejections of its alien provenance, since critics could not overlook its popularity and unstoppable proliferation; concurrently, discussions of the features of French and German melodrama served to assess the nature and status of this newly predominant genre in British theater. In 1822 a review in the Drama of The Murderer; or, The Devoted Son (Surrey Theatre, 5 August 1822) opened with a customary lamentation (“Our stage precariously exists too long, / On French translation and Italian song”); but, instead of endorsing this “old adage,” it went on to declare that, “if we feel entertainment from the production, we care but little whether it be from an English, a German, or a French pen, although our frequent seizures on the Dramas of the German and French certainly intimates a decay in our own talent for Dramatic writing.” While making a nod to more conservative readers and spectators, the author refuses

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to damn “those pieces which have been transplanted from the Parisian capital to our own,” saying that “they certainly have had incident, and ingenious contrivances, to ensure a recommendation, and are generally worked up to a pitch of intense interest that makes them in the long run great favourites with the public.”46 As these words suggest, the gradual inclusion of melodrama among acceptable genres in the 1820s was bound up with the rise of the “popular” (meaning “of the people”) as a powerful cultural and political category and a distinctive trait of theatrical entertainment in these years.47 Moreover, the indirect way of absolving melodrama of its worst crimes results once again in an examination of the specific traits of French and German melodrama in terms of their aesthetic value and fitness for the British public. At this point the Drama reproduces almost verbatim (and without acknowledgment) the comments from the Theatrical Inquisitor’s “On Melo-Drama,” cited above. It rehearses the idea that while the German type foregrounds violence and horror to induce strong sensations in audiences composed of naturally sluggish people, the French reflects a national character stereotypically seen as sentimental, frivolous, and hedonistic: by this act of recycling (and plagiarism), the article in the Drama confirms the extent to which ideas about national schools of melodrama were becoming commonplace in the early 1820s. When it eventually turns to consider The Murderer, the same article describes a melodrama of the French type (based on a translation by J. H. Amherst) sharing themes and plot features with Holcroft’s A Tale of Mystery. It routinely records its success—“The Piece was received throughout by marked approbation and has since been nightly performed to overflowing houses”— but while registering the popularity of this play, the author refrains from commenting on the “decay” in the national “talent for Dramatic writing” voiced at the beginning of the article. The “overflowing” audiences attracted to the latest (translated and “French”) melodrama are a fact of present-day theater that deserves attention and respect.48 Even as this review and the piece it plagiarizes bear witness to the gradual acceptance of melodrama as a significant phenomenon, they confirm that its degree of foreignness still serves to distinguish between more or less acceptable, and differently popular, types. On closer inspection, however, the national types identified only partly reflect what was actually imported from, or constituted melodrama in, either France or Germany. Assessments of French melodramas were relatively more accurate, insofar as there was an abundance of translations and adaptations, the originals of which, generally already identified as mélodrames, could be easily obtained and compared to the English versions. Yet, as mentioned above, opinions about the French melodramatic type, its themes,

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and affective potential relied as much on time-honored and ideologically charged stereotypes of the French national character as on direct textual knowledge.49 Although equally stereotypical, the idea of a German melodramatic school was laden with additional complications. As anticipated above, interest in German theater had waned noticeably after the enthusiasm for Schiller, Goethe, and Kotzebue in the 1780s and 1790s: far fewer plays from Germany were adapted for the English-language stage in the first three decades of the nineteenth century.50 This fact explains the Theatrical Inquisitor’s observation, in 1818, that if the “first model” for melodrama in Britain was the German, it had been now “entirely superseded by the French.”51 The idea of German melodrama therefore seems to have drawn on earlier forms of theater from Germany: plays denounced by the Anti-Jacobin and Preston, and especially Kotzebue’s output. These may have been absorbed into discourse about melodrama by virtue of their extreme passions and use of incidental music and songs. Placed under the sign of melodrama (“many of [the Germans’] best plays are strong approaches to it”52) this tradition was construed as a collection of dark, violent plays, an image further reinforced by the “gothic” dramas of Adolf Müllner, Franz Grillparzer, and Theodor Körner reviewed by Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine in the late 1810s and 1820s, and then by the success of “the elaborate diablerie of the German melo-drame and music” that The Monthly Magazine in 1826 associated with “the Faust and the Freischütz” phenomena.53 Since this is what largely stood for “German melodrama,” there was little discussion in British periodicals from the early 1800s to the early 1830s of the tradition now associated with Georg Benda’s Ariadne auf Naxos and Medea from the 1770s. An isolated commentary appeared in the New Monthly Magazine of August 1823, where “G.L.E.” (G. L. Englebach) discussed the importance of “masterly instrumental support” to the successful effect of recitative, observing that this is especially visible in a species of composition introduced upon the German stage, about forty or fifty years ago, under the appellation of Melodrama, but which is widely different from the dramatic trash under the same name that has of late taken possession of the English boards. The German melodrama consisted of a scenic representation, consigned to few performers, simple in its plot and action, and highly poetical as to diction. The whole of the text was spoken, not sung, but frequently interrupted by instrumental periods of longer or shorter duration analogous with the import of the text. Benda, the German composer, excelled in these; his “Ariadne in Naxos” and “Medea,” scarcely known in England, are mas-

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terpieces of composition, replete with the finest thoughts and deepest feeling.54

The work of a German commentator, or at least one of German descent, this knowledgeable and detailed summary has an introductory and explicatory tone that reveals how unfamiliar this version of German melodrama was to non-specialist readers. The latter would have associated that category with plays full of “imminent danger, desperate villainy, situations of horror, escapes and catastrophes,” as described by the Theatrical Inquisitor and the Drama. Harking back to late eighteenth- century anxieties about the moral and political subversiveness of German theater, after the end of the Napoleonic emergency, this formulation together with the idea of “French melodrama” still constituted contentious ideological objects as they regularly interfered with assessments of the theatrical and cultural identity of the nation in a European perspective.

• The excerpts examined in my last section indicate that, during the 1820s, the progressive incorporation of melodrama into what constituted the theater of the nation was inseparable from persistent negotiations of its foreign connections.55 It may well be, as George Rowell has suggested, that Jerrold’s Black- Ey’d Susan called “English melodrama home from abroad” and “encouraged the English theatre to depict increasingly the native scene.”56 Drawing on the ballad tradition and capitalizing on the patriotic figure of the British tar, Jerrold’s work contributed to popularizing a national form of melodrama serving, as Jeffrey Cox argues, to “underwrite a vision of the status quo at home” that was “part of a process of reactionary myth-making.”57 Yet, such developments aside, the alien status of melodrama remained problematic in discussions about thematic range, ethical influence, pedagogic agency, and affective impact. In England and the English (1833) Edward Lytton Bulwer, as he then called himself, acknowledged melodrama as a principal form of stage entertainment, one that might even help revive the popularity of legitimate theater. His advice to disoriented would-be authors of tragedies was unequivocal: “Whither?— to the People! Among the people, then, must the tragic author invoke the genius of Modern Tragedy.”58 Fully integrating the “popular” into his vision for a regenerated serious theater, Bulwer asserts further that “the melodrames, whether simple or gorgeous” should be the pivot of any theatrical reform instigated by some “future Scott of the drama.” To be sure, his recourse to the “people” as a key cultural

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category reflects the socio-political idiom that had emerged during the battle for parliamentary reform in 1830–32. A Radical MP in favor of the Reform Bill, Bulwer also led the Select Committee of inquiry into “the Laws affecting Dramatic Literature,” created in 1832 a mere few days before the passing of the Reform Act itself.59 And in the Committee’s final report, melodrama warranted attention, if not cultural respect, as the form favored by the masses. Its foreignness, however, was still perceived as a disturbing feature in the current theatrical panorama. On 30 July 1832, the proprietor of the Norfolk theaters William Wilkins told the Committee that “melodrama and translations from the French” (often one and the same) were among “the only things that are successful at the moment.”60 Together with the French-language plays produced by the patent houses and the numerous operas in Italian, French, and German denounced by other witnesses, melodrama was responsible for the foreignization of a national theater that the Committee explicitly sought to delineate, and regulate. If it was well on the way to being “incorporated,” melodrama, which Bulwer still calls “melodrame” in England and the English, remained a troubling theatrical phenomenon and cultural category that could not be easily laid to rest. The narrative of critical reception and construction of melodrama identified in this chapter oscillates from an initial indifference to its exotic provenance to a hostility that slowly gave way to resigned tolerance. This development was coterminous with the quick succession of historicalpolitical events— the Peace of Amiens, Waterloo, and the fight for political reform in 1830–32— as well as such dramatic and theatrical manifestations as the rise of generic hybridity, the decreasing popularity of legitimate forms, the growing competition by and among the minor theaters, and the increased importation of foreign plays after 1815. Like its controversial formal admixtures, melodrama’s composite foreign affiliations were among its most regularly debated features in critical and cultural discourse. There, its problematic status as a national and international phenomenon brought into focus the tension between protectionism and cosmopolitanism characterizing the stage between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Foreignness also played a part in the delineation of melodrama as a critical construct with specific ideological inflections, as appears from the xenophobia pervading wartime dramatic diatribes and post-Waterloo efforts at shoring up the nation’s theatrical identity. If, in the early nineteenth century, melodrama emerged as a major constituent of British theater, at the same time it continued to function as a “culturally polyglot” form that went on unsettling ideas of, and upsetting plans for, the national theater and theatrical identity.

•

Ch a p t er 4

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Between the Sacred and the Profane

French Biblical Melodrama in Vienna c. 1800 Ba r ba r a Ba bić

Any casual surveyor of the title pages of libretti and scores of melodramas in early nineteenth- century Vienna will soon become familiar with the words “nach dem Französischen frey bearbeitet” (freely adapted from the French). This is especially true of religious subjects. Indeed, with very few exceptions, the repertoire of biblical melodramas in Vienna was entirely based on French sources translated into German (the only language then permitted on the city’s Vorstadttheater, or suburban stages) and adapted with new music by the theater’s Kapellmeister. The emerging genre of biblical melodrama, and its reception in Vienna, both contribute to and reflect a nexus of wider social, cultural, and political concerns in early nineteenth-century Europe. One of the ways in which the rapid pace of change over the previous twenty years had been registered most forcefully, in both Paris and Vienna, was in the field of religious practice, and the mixture of devotional, educational, and spectacular aims common to biblical melodramas inevitably prompted anxiety. From the Viennese perspective, genres associated with the hotbed of post- Revolutionary anticlericalism that was Paris only exacerbated concerns about the potential impropriety of representing sacred events onstage. Add to this the tension between the ostensibly “popular” melodrama of Parisian boulevard theaters and the courtly tradition of German monodrama represented by the works of Georg Benda, not to mention the threat that melodrama posed to existing modes of biblical performance (principally oratorios and sacred operas), and it is no surprise that this novel form of music theater proved distinctly problematic. What is more, the casting of melodrama as “product” or symbol of the Napoleonic era fueled wider concerns about the impact of the importation of French theater to Vienna. However, it is precisely the genre’s close engagement with the controversies of production and reception that enables

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us to understand better such a complex era of transformation in two of Europe’s political and cultural capitals.

Biblical Melodrama in Paris While Viennese biblical melodrama can be traced directly to Paris, Parisian biblical melodrama seems to have developed from a variety of theatrical genres, ones demonstrating a range of approaches to the dramatization of biblical material. The traditions of pantomimes- sacrées and biblical tragedies, for example, both displayed piety and seriousness: the former came into existence in the second half of the eighteenth century, initially as an entr’acte at the Parisian foires, and later migrated to the boulevard theaters;1 the latter, stretching back to Jean Racine’s Esther (1689) and Athalie (1691), continued post-Revolution with works such as the two versions of La mort d’Abel by M. Chevalier (Théâtre de Mlle Montansier, 1791) and Gabriel-Marie Legouvé (Théâtre de la Nation, 1792). The reverential presentation of religious themes onstage had not gone unchallenged, however. The anticlerical and anti-Catholic attitude that emerged during the Revolution— and culminated in Robespierre’s proclamation of the Cult of the Supreme Being (1794)— can be found in plays spanning from tragedy to vaudeville. Népomucène Lemercier’s tragedy Le Lévite d’Ephraïm, for example, written during the Revolution and inspired by Rousseau’s “petit poème en prose” of the same title (1762), was perceived to contain republican sentiments and anticlerical attitudes when it was performed in 1796 at the Théâtre de la rue Feydeau.2 A more extreme tendency toward religion can be found in the irreverent La passion de Notre Seigneur Jésus Christ, a “tragédie en vaudevilles à grand spectacle” (1794) attributed to Pierre-Sylvain Maréchal or to Sewrin, “culminating in a torrent of fire” (terminée par une pluie de feu).3 Further biblical vaudevilles make plentiful references to the contemporary political situation and antipious attitudes.4 Nonetheless, it is possible to trace the continuation and the resurgence of the Roman Catholic faith around the turn of the century. One of the most important literary works in this context is of course Chateaubriand’s “ouvrage apologétique” Génie du christianisme (1802), which quickly became a touchstone for the religious and the Romantic in nineteenthcentury France. The publication date was 14 April: four days before the concordat between Napoleon and Pius VII that acknowledged Catholicism as the majority religion of the French. By means of this treaty Napoleon intended to establish a new order in the aftermath of the Revolution, keeping church and clergy under strict state control and thereby

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harnessing and limiting their power. The revival of biblical tragedy is closely linked both with the official reestablishment of Catholicism and with the phenomenon of the “Racine renaissance,” which emerged in the wake of the hundredth anniversary of the author’s death (1699– 1799) and saw about 430 performances of his dramas at the Théâtre-Française between 1801 and 1810.5 After the concordat, Racine’s biblical dramas were often performed to mark pivotal moments of the empire’s calendar. Esther inaugurated the salle de spectacle at the Saint-Cloud residence on 12 June 1803; on 24 March 1805, the baptism day of Napoleon’s nephew Napoléon- Louis, the drama Athalie enjoyed its first performance after the Revolution, also at Saint-Cloud. Napoleon instructed the censors to make several corrections in order to remove all possible references to the Bourbons before permitting its staging in Paris. During its performance on 24 February 1806 at the Théâtre-Français, the emperor appointed the actor François- Joseph Talma to announce (after the first act) that the French troops had entered Naples.6 The reflowering of biblical drama can be explained by recourse to similar arguments used to account for the success of contemporary melodrama, though they remain just as incomplete: the revival of religious topics was perceived even at the time as a way to reestablish morality and order after the horrors of the Revolution, thanks to the representation of “the sublime images of religion[, which] move us more than the undistinguished paintings of romantic [romanesque] love.”7 To understand the appeal of biblical melodrama, such explanations need to be considered alongside a number of developments in the musico-theatrical world. One was the Parisian production of oratorios in the wake of the huge international success of Haydn’s Die Schöpfung, performed at the Opéra as part of a Christmas Eve concert in 1800. In a review of the vaudeville parodies of Haydn’s oratorio, a Parisian critic wondered about this sudden flourishing of biblical plots onstage: “One day we will end up trying to put the Bible in ballet, and the joys of paradise in music.”8 Indeed, shortly afterward the Opéra commissioned two staged oratorios, in the manner of operapasticcio, from the composers Christian Kalkbrenner and Ludwig Wenzel Lachnith, for performance in Holy Week. The results were Saül, an “oratorio mis en action” (1803), and La prise de Jéricho, an “oratorio en trois parties” (1805), which employed music by, among others, Haydn, Handel, Mozart, Cimarosa, Paisiello, and Gossec. Judging by an article in the Nouvelles littéraires (1803) after the premiere of Saül, this genre was in fact not yet as prestigious in France as in Italy and Germany: the idea of staging a biblical oratorio was primarily considered a means of “awakening the curiosity” of the audience for a “superb spectacle” that would be com-

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pleted by “pomp” and “decorations,” an interpretation of biblical material that would remain central to its melodramatic treatment.9 The disdain of the Viennese critics toward the proliferation of these “pot-pourri” oratorios, considered a poor imitation of the Austro- German tradition, led a correspondent from Paris to remark ironically that “our piousness is now conquering everywhere.”10 Close cousins of these staged oratorios were the French Lenten operas, which formed another important reference point for the emergent biblical melodrama. The most famous example also demonstrates the generic flexibility and mobility of dramatic material in Paris at this time: Joseph en Égypte, a “drame en prose mêlée de chants,” first performed by the OpéraComique at the Théâtre Feydeau on 17 February 1807, alternated singing and spoken dialogue and was often performed as an oratorio during the nineteenth century.11 Alexandre Duval’s libretto for the opera was based on the popular tragedy in five acts Omasis; ou, Joseph en Égypte, by Pierre Baour-Lormian (Théâtre-Français, 1806), which itself had two “melodramatic” precedents: the drama “à grand spectacle” Joseph, by Jean-Marie Gassier and Henri Lemaire, with music by Jean A. Gaultier (Théâtre des Jeunes- Artistes, 1800);12 and the “mélodrame” Pharaon; ou, Joseph en Égypte (Théâtre de la Gaîté, 1806), with both libretto and music by Lefranc. The dissemination of these Joseph-based histories on the stage led Barré, Radet, Desfontaines, and Dieulafoy to write a parody at the Théâtre du Vaudeville under the title of Omazette; ou, Jozet en Champagne (1806). These simultaneous productions on the same theme serve as a reminder of the osmotic nature of early melodrama, at the intersection not only of spoken drama and opera but also of parodic and sacred musical-theatrical practices, and of the primary and secondary stages. Biblical melodramas appear to have been popular from the very start of the nineteenth century. Louis-Charles Caigniez, author of Le jugement de Salomon (Théâtre de l’Ambigu-Comique, 1802)13 and Le triomphe de David (Théâtre de la Gaîté, 1805), was known as the “Racine du Boulevard” owing to his melodramas on biblical subjects, and the association of Racine, biblical melodrama, and “official” occasions may also have extended to Caigniez and his biblical output: Le jugement de Salomon was staged for celebrations on the eve of the emperor’s coronation (1 December 1804), the eve of Napoleon’s wedding with Marie-Louise of Austria (1 April 1810), and the eve of the emperor’s birthday (14 August 1812); the premiere of Le triomphe de David (26 November 1805) was used to mark the occasion of the French entry into Vienna.14 The history of another wise character of the Old Testament was displayed in the melodrama Le jugement de Daniel; ou, L’innocence de Suzanne, by Vallée with music

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by Taix (Gaîté, 1805). This, in turn, prompted the Théâtre du Vaudeville to restage an old and highly problematic vaudeville, La chaste Suzanne (1793), which had created a scandal at the time of the first performances on account of its counterrevolutionary content. In 1805, however, the subject of the vaudeville was considered appropriate for melodrama and, in the opinion of the Courrier des spectacles, the authors managed to cast the work “in a new light, which brought it closer to present circumstances. The couplets sung on this occasion are an allegory of the recent victories of our Grande Armée.”15 As we can see from these examples, not only were biblical melodramas the “daily bread” of French boulevard stages, as noted by commentators at the time, but they also reflected Napoleon’s official cultural strategy. Nonetheless, biblical melodrama received particular attention within the barrage of criticism directed at melodrama more broadly. This reached an early peak at the time of Napoleon’s fall, even extending to some of the mélodramaturges themselves. Jean-Baptiste-Augustin Hapdé, a prolific author of melodramas, provided one of the most pointed critical barbs: “Defenders of religion and taste, follow me: the political monster is overthrown[; now] we must defeat the literary monster.”16 Within the subgenre of biblical melodramas, Hapdé saw a particular danger: “If people see the priest at the altar in the morning and on stage at night, they will see the prelate and the actor with the same eye.”17 The authors of the famous Traité du mélodrame signed “MM. A!A!A!,” on the other hand, acknowledged the success of Le jugement de Salomon and Le sacrifice d’Abraham but did not “believe that religious subjects should be drawn on, because dealing with sacred subjects is incompatible with the noble surges of genius, which only wants to be free.”18 Despite these protestations, playwrights continued to write biblical melodramas, including those depicting histories of oppressed (or freed) peoples, or biblical heroes, which could easily be seen as restaging recent political events.19 And despite the status of their source material, melodramatists seem frequently to have felt at liberty to add, cut, or fictionalize aspects of their biblical subjects: Léopold and Cuvelier openly listed their changes and inventions (to “make the tale more dramatic”) in the “Notice historique” of Les Machabées; ou, La prise de Jérusalem (AmbiguComique, 1817).20 Fully aware of dealing with sacred topics, they claimed “the indulgence of the public, remembering that this is a theatrical piece belonging to a secondary genre. We do not want to sketch a fragment of history.”21 This statement opens two important issues in the contemporary production of melodrama. On the one hand, authors wanted to protect their dramatic inventions, especially in light of the overlap of subjects

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across various suburban stages.22 On the other hand, Léopold and Cuvelier’s statements about the historical truth of biblical melodramas likely referred to a querelle surrounding their previous melodrama Le sacrifice d’Abraham (1816). Critics of this work had debated the attitude that playwrights should have toward the Bible, stating that the tolerance of historical inaccuracies in melodrama libretti made the genre unsuitable for biblical topics. However, the practice of modifying aspects of the Holy Scripture and of adding new, original theatrical elements suggests that religious instruction was not the central motivation for bringing biblical topics to the melodramatic stage. Rather, biblical melodrama provided a pretext for theatrical, spectacular moments, general moral instruction, and political celebration— just like many melodramas on other topics. Even while stressing the literary mediocrity of melodramas like Le jugement de Salomon, a critic in 1827 nevertheless stated the importance of melodrama that “derives its origin from that need for theatrical emotions that seized the lowest classes of the people at the end of our long revolutionary drama.”23 This statement confirms the familiar refrain in melodrama studies, most famously expressed in Charles Nodier’s retrospective diagnosis of melodrama as a “necessity” in the post-Christian, post-Revolutionary epoch.24 Leaving pious religiosity to other dramatic and literary genres, biblical melodrama might thus be thought as a “seismograph” of the turbulent sociopolitical environment c. 1800, but above all as a pretext for staging well-known stories packed with moral models in the style of a “grand spectacle.” Indeed, a huge part of the appeal of importing these melodramas to Vienna was their mixture of the spectacular and the sacred, along with the less genre-specific hope of theater directors keen to repeat the success of repertoire popular in Paris. But the new and relatively secularized French biblical melodramas would initially pose problems not only due to their less pious content but also due to their form, which clashed with the existing German concept of melodrama.

Biblical Melodrama in Vienna The development of Viennese biblical melodrama in many ways closely followed the Parisian evolution of the genre but also bears clear signs of its adaptations to a new context. As in Paris, where biblical melodramas were predominantly performed at the boulevard theaters, in Vienna these works found a home in the Vorstadttheater, or suburban theaters, which flourished after the Schauspielfreiheit (freedom of the theaters) declared by Emperor Joseph II in 1776. The Theater auf der Wieden (which opened

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in 1787 and then reopened as the Theater an der Wien in 1801) was the largest such venue, and its repertoire lay midway between the “popular” register of the Leopoldstadt Theater (1781) and the Josefstadt Theater (1788) and the more elevated productions of the court theater.25 But part of the attraction of all the suburban theaters was the range of drama they offered: opera, spoken plays, folk comedies in Viennese dialect (Singspiele, Lustspiele, Zauberstücke, Possen), ballet, pantomimes, melodrama, and many parodies of dramas performed at the Hoftheater, or court theater. Similarly, while the court theater audiences primarily consisted of the aristocracy and the upper middle classes, the suburban theaters were frequented not only by their local communities but also by aristocrats and burghers, as was the case with the boulevard theaters in Paris. Moreover, there was considerable exchange between institutions, above all between the Theater an der Wien (the main home for biblical melodrama in Vienna) and the Hoftheater, with actors, singers, and directors often working across both sorts of venue, sometimes simultaneously:26 Baron Peter von Braun, for example, was director of the Hoftheater from 1794 and in February 1804 also took over the Theater an der Wien. It is Braun that we can likely thank for the arrival of biblical melodrama in Vienna, at the Theater an der Wien, in 1804: the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung announced in October 1802 that Braun was returning to Vienna from Paris with many new plays, hoping that they would stimulate improved stage machinery in Vienna, and be performed according to French theatrical tastes.27 Salomons Urtheil (1804), the first German version of Le jugement de Salomon by Caigniez, and the first biblical melodrama in Vienna, was also the first big melodramatic success in the city.28 Its production and popularity in 1804 may reflect what was a crucial year for political relations between the Habsburgs and Napoleon. The latter’s self-proclamation as emperor of the French on 18 May led the Holy Roman Emperor Francis II— a would-be defender of Europe against Napoleon’s advances— to declare himself emperor of Austria on 11 August. It can be no coincidence that Salomons Urtheil, a melodrama that celebrates the wisdom and greatness of the king, was first staged two months later (27 October 1804) at the Theater an der Wien, or that it went on to enjoy great success over the years.29 Nevertheless, the importing of this new genre caused several controversies. That it was French, and that it was sacred, were perhaps the most serious and ultimately damaging ones and will be dealt with in due course. But it was also controversial from the perspective of genre, not least because the Viennese performance— exceptionally— used the original music by Adrien Quaisin. The following commentary on the

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performance, in the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung, draws attention to the initial confusion that greeted the Parisian mélodrame in Vienna: Guaisin’s [sic] musical accompaniment for Salomo’s [sic] Urtheil has no value or relevance; the piece could only be appreciated thanks to the great performance by Dem[oiselle] Eigensatz. Overall, a three-act melodrama may be much too long. Only passionate emotion, which naturally expresses itself in lyrical leaps, can be so broken up by music, which draws attention to these transitions in the mind of the listener. But in such a long piece, too much that is dramatic must happen: it features too much mere exchange of ideas, which appears to me not to suit this lyrical treatment. Hence it becomes a play, which is only negligibly interrupted with music at arbitrary places.30

It is clear from the reference to the exaggerated length of the work and the sudden interruption of the text by music that the critic’s expectations of Parisian melodrama were based on Georg Benda’s melodramatic Kurztragödien on classical topics. Benda’s melodramas, in which music continually accompanies or alternates with speech, had remained a constant presence on the Viennese theater scene from the early 1780s onward and were the model for similar works by Christian Gottlob Neefe, Anton Zimmermann, and Johann Friedrich Reichardt.31 Just as German critics in Paris were struck by the differences between “their” understanding of melodrama (generally represented by Benda) and the Parisian mélodrame, so were the Viennese confused by the shared term.32 The concerns were not only limited to the strange interplay between music and text, which frequently diverged from the contemporary Viennese concept of melodrama and melodramatic technique. Soon authors began to stress the difference between German and French melodrama by reference to a hierarchy of the senses. While Benda’s melodrama had “more effect on the listener than on the spectator,” French melodrama was, from the Viennese perspective, more a visual than a musical genre.33 A Viennese music critic in Paris was stunned to discover that in 1805 such “enormous pomp-, spectacle-, and machine-pieces” (gewaltigen Pomp-, Spektakel- und Maschinen-Stücke) as he saw in Paris under the name of melodrama had become fashionable at the Viennese suburban theaters, too: “It is terrible”, he lamented, “what mischief is now being done with this quaint genre of theater music.”34 These few examples illustrate a discomfort among Viennese critics when faced with the “new,” French melodrama: the accusation that the genre offered mere sensation without musical interest was, in part, an at-

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tempt to defend the “noble” intent of Benda’s melodramas. The status of French imports was especially problematic when it came to the biblical subjects staged at the Theater an der Wien. This is perhaps implicit in the generic subtitles of the Viennese versions, where the word Melodram is by no means the standard designation (see table 4.1).35 And yet all of these works contained the melodramatic technique of small-scale text-music alternation, in varying quantities. What is more, the term Melodram was used often in the reviews, probably in order to link these works further to the French original or to underscore the presence of melodramatic numbers. The table establishes the extent to which the French genre was adopted in the capital of the Holy Roman Empire, and the extent of Viennese reliance on French material: there are few biblical melodramas that did not draw from French sources, and these were mainly performed in the Theater in der Leopoldstadt. Most biblical melodramas were at the Theater an der Wien, thanks in no small part to Ignaz Ritter von Seyfried being hired as Kapellmeister in Emanuel Schikaneder’s Theater auf der Wieden on 1 March 1797 and employed there till 1826.36 The table also makes apparent that— despite the reservations of critics and censors— the genre continued to be associated with state occasions, just as it was in Paris. Thus the melodrama Saul, König in Israel was first staged on 7 April 1810 at a crucial point, around the time of Napoleon’s marriage to Marie-Louise of Austria, celebrated in Paris on 2 April 1810. Conceived as a solution to reestablish order in Europe, this alliance left Vienna straddling an obligation to pledge allegiance to France and the need to come to terms with the recent trauma of the occupation and defeat. The translation of the text by Seyfried’s brother Josef is quite close to the French original, but there is one telling difference at the end of the melodrama: after the final scene, which alludes to contemporary events as Saul blesses the union of his daughter and David, there is an additional instrumental number, newly composed by Seyfried. This solemn Schlußszene, scored for cellos and double bass, accompanies Saul’s final speech, in which he declares the virtues and values of a good king. Not present in the French libretto, this passage may be interpreted as a veiled attack on Napoleon’s character and a celebration of the Austrian emperor. Even in 1813, theater directors would capitalize on the genre’s spectacular nature to mark state occasions: Seyfried’s Moses, ein dramatisches Gedicht in fünf Akten, a spoken play with incidental music, was staged with great success for the first time at the Theater an der Wien (24 April). Some months later, on 31 August, the emperor requested this drama to be restaged at the imperial court for the visit of the Princess of Oldenburg

Ta ble 4.1. Biblical melodramas in Vienna and Paris, 1800–1821 Paris

Vienna

Joseph Drame à grand spectacle, 5 Gassier, Lemaire/Gaultier Théâtre des Jeunes-Artistes 1800 La Récréation du monde, suite de la Création Mélodrame, 1 Barré, Radet, Desfontaines/Haydn Théâtre du Vaudeville 1801 Le jugement de Salomon Mélo-drame mêlé de chants et de danse, 3 Caigniez/Quaisin Théâtre de l’Ambigu-Comique 1802

Salomons Urtheil Ein historisch-musikalisches Drama, 3 Stegmayer/Quaisin Theater an der Wien 1804

Esther Mélodrame à grand spectacle, 3 Plancher Valcour/Leblanc Théâtre de l’Ambigu-Comique 1802 Le jugement de Daniel; ou, L’innocence de Suzanne Mélodrame à grand spectacle, 3 Vallée/Taix Théâtre de la Gaîté 1805 Samson, Richter in Israel Historisches Drama, 3 Schuster/Tuczek Theater in der Leopoldstadt 1808 Moses in Egypten Ein historisches Schauspiel mit Gesang, 4 Gleich/Tuczek Theater in der Leopoldstadt 1810 Le triomphe de David Mélodrame, 3 Caigniez/Leblanc Théâtre de la Gaîté 1805 Samson; ou, La destruction des Philistins Mélodrame, 5 mis en scène d’après la pièce de Romagnesi par Ribié Théâtre de la Gaîté 1806 Pharaon; ou, Joseph en Egypte Mélodrame à grand spectacle, 3 Lefranc Théâtre de la Gaîté 1806

Saul, König in Israel Melodram, 3 J. von Seyfried/I. von Seyfried Theater an der Wien 1810

Paris

Vienna Omasis; oder, Joseph in Egypthen Melodram, 5 Sonnleithner/Pössinger Theater in der Leopoldstadt 1811 Isaak Historisches Melodram mit Arien und Chören, 1 Perinet (after Metastasio)/Fuß Theater in der Leopoldstadt 1812 Moses Ein dramatisches Gedicht, 5 Klingemann/Seyfried Theater an der Wien 1813

Le Lévite d’Ephraïm; ou, La destruction des Benjamites Pantomime dialoguée à grand spectacle, 3 Alexandre/Propiac Théâtre de la Gaîté 1813 Le sacrifice d’Abraham Pièce à grand spectacle, 4 Cuvelier, Léopold/Hus-Desforges Théâtre de la Gaîté 1816

Abraham Drama mit Musik, 4 Castelli/Seyfried Theater an der Wien 1817

Daniel; ou, La fosse aux lions Pantomime dialoguée à spectacle, 3 Frédéric [Dupetit-Méré]/Schaffner Théâtre de la Porte Saint-Martin 1817 Les Machabées; ou, La prise de Jérusalem Drame sacré à grand spectacle, 4 Cuvelier, Léopold/Amédée Théâtre de l’Ambigu-Comique 1817

Salmonäa und ihre Söhne Drama mit Musik, 4 Castelli/Seyfried Theater an der Wien 1818

Le passage de la Mer Rouge; ou, La délivrance des hébreux Pièce à grand spectacle, 3 Hapdé, Desiré/Darondeau Théâtre de la Gaîté 1817 Noah; oder, die Sündfluth Biblisches Drama mit Musik, 3 Eckschlager/Seyfried Theater an der Wien 1819 Le déluge universel; ou, L’arche de Noé drame lyrique et à grand spectacle, 3 Hapdé/music by various composers Théâtre de Versailles 1821

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and Weimar (13 October). The occasion called for massive performance forces: the chorus comprised 130 singers and brought together members of the Theater an der Wien with the Hoftheater troupe. During the Viennese Congress, on 10 October 1814, Moses was restaged at the Theater an der Wien in the presence of the emperor and the allies, an event that, in the words of one contemporary commentator, “mark[ed] an epoch of history and theater.”38 As we can see, the first examples of biblical melodramas coincided with pivotal moments of the Viennese calendar and seem to have served as a riposte to the French on the melodramatic battlefield for political and cultural power at a time of high tensions between the two capitals. And yet the very combination of sacred content and spectacular staging that made biblical melodramas fit for state occasions was also a source of anxiety for the strict Viennese censors of the time, not least because of the “foreign” provenance of the genre. 37

The Sacred Onstage While the foregoing survey of performances testifies to the success of biblical melodrama in Vienna, this success only exacerbated concerns among the city authorities about the staging of sacred drama. Since private theaters were considered sites of potential revolt against the monarchy, the law, and the religious establishment, all performances in such venues were subject to strict controls. Anyone involved in the production of biblical melodrama— typically in suburban theaters— thus had to negotiate a complex process of censorship overseen by the police (Polizeihofstelle), who had responsibility for the rejection or admission of plays from 1803 onward. After an initial examination of the text or libretto, the theater commissioners (Theaterkommissäre) routinely attended rehearsals and first nights, their influence extending as far as the approval of costumes, decorations, and stage sets.39 Crucially, at this period, censorship was a work in progress: neither the targets nor the tactics remained constant. It is possible to trace a general tendency across the post-Revolutionary period and the periods of French occupation (November 1805–January 1806 and May–November 1809) whereby censorship of French and biblical dramas increased.40 In a report about the suppression of the biblical drama Judith, die Heldin in Israel, oder: Holofernes, dated 23 February 1806, the head of police, Joseph Thaddäus Vogt von Sumerau, notified the emperor about the increase of biblical dramas on the suburban stages following the success of Salomons Urtheil, which had been approved “since 1805 with particular consideration.”41 He announced a directive (Directiv-

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regel) concerning religious topics onstage, which stated that “no dramas on biblical themes can be composed, arranged or performed without his permission”42 The emperor’s response to this strict guideline was one of immediate approval. But the archbishop, Sigismund Anton Graf [Count] von Hohenwart, was more cautious: as well as declaring support for the censor’s decision, he expressed tolerance for biblical dramas, at least when written and performed “by skillful men, bringing the most beautiful consequences for morality and the revival of good principles.”43 This initial period was one of relatively mild censorship toward biblical plots. The Viennese authorities considered the suburban theater a “school of good habits” (“Schule der guten Sitten”) as well as a “safe” place for the lower classes, far away from other dangerous distractions that could emerge during a time of high discontent, as reported in a letter of Sumerau’s to the emperor dated 27 August 1806.44 In the wake of the second French occupation and the rise of so-called Problemstücke— pieces inspired by French productions of the Revolutionary and post- Revolutionary era, permitted in Vienna during the occupation— regulations became more restrictive. The accusation against such pieces was that they challenged the Church and government both through controversial and irreverent arguments and through their presentation of the clergy and characters from the political upper classes. A letter by the Viennese police officer Franz von Hager, answering the emperor’s request for clarification regarding censors’ criteria in 1810, states: The principles, which you suggested as a guideline, are generally limited to removing anything that may be offensive to moral, religious, and political considerations. . . . The invasion of the enemy has brought a major change. The French, during their long occupation of Vienna, enunciated the principle that all plays whose performance was allowed in France and in the federal states [Bundesstaaten] could be performed here as well. Among the local theaters, the Theater an der Wien took advantage of this permission with great eagerness: the theater staged Kreuzfahrer, the tragedy Marianne, in which nuns and clergy appear in all their regalia, showing churches and religious ceremonies in the greatest detail. Such new and unheard-of ideas filled the theaters for a long time and aroused theater directors’ desire to continue to perform these or similar plays, even after the withdrawal of the French.45

In this context biblical melodrama was not just problematic because it showcased religious subjects onstage but, again, also because it was an example of the greater French license with religious material. The example

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given by Hager is August von Kotzebue’s Die Kreuzfahrer, which had been staged twenty-two times in Vienna (with music by Seyfried) in 1809, the year of the second French occupation. In a letter dated 31 July 1812, the director of the Theater an der Wien, Count Ferdinand Pálffy, asked for permission to restage the work. The censor responded: “In that the drama Die Kreuzfahrer argues with the principles of the Christian-Catholic religion, I consider a performance unsuitable.”46 Censorship of dramas on biblical subject matters became even stricter after Napoleon’s fall. Christine Blanken’s well-documented study of oratorio practice in Vienna brought to light several censorship decrees, among them two more Directivregeln directed against biblical plots on Viennese stages, dated 1817 and 1818.47 The increase in censorship at this moment is clearly linked to accumulated concern about the fashion for biblical melodramas from Paris, and has to be understood as an attempt of the authorities to limit the importation of “sacrilegious” and French dramas. Dramas on biblical topics were either completely banned from 1817 onward or— in rare cases such as Rossini’s opera Moses in Egypten or Seyfried’s melodramas— were granted permission for performance with significant alterations. In addition to deciding whether or not a given piece could be staged, the records reveal, censors closely monitored the libretti of biblical melodramas for theological errors. The “correcting” of libretti extended beyond the text to encompass scenography and stage decorations, since the ecclesiastical authorities did not consider the “machines, lifts, [and] costumes” associated with the mise en scène of melodrama appropriate “for biblical teachings, because the message of the bible could be misunderstood and lose its holiness as well as its deep meaning.”48 Thus the biblical melodramas Abraham (1817) and Salmonäa und ihre Söhne (1818), both adaptations of French melodramas by Ignaz Franz Castelli with music by Seyfried, were staged with several corrections to the libretto. In the case of Salmonäa, even the title was amended: the work’s initial German title, Die Makkabäer, was not allowed because it suggested too close a relation with the French source text— the melodrama Les Machabées— whose authors had intentionally included biblical inaccuracies.49 Such concessions were not enough, however, to placate hardening attitudes. In June 1818, commenting on Salmonäa, Archbishop Hohenwart revised his opinion about the suitability of biblical stories for the stage: “Theater writers should find sufficient subjects for eyes and hearts in mythology and other profane stories. The sacred does not belong on the stage. It should be used in those countries where churches are empty.”50 The connotations of theatrical presentation were clearly too threatening to a Catholic Church that had suffered greatly during the Revolu-

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tionary and Napoleonic years and sought to set up boundaries between its own seemingly sacred and well-organized theater and the French, deChristianized, sacrilegious opponent. Indeed, in a report in 1817, Generalvikar Turzan came close to making the oratorio a required model for biblical productions in Vienna: If these pious authors seek to reinforce religious spirits through their intervention, they should use Metastasio’s oratorios as models and exclusively employ touching music, arias, and recitatives— and no stage costumes or machinery, which would only do harm to the matter as opposed to fostering it.51

The reference to Metastasio’s oratorios, together with other “pious authors of the past” like “Racine (Esther, Athalia), Manasses, Sedecias, or Saul the Italian,” is a recurring theme in censorship documents.52 Such regulations— viewing oratorios as reference works for religious topics on the stage— greatly influenced the process of adapting French biblical melodramas in Vienna.

Melodramatic Oratorios It is no coincidence that the adaptation of French biblical dramas at the Theater an der Wien increased during the era of the Gesellschaft der Cavaliere (later the Gesellschaft der Associierten), an association of musicloving noblemen founded by Baron Gottfried van Swieten in 1786. As is well known, van Swieten was an energetic promoter of early and choral music, encouraging Haydn in his composition of Die Schöpfung and Die Jahrezeiten as well as supporting the performance of Handel’s oratorios in Vienna. The Gesellschaft even took over the direction of the Theater an der Wien between 1807 and 1813, during which time the performance of Handel’s works at the musikalische Akademien and the staging of biblical operas like Méhul’s Joseph und seine Brüder (1809) enjoyed great success. For Joseph, Kapellmeister Seyfried arranged the overture and added a new final chorus; apparently, it was his work on this opera that pushed him to “try his hand at a similar genre” with such great enthusiasm.53 Thus, he first composed his own score in 1810 to Saul, König in Israel (mentioned above), the translation of Caigniez and Leblanc’s Le triomphe de David.54 Relying on one of the most popular biblical subjects, and linked in performance with affairs of state, Saul turned out to be the first great achievement in Seyfried’s career, performed thirty-eight times in Vienna between 1810 and 1816. Seyfried undoubtedly saw in biblical melodrama a

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continuity with the tradition of sacred musical genres that were a fixture of Viennese musical life. As he wrote in his autobiography: “The religious atmosphere which raised me during the composition of Saul led me to compose a mass. . . . If fate had brought me to write only for the church, I would be the happiest mortal. Pia desideria.”55 Whether motivated by his enthusiasm for religious music, or indeed by the need to develop a more “religious” aura in the biblical melodrama, Seyfried’s approach to the genre is exemplified by the serious style that can be found in the choruses and in the insertion of passages from the Holy Scripture. So, for example, while the text of the chorus (3.4) of the French version seems to follow the style of Racine’s Esther, the Viennese adaptation adds the words glauben (believing), hoffen (hoping), and lieben (loving), the three theological virtues elaborated in Paul’s Epistle to the Corinthians. A more religious aura can also be found in the first chorus at the beginning of the melodrama (1.5), where the librettist inserts the verse “Des Herren Lob ertön’ in Ewigkeit” (The Lord’s endless praise resound forever). Moreover, the Viennese version displays at the end of the scene another larger chorus: the pantomimic number with ballet of the French version is enriched in Viennese adaptation with a long, solemn chorus, which quotes the biblical verse “Saul hat tausend Mann erschlagen, David aber zehntausend” (Saul has slain his thousands, and David his ten thousands; 1 Samuel 18:7). The choruses are written in a learned style, and special attention is consistently paid to them in reviews of Seyfried’s biblical melodramas, often to the exclusion of other aspects. In the case of Saul, Seyfried’s music is enthusiastically praised: “The choruses are very well done, and the marches composed with great taste.”56 The Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung appreciated “a chorus, structured as a double fugue in order to express Saul’s spiritual confusion, which was very appropriate and highly effective.”57 This “serious” approach to the religious content of biblical melodrama can be seen elsewhere in Seyfried’s output. His Moses, ein dramatisches Gedicht in fünf Akten was described by its author as “my second work in serious style”— a designation apparently unaffected by the work’s association with spectacle.58 Seyfried applied the melodrama technique in a short passage, labeled as “Melodram,” at the point of the spectacular scene of the burning bush. When God manifests his divine presence and appoints Moses to guide the Israelites out of Egypt, the timpani and trombones establish a dark, mystic atmosphere (Grave) before short musical phrases alternate and overlap with Moses’s monologue. Once again, it is clear that the reception of biblical melodrama in Vienna was mediated by a range of more or less sacred musico-theatrical genres.

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This tendency can also be observed in one of the few Viennese melodramas that imitated the imported tradition rather than adapting French works. When the Theater in der Leopoldstadt staged a biblical melodrama—Isaak (1812), by Joachim Perinet with music by János Fusz ( Johann Fuss)— it was inspired by Metastasio’s popular oratorio Isacco figura del Redentore (1740): the melodrama avoids the short sections of music typical of French melodrama and contains longer passages where the speech is overlapped with music, as well as arias, choruses, and “religious” stage effects. Nevertheless, the Theaterzeitung was skeptical about the quality of this play, and the following words clearly show the severity of contemporary attitudes toward biblical melodrama tout court: “Since a melodrama . . . is already a dramatic absurdity in itself, it should really not be tolerated on the respectable stages. It is an unwholesome idea to impose such plots drawn from Jewish ancient history on the honest audience just for the sake of Saturday night’s sales.”59 Perhaps the most pronounced example of the merging with oratorio came with the Seyfried-Castelli Abraham, which was first staged on 28 November 1817 and achieved twenty- five performances by 1818. In contrast to the melodramatic treatment of Saul, where often very short melodramatic phrases support or alternate with the declamation, Abraham features not only more extended melodramatic moments but also a more religious attitude, exemplified by indications such as religiosamente, marcia religiosa, or preghiera. As Blanken has noted, some parts (above all the choruses) of the drama are taken from Niemeyer’s Religiöses Drama für die Musik Abraham von Moria (1776),60 which perhaps prompted the inclusion of a series of recitatives sung by the seer (Seher) Theman and interplayed with chants (hymns) at the end of the drama. The Theaterzeitung praised the style of the choruses, even comparing a hymn to the one contained in Méhul’s biblical opera Joseph: “Grand and sublime is the style of composition, the choruses breathe patriarchal impetus, and the first chorus can even be compared to the prayer of the Israelites in Joseph.” However, along with the praising of the composition, the antiFrench attitude toward the genre was again still remarkable. The same critic wrote of the “ingratitude” (Undankbare) of the melodrama,”61 while the Wiener Zeitschrift noted the large amount of historical inaccuracies of the “French melodramatists,” which cause many problems for the local librettists and composers delivering the German adaptation.62 Undaunted by the increasing hostility of the critics and the censors, and no doubt spurred on by the popularity of the genre, Seyfried continued: his Salmonäa und ihre Söhne received nineteen performances between 1818 and 1819. The adaptation of the libretto recalls the model of

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the biblical drama, and the melodramatic treatment by Seyfried includes larger musical numbers, this time mostly at the end of scenes. Compared to the French original, which tends to longer pantomimic moments supported by great stage effects, the Viennese version seems, once again, to announce the Holy Word through the seven large choral numbers and additional biblical references.63 His last melodrama, Noah, staged twentysix times between 1819 and 1820, is based on an earlier drama by August Eckschlager originally conceived with choruses from Haydn’s Die Schöpfung and Die Jahreszeiten.64 The drama is pervaded by a sensational and religious aura, even in the staging. The famous paradise scene contained flames, red clouds, and the spectacular olfactory effect of incense (Ambrosiaduft) burned in the theater.65 A critic of the Morgenblatt für gebildete Stände noted how Seyfried’s “music resembles the ecclesiastical style because of its use of canonic imitation.”66 Similarly, the critic of the Sammler stated that “the choruses [of Noah] were composed more in the taste of an oratorio,”67 while the Wiener Zeitschrift observed the affinity with Handel’s style.68 These few examples illustrate the centrality of choruses to Seyfried’s biblical melodramas, and to the Viennese approach more generally, and, by extension, the unmistakable influence of Handel. During the Napoleonic Wars and the Congress of Vienna, Handel’s oratorios, with their massive choral forces, were performed on many official occasions and helped to shape the style of many contemporary composers.69 For Seyfried, massed voices may have offered biblical melodrama a sense of power and solemnity, thereby bringing his new works closer to that sacred musical genre par excellence, the oratorio. The apparent fusion of melodrama and the oratorio style, and the general call for “sacralization,” was also a regulation imposed from above, as we have seen in the correspondence and directives of the various authorities. The pegging of melodramatic fortunes to the pious credibility of the oratorio tradition can therefore be seen as a kind of preemptive self-censorship, as well as a means of elevating the status of biblical melodrama to the level of a sacred genre. Nevertheless, these attempts did not succeed in the long term: the limited tolerance for biblical melodrama began to decline around 1820,70 and even Seyfried’s biblical melodramas could not be restaged again. Despite this categorical pronouncement, some aspects of biblical melodramas survived in another form in Vienna’s musical life. Just like the grand choruses of oratorios, several excerpts from Viennese biblical dramas sporadically appeared on the programs of charity concerts and of the Concerts Spirituels, inaugurated by Franz Xaver Gebauer in 1819.71 The porous boundaries between

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staged works and oratorios enabled melodramatic music to travel as oratorio, outside the theater.

Conclusion Judging by the combined approaches of censors, librettists, and the composers involved, in particular Seyfried, the adaptation of French biblical melodramas to Viennese performance was fundamentally a process of sacralization— an attempt to distance imported works from French approaches to religion. Yet even if this was the case, it is hard to determine whether biblical melodrama in Vienna was primarily received by audiences as devotional or spectacular. Perhaps the best we can say is that these new stage works oscillated continually between the two poles, linked on the one hand with sacred musico-theatrical traditions in Vienna and on the other with the taste for Spektakelstücke, a common feature of the suburban theaters of both Paris and Vienna. While Parisian biblical melodramas turned sacred stories into allegories of contemporary political and social situations in a “theater of morality,” matters played out differently in Vienna, as the genre became an altogether more pious affair. Through translation and recomposition Viennese authors sought a more elevated status: libretti referenced the model of the sacred drama, and the music, as we have seen, was set against the background of the all-conquering oratorio. More broadly, the investigation of biblical melodrama on the axis Paris-Vienna helps us to understand the political and cultural tensions between the two capitals and their respective countries. Biblical melodrama was contentious not only on account of its “sacrilegious” content but above all because of its provenance, during a time of anti- French propaganda on the Viennese stage. This more general rejection of French repertoire on the stage is a thread running through the Viennese reception of biblical melodrama, despite and because of the reliance on French theater in the city: the Theater an der Wien, for example, based almost half of its productions on French imports. It is no coincidence that such malcontent comes from the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung, a journal that was more likely than most to concern itself with the health of the “national” tradition. In 1810, a critic of the newspaper was wondering about this phenomenon: “Why do we still take our refuge in foreigners in order to see new operas on our stages? Or moreover, why are we somehow forced to do it? Don’t we have librettists, or do we lack composers?”72 While it was understood that French repertoire was often used as a way to

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improve the fortunes of the theaters, it was precisely this that was exacerbating the poor health of the vernacular tradition. Commenting on the repertoire of the Hoftheater and on the custom of Viennese theaters generally, one critic observed that “for several years, the theater direction has found it more convenient to get neat scores of French operas from Paris for little money [Louis d’or], and to translate the libretti— themselves indifferent enough— into German, instead of encouraging German poets and composers with respectable fees and honors.”73 French biblical melodrama, with its prioritization of the “visual” and its unique interplay of text and music, was perceived— even in adapted form— as problematic because it conflicted with local theatrical productions and traditions. It was also simply French. The danger of mixing various sacred genres and thereby confounding them, along with the danger of “melodramatizing” (that is, popularizing) biblical subjects, led censors and critics to starve biblical melodrama of its audience. The sacred ambitions of these new works could no longer survive in the famously profane environment of the theater. Hence the year 1820 marks the end of the biblical “melodramatic moment” on Viennese stages.

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Ch a p t er 5

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Scenography, Spéculomanie, and Spectacle Pixerécourt’s La citerne (1809) S a r a h Hibber d

Pixerécourt’s “mélodrame en quatre actes, en prose, et à grand spectacle” La citerne premiered at the Théâtre de la Gaîté on 14 January 1809. It was widely received as reaching new heights of magnificence in its combination of sumptuous décor, special effects, coups de théâtre, dancing, and fighting: audiences reported experiencing everything “from fear and hope to horror and pleasure.”1 La citerne tells the story of Don Raphaël: having been taken prisoner by pirates in Africa, he finds his way home to Majorca with his young daughter Clara, surviving a wild storm and shipwreck in act 1. In his absence, his elder daughter, Séraphine, has been tricked by her duplicitous tutor, Don Fernand, who has persuaded the pirate Picaros to impersonate her long-lost father in order to help him win her hand— and wealth. All the characters come together in the final act— a “denouement à grand fracas”2— which concludes with the extravagant conflagration of the cistern of the title (a tank for storing water). The reunited Raphaël, Clara, and Séraphine escape from the fire, helped by a reformed and remorseful Picaros. Such melodramas are remembered not least for their abundant scenic effects, and Pixerécourt took great care to ensure successful stagings, providing detailed directions with technical descriptions, and overseeing rehearsals himself.3 However, there has been only limited research into melodrama’s scenography— what might be understood according to David Charlton’s recent discussion as its “stage space and associated elements of imagined time and fictive event.”4 How, for example, are stage action and special effects correlated with the other aspects of the drama, including the music, and how does this relate to earlier practices? Furthermore, given our understanding of melodrama as a cathartic response to the experience of the Revolution,5 how does scenography contribute to this process, helping to articulate society’s relationship to its recent, violent past?

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Although the period of Empire has been viewed as one of artistic stagnation in the official theaters— Napoleon famously favored traditional repertory and staging at the imperial theaters and legislated in 1807 to reduce the number of commercial houses to just four6 — staging design and technology were being developed in the commercial theaters in ways that were to invigorate production across dramatic genres.7 At the same time, new spectacles d’optique such as the panorama— exhibited in theatrical spaces and in specially constructed rotundas— were bringing art to a wider public.8 Melodrama sits at the juncture between these currents of theater and art, which competed with and nourished each other. Indeed, the genre became the cradle for a new, romantic scenography, one whose legacy can be traced in the spoken theater and opera of the following decades. This chapter will thus situate La citerne in a context of staging innovation and visual display, seeking to demonstrate how competing modes of spectatorship were brought into play during these years. First I will sketch the trajectory of scenography and emerging forms of spectacles d’optique and identify some of the shared aims and points of tension between these visual worlds. Then I will examine the ways in which music participated in melodramatic spectacle, making particular reference to two key scenes from La citerne— the act 1 storm sequence and shipwreck, and the act 4 fight sequence and conflagration. I aim to reveal the ways in which the spectacular language of melodrama during the Empire drew on and promoted competing ways of viewing that can be understood in relation to the evolution of aesthetic taste and practice, on the one hand, and to France’s self-identity in the wake of the Revolution, on the other.

Scenography The end of the eighteenth century saw a new aesthetic emerging from the conventions of baroque theater, in particular a greater synthesis of the arts in order to “enthrall, elevate and edify.”9 Improvements in lighting— including the invention of the Argand (oil) lamp, which offered a steadier and brighter light that could be controlled more precisely— led to the creation of striking chiaroscuro effects; perfect symmetry and single perspective views were disrupted to create a sense of depth, and of immersion in the landscape; and local color was deployed in the creation of more historically and geographically varied locations.10 This aesthetic has been widely understood as deriving from the midcentury innovations of Jean-Nicolas Servandoni, who worked at the Paris Opéra in 1728–37 and 1741– 44 and created spectacles d’optique at the Tuileries Palace in

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1738–42 and 1754–58. For Servandoni, décor was no longer simply the background for actors and singers; rather, he created tableaux of sublime effect, for a new kind of theatrical spectacle in which painting became the main focus.12 By the end of the eighteenth century, as David Charlton has argued, innovative scenography had become central to the aesthetic of opéra comique and had raised the stakes in a rivalry both between the two companies that staged the genre (the Opéra Comique and the Théâtre Feydeau) and between these institutions and the commercial theaters.13 Furthermore, these developments did not operate purely in the visual sphere but were combined with music in sophisticated new ways to create novel impressions adding powerfully to narrative and atmosphere.14 The celebrated stage designs created for the opéras comiques at the Feydeau in the 1790s by the Degotti brothers, Ignazio and Ilario, frequently suggested the overwhelming forces of nature and exploited the full width and depth of the stage.15 The conflagration of a castle in Luigi Cherubini’s Lodoïska (1791) and the rapid flow of an avalanche for the same composer’s Eliza (1794), each presented in combination with novel use of the orchestra, offered “sublime” spectacles that reputedly awed, terrified, and delighted audiences.16 By the beginning of the new century, however, the Degottis had moved on, the two opéra comique institutions had merged, and the most ambitious staging practices were now to be found in melodramas produced at three commercial theaters: the Ambigu-Comique, the Gaîté, and the Porte Saint-Martin.17 The overwhelming power of nature continued to be central to such spectacles, with characters frequently depicted at the mercy of elemental forces. Set designs reveal a preoccupation with history: the traces of previous societies are suggested with the ruins of buildings from different ages, often overgrown with vegetation. In the wake of the Revolution, similarly evocative landscapes in the paintings of Hubert Robert have been understood by Nina Dubin as “sublimat[ing] an unease with the disintegration of stable truths.”18 In other words, if the plots of melodramas have been understood as reenacting the trauma of the Revolution, offering themes of reconciliation and forgiveness to help heal psychic wounds,19 such arresting, multimedia tableaux seem to have magnified the feeling of being overwhelmed, in order to heighten the subsequent effect of catharsis achieved in the happy endings of the plots. 11

Spéculomanie At the same time that melodrama was shocking and astonishing audiences, art that appealed in a similar manner to the emotions was becoming

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increasingly popular. Charles Nodier bemoaned the spéculomanie by which artists were using their talents to create commodities for the marketplace rather than works of art for a cultivated public.20 This included the display of paintings in private exhibitions for an entrance fee (rather than in public museums and galleries) and new entertainments, such as the panorama, that produced art on a gigantic scale. For Nodier, such tendencies pointed to a future in which art and industry were inevitably linked, with “the creative hand of man lost to the machine.”21 While such apocalyptic predictions may have been exaggerated, the first decades of the century did see an extraordinary flowering of such spectacles d’optique, entertainments that emphasized scale and visceral effect, and in so doing appealed to a wider section of the public. As we shall see, these had a profound influence on the development of theatrical spectacle. Not only did they promote alternative modes of spectatorship that have been seen as anticipating those for photography and film, encouraging absorption in the “realism” of the representation; they also experimented with ways of creating a temporal complexity in the viewing experience that can be understood in relation to the precarious nature of post-Revolutionary life. In his Salon de 1763, Diderot had noted how some landscape painters encouraged spectators to imagine themselves into the represented space: he recommended looking at such paintings through a telescope to illuminate a fragment and exclude the edges, and from an elevated position such as a stairway, thus perfecting the illusion of looking at a “real” view.22 This experience was precisely what the panorama promoted: patented by the Irishman Robert Barker in 1787, it captured a frozen moment from a dynamic landscape (using perspective, depth of field, and chiaroscuro effects), displayed as a painting wrapped around the interior of a large rotunda, which was viewed from a platform in the middle of the building.23 The first panorama in Paris opened in 1799 and offered the depiction of a view from the central pavilion of the Tuileries palace;24 it was followed shortly afterward by “Toulon and its surroundings, taken at the moment when the English were forced to abandon it in 1793,” viewed from a fort situated a quarter of a mile away.25 These set the pattern for a series of panoramas of teeming cityscapes and battle scenes, captured as if from a distance (thus mitigating the lack of movement) and suspended in time: the spectator was encouraged to contemplate in awe and to wander through at leisure, perhaps consulting an accompanying map of the landmarks. Real and imagined memories mingled in this illusory space. Philippe- Jacques de Loutherbourg’s eidophusikon was another import from across the Channel, offering static, distant views but this time injecting a sense of time unfolding. Gradually changing light effects

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played across a sequence of pictures, in the more intimate setting of a small, darkened theater, with music to accompany the scene changes. 26 Arguably, the rudimentary narrative of time passing encouraged more focused attention and engagement, akin to watching a sequence of timelapse photography. The eidophusikon was widely imitated: in Paris, Monsieur Pierre’s spectacle pittoresque et mécanique offered “in small animated tableaux, effects of perspective, shipwrecks, storms, the rising and setting of the sun.”27 Storm scenes were particularly effective, with flashes of lightning, and storm-tossed waves in different planes of perspective, created with the aid of lighting, painted decorations, colored glass filters, and mechanical effects. Louis Daguerre’s diorama, which opened in 1822 and was to enjoy great public success, was on a grander scale but worked on similar principles, though its auditorium rotated on an axis to reveal a second painting (viewing time was about fifteen minutes per painting).28 Critics described the subtlety of effects: “From a calm, soft, delicious, serene day in summer, the horizon gradually changes, becoming more and more overcast, until a darkness, not the effect of night, but evidently of approaching storm— a murky, tempestuous blackness— discolours every object, making us listen almost for the thunder which is to growl in the distance.”29 The success of these spectacles centered on the naturalistic depiction of landscapes experienced either in suspended time, as if one were contemplating a view (the panorama), or in accelerated time (the spectacle pittoresque, the diorama). Any painted human figures in these scenes were tiny and distant, so that their lack of movement did not detract from the realism of the scene. By the time of Daguerre’s diorama, a number of attempts had nevertheless been made to create a hybrid genre that brought drama into the scene. The theater designer Jacques-François-Louis Grobert, for instance, put forward plans for an Autorama in 1814, a device that promised to remedy all the scenic problems of the traditional theater by adding the realistic perspective of the spectacle d’optique (permission was withheld, however): The objects round which the actors perform, will be represented not on a flat surface, but, in relief; and a great part of them in realities; they will be detached; and the perspective will be exclusively applied to the duty of preserving distant appearances, rendering extensive views, &c. vaporous and indistinct. The moving objects will appear to diminish in magnitude as they increase in distance: some will tremble while they obey the impulse of the wind, for instance, in a storm; while the atmosphere and the sea will offer smooth and serene, or stormy and agitated

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effects in infinite variety; the light will also strike them from the same angle of elevation as it strikes them in nature.30

Similarly, in 1818 the painter Jean-Pierre-Noël Alaux proposed a théâtre magique, which became the Théâtre du Panorama- Dramatique (1821– 23): large painted tableaux (often copies of salon paintings or panoramas) were animated by lighting effects and by distant mechanical figures, with commentary or dialogue provided by two offstage actors, together with musical accompaniment and occasional songs.31 Within a year the enterprise had failed: amid concerns that actors, language, and plot were incompatible with the new illusionism of such spectacles d’optique, spectators seem to have been caught between contemplating the depicted landscapes and following a dramatic narrative.32

Spectacle Although the Panorama- Dramatique did not have long- lasting success, Alaux exemplifies the sort of mobility that painters of the period enjoyed— crisscrossing between art and drama, and commercial and state theaters— participating in the cross-fertilization of techniques. He had begun his career as a scene painter at the Feydeau and then the Opéra,33 went on to paint panoramas,34 and joined the Gaîté from 1806 to 1816 and the Porte Saint-Martin during the period 1814–30,35 where he designed scenery for melodramas. He set up the Panorama- Dramatique in 1821 and an even more short-lived enterprise in 1827, the Néorama, both of which fused aspects of the panorama and diorama.36 Similarly, when Daguerre first arrived in Paris in 1803, he was apprenticed (privately) to Ignace Degotti at the Opéra, worked with Pierre Prévost on his new panorama,37 and secured a contract as stage designer at the Ambigu-Comique (1816– 22), where he created the scenery for thirteen melodramas. In 1820, he returned to the Opéra and codesigned the sets for the first gaslit opera in Paris, Nicolas Isouard’s Aladin (1822), before going on to create his diorama later the same year.38 The few surviving lithographs for Daguerre’s set designs for the Ambigu- Comique, and Alaux’s for the Panorama- Dramatique, demonstrate the continuing influence of Servandoni’s approach and postRevolutionary fascination with ruins in wild natural landscapes.39 Thus we see how Daguerre opened up the back of the stage onto an expansive vista, employing freestanding fermes to break up the monotony of traditional stage sets and suggest depth, and framed the view with the crumbling pillars of colossal architecture, disappearing beneath the tendrils of

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lush vegetation. His approach is exemplified by the design for act 4, scene 6 of Alexandre Guiraud’s melodrama Les Macchabées from 1817 (see figure 5.1). Marie-Antoinette Allévy has pointed to the elevation embodied in some of Daguerre’s designs: in Le songe (1818), for example, the spectator is transported to the summit of a high mountain, amid the ruins of an ancient Gothic chapel.40 The influence of the panorama— in horizontal and vertical dimensions— is clear. Moreover, to vary the play of light and shade on the décor and animate the scene, Daguerre taught the stagehands how to produce subtle and graduated effects with oil lamps; his trompe l’oeils were apparently so realistic that critics declared he had introduced a real stream and real trees and grass onto the stage for La Forêt de Sénart (1818).41 By 1819, Daguerre had been dubbed in the press the “Servandoni of the boulevards,” an acknowledgment of the importance that scenery played in the overall impact and success of these works.42 The designs for Alaux’s Panorama-Dramatique show similar interests in dramatic heights and panoramic views, in fragments of overgrown architecture— often to frame the tableau— and in lighting effects, whether striking contrasts of light and dark in different areas of the stage, or the implied gradual changes of light signaled by an approaching storm or other natural event. However, his views tend to be more symmetrical than Daguerre’s, with less attempt to break up the visual pathways and emphasize depth of field.43 The temporal manipulation that was a hallmark of the panorama and spectacle pittoresque— the suspension or acceleration of time— can be understood in relation to the larger- scale preoccupation with time, so often represented by ruins.44 Pannill Camp has explained how Hubert Robert’s landscapes of the 1780s and ’90s “[fold] together the immediate temporal scale of actualité with the imaginative longue durée projected by ruins . . . compressing the passage of time in an evocation of mortality and relentless nature,” and borrowing from the spatial abstractions and architectural features of theater space.45 For Dubin, Robert’s art satisfied particular needs in an era of increasing estrangement from the past, an impulse that had become more intense by the first decade of the nineteenth century.46 During the Empire, such representations can be understood as promoting a full experience of the present in order to help one come to terms with the ravages of the past and the uncertainty of the future. One can see the influence of the period’s spectacles d’optique on scenography, then, in terms of dramatizing the present by encouraging a contemplation of vastness in a suspended moment, or by compressing time in an exciting, accelerated experience. But how did music participate in the dramatization of the image, shaping modes of perception?

Figur e 5.1. Louis Daguerre, “Le tombeau,” 1817 scene design for Les Macchabées, act 4, scene 6 (Musée Toulouse-Lautrec).

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Music and Melodramatic Spectacle In 1985, David Charlton proposed a “melodrama model” in which artists generated “the illusion of realistic, controlled sequences perceived to run in ‘real time’ ” that built toward a climactic moment.47 Taking scenes from Rousseau and Benda as a starting point, he explored melodrama’s influence on the musico-scenic developments that took place in opéra comique during the 1790s and eventually fed into grand opera in the 1820s. Music in these works helped to articulate a sense of unfolding time, expansive space, and grandeur in partnership with the “new” scenography. In recent work, Charlton has identified a more precise relationship between lighting effects and musical form in certain opéra comique scenes— simple stage movement coordinated with slow lighting changes (e.g., for a sunrise) and, increasingly, irregular stage movement allied to lighting and stage effects (e.g., for a storm at sea).48 Such moments, he claims, demonstrate the landscape’s abstract power by “dispos[ing] the spirit to a certain kind of feeling and to the reception of certain ideas.”49 In the final section of this chapter, I focus more precisely on two such sequences in Pixerécourt’s La citerne but situate melodrama less diachronically as a step in the development of opera, and more synchronically as a site where various strands of artistic practice— from painting, various spectacles d’optique, and opéra comique— came together at a time when musical form and meaning were profoundly influenced by trends in visual culture.50 In so doing, I find alternative conceptions of time to the “real time” sequences that Charlton finds in opéra comique scenes, conceptions that are allied to the experiences evoked by the panorama and the spectacle pittoresque and that center on destructive natural landscapes and escape from seemingly inexorable forces— metaphors for Revolutionary and counter-Revolutionary experiences. The set designs for La citerne are by Alaux. Although no pictures survive, detailed descriptions are provided in the play text (from which I quote); the music is by Louis Alexandre Piccinni, who wrote and adapted scores for a large number of melodramas and was one of the house composers at the Gaîté.51 Act 1: Storm a nd S hip wr eck This is the lengthiest tableau in the play: music, scenery, and stage action together create the threatening atmosphere and articulate the protagonists’ physical struggle in a magnified moment. The storm and shipwreck take place across four scenes (1.4–7) and comprise some 265 bars of

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music (lasting approximately eight minutes), punctuated by a few lines of dialogue.52 The curtain rises on a beach, and the stage directions describe the scene as follows (working from the back to the front of the stage): the sea extends to the third plan, taking up more than half of the depth of the stage and offering an “immense view in all directions”; there are points of rock jutting up from the sea in the middle; on the left is a steep rock, covered with vegetation; farther forward (second plan) on the right there is a thatched belvedere or pavilion, built on ruins, with a path down to the sea; to the right and left are arcades, the bases of columns, architectural debris, with wild plants; on the right is an antique sarcophagus. These anticipate features of the later melodrama designs of Daguerre and Alaux for which we have extant pictures (described above): the tableau opens out onto a broad horizon; freestanding rocks and the belvedere break up the foreground and create a sense of depth, and fragments of monumental architecture ravaged by time frame the stage. Scene 4 concludes with a short, lively ballet, and as it finishes a clap of thunder is heard in the distance: “The sky darkens; in an instant the sea is covered with thick clouds from which many bolts of lightning come; the waves get bigger and are soon whipped up violently by the furious winds and crash on the rocks.” The dancers rush off to take shelter in the belvedere. Twelve bars of allegro accompany their flight, and then the storm proper begins (1.5, music cue 4): The storm builds, the claps of thunder follow each other more rapidly; the air is on fire, the waves pile up and leap to a prodigious height. Hail and then rain fall with a horrible fracas; all of nature is convulsed. We see in the distance a boat, battered by the storm, and which sends out a distress signal; it fires its cannon several times, from which we see the fire, and whose sound is heard a long time afterward. Several small boats with their masts down pass by; one of them explodes and disappears from view.

We move abruptly into D minor (the tonality of many storm scenes of the period), and the tempo increases, trombones joining the orchestral forces.53 Descending scales in the upper registers are sequenced downward, answered by rising three- or four- note motifs and short oscillating figures in the lower registers: thus the “fracas” of hail and rain is suggested. Alternating bars of piano and fortissimo emphasize upward leaps of a tenth, followed by stepwise descents, which seem to suggest the swell of the large waves. A continuous pattern of semiquavers and answering

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triplets, underpinned by a dominant pedal in the trombones, carries us into D major, and we hear the cannon fire (labeled in the score) as a series of diminished seventh chords, each preceded by tremolo strings. A sense of expectation is set up by the chromatic upward sequencing of a twobar motif, during which we perhaps see the small boats passing with their masts down; we then arrive at a more sedate fortissimo passage that carries us into E flat and— without pause— into the next scene, where our attention turns to Raphaël (1.6, music cue 4, continued). Here, the stage directions in the text indicate “we see Don Raphaël struggle against the waves; he tries to swim to a piece of rock jutting out from the sea; but he is repeatedly pushed back by the waves; finally he succeeds; his first movement is to raise his hands to the sky.” These brief instructions are realized in a lengthy passage of 71 bars that again conveys both nature’s power and the physical struggle of the protagonists: initially, rising and falling arpeggios suggest his determined attempts to reach the rock; short forte-piano ostinato figures (flutes and violins) and bar-length descending scales (bassoons and lower strings) over an E flat pedal suggest his continuing efforts. Changes in texture— repeated flourishes in the violins, repeated rising and falling scales— carry us back into D minor. Here, further scale fragments and forte- piano ostinatos flow into a pianississimo section in D major, across 22 bars of tremolo strings and a pedal, suggesting Raphaël’s relief and exhaustion as he eventually reaches the rock. He then speaks, unaccompanied, and the mood changes. His survival means nothing if he has lost his daughter Clara: “What dreadful chaos! An endless abyss on all sides, and yawning gulfs! Oh my daughter! My daughter! No doubt she has perished.” But he hears Clara’s voice in the distance (“Save me, I’m dying”) and jumps back into the sea, swimming across to where the sound came from. The music returns, in D minor, to accompany the tempest: “Don Raphaël disappears for a moment. The storm redoubles, the sea is more agitated, more furious than before; but the sky is less dark and allows us to see what is happening at the edge of the stage.” The accompaniment flows again, without break, into the next scene, which unfolds as follows (1.7, music cue 4 “suite,” 125 bars): Raphaël supports his daughter with one arm, and with the other makes every effort to climb onto the steep rock on the left. Again and again carried forward and then pushed back by the waves, they finally reach the base of this rock; a half- dead tree dangles its branch toward the sea. Clara, helped by her father, grabs the end of the branch and climbs onto the rock; she has almost reached the top when lightning strikes the tree and breaks it. Clara calls out and falls back into the sea with

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the branch from which she was suspended. Raphaël seizes her again and aims for the least elevated part of the rock; there, he puts her on his shoulders and gradually raises her so she can use the vegetation to pull herself onto the rock. When she reaches the summit, she helps her father, who climbs as she does. When they are out of danger, they throw their arms around each other and then kneel. The storm begins to calm; the thunder can be heard only at intervals and in the distance.

Again, the score provides two perspectives, evoking both the turbulent sea and the struggle of the two figures: semiquaver scales, repeated and sequenced three- or four- note motifs, and tremolo strings suggest the constant movement. This time when they have both reached safety a crescendo leads us back from D minor into D major. What is most striking about these extended tableaux is the short-range repetition— of the action (the waves, the procession of passing boats, the attempts of Raphaël and Clara to climb onto the rock) and of the music (the short sequences, ostinati, and repeated motifs and scales). The tableau unfolds— both visually and aurally— through these “frames,” or segments; it is difficult to discern any longer-range development or return of themes, although everything is in constant flux.54 In contrast to opéra comique storm sequences such as that of Rodolphe Kreutzer’s Paul et Virginie (1791, considered by Charlton as an example of the “melodrama model”), although we see and hear the storm build, reach its climax, and then recede, we do not experience it here as building through “real time”; indeed, the scene is much shorter than the equivalent scenes of opéras comiques.55 Beyond the pull of D minor/major, there are few decisive modulations to underpin the nuances of the story as it unfolds, or to mark the changing fortunes of the protagonists. And there are no singing voices (solo, ensemble, or chorus) to comment on the action and articulate the individual human drama. Rather, the sense of stasis created by surface repetition and tonal stability creates a magnified moment, suspended in time and encouraging absorption. The melodrama, in other words, does not require the spectator simply to invest in unfolding events. It also encourages contemplation of the scene as if from afar, out of time, in order to experience the emotions of terror and awe generated by the atmosphere more generally. Nature’s power is captured by magnifying it (visually and aurally) through repetition, erasing its boundaries; the drama is as much one of landscape as of plot and character.

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Act 4: Figh ting a nd Confl agr ation In the final act, we find ourselves contemplating the citerne of the title: The theater presents a vast cistern built from bricks and half ruined. The interior is carpeted with moss, ivy, and other creeping plants. . . . Here and there we can see blocks of brickwork that have become detached from the roof and attest to the dilapidation of the building.56

A similar constellation of visual and musical techniques to those in the storm sequence is deployed at the climax of the act (4.11), but here the narrative injects a sense of urgency that is more analogous to the accelerated time of the spectacle pittoresque than to the timelessness of the panorama. Spalatro, at the head of the pirates, appears on the gallery and orders the death of Clara and Séraphine: a horn fanfare launches fortyfive bars of allegro (4.11, music cue 11).57 Descending scales and sequenced repeating motifs in A minor alternate with reiterated tonic and dominant chords, which dissolve into sextuplet fragments in the violins over a slow chromatic descent in the other instruments, arriving in E minor. The tableau is described in the stage directions: All flee, crying out in horror and throwing themselves in front of the spiral staircase that will carry them to certain death. At the same moment, a terrible explosion is heard. The wall crumbles; the ramps of the staircase break; the gallery (no longer supported) collapses with a horrible fracas, carrying with it Spalatro and his men. At the back of the stage we see the castle lit by torches and flames and packed with fighting men. Meanwhile, the front of the cistern, to the right, shakes; enormous blocks detach themselves and reveal a wood, full of workers demolishing the building. As the opening is widened, the workers attach ropes to trees and slide into the cistern, suspended from the branches and stonework. The group in front of the staircase kneels.58

The descending scales emphasize the falling walls, gallery, and bodies and help to articulate the sense of elevation captured by the set design. One might take this further and equate the sense of vertigo and confusion with the spirit of the battle panorama, a moment frozen in— or out of— time. However, despite the use of similar musical components, and the creation of a long-range form that is once again ungraspable, the effect is very different: context is everything. The scene’s place at the end of the drama, and

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its shorter duration, mean that we feel the narrative pull and excitement more keenly than in the storm sequence. The stage directions describe progressive destruction rather than stasis through repetition. Confidence in the ultimate defeat of the villain grows, supported by the glimpses of light and distant landscape as the walls gradually fall away— and by the tonicdominant reiteration, which suggests an imminent conclusion. Similar musical ingredients are to be found in the conflagration and battle scene at the end of Cherubini’s opéra comique Lodoïska, but a feeling of more gradual movement through real time is created there, with a nuanced use of tonic-dominant alteration suggesting the changing fortunes of the opposing sides, across a much longer duration (124 bars).59 In La citerne, time seems rather to have speeded up with the blurring of such markers. These scenes exemplify the way in which melodramas responded aesthetically to the breathtaking process of rapid political change that characterized the period. The dominant reference point for both sequences is the Burkean sublime of the panorama. The sense of immensity in the set designs (horizontal and vertical scale, views into the distance, ruins of monumental architecture) is also suggested in the music (the lack of perceptible form beyond short-range repeated and sequenced segments, scalic runs, busy surface detail), stimulating emotions of excitement, terror, and awe. In both cases, the emphasis is on atmosphere and local events rather than the larger narrative: the moment is magnified, either through a suspension of time or by its acceleration. The aesthetics and techniques of the panorama and the spectacle pittoresque were being felt in set design more generally, but what is striking in La citerne is the way in which time is presented: it is as if a camera were panning back, so that the figures become indistinct, and we are left with a “sonorous tableau vivant” rather than a fully narrative or dramatic representation.60 The lack of perceptible long-range musical form enables this manipulation of temporal awareness. The imaginative longue durée projected by ruined landscapes might here be understood as articulating a reassuring frame within which to experience the continuing uncertainty of the present— and the future. In such tableaux, realism of effect is harnessed to create intensely experienced moments that sit “out” of time but nevertheless can be understood in relation to the spectator’s lived experience.

• Melodrama was implicated in the popularization and commercialization of art that Nodier so lamented in 1821. To put this in more positive terms, the genre borrowed from the broader visual excitement of spectacles d’op-

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tique and scenographic innovation, benefiting from the professional mobility of artists working in different media and institutions, and creating emotionally charged tableaux. The genre’s reliance at climactic moments on pantomime rather than sung ensembles and choruses meant that visual and orchestral means were sought to expand and intensify the drama in innovative ways. Nevertheless, these scenes, together with the experimental practices outlined above, demonstrate some of the tensions inherent in such multimediality: between art and drama, between contemplation and narrative drive. This was, however, a productive tension: it opened up a temporal space in which to explore post-Revolutionary experience. By acknowledging the diverse ways in which spectacle was understood in the nineteenth century, crossing generic boundaries and embracing music as well as visual display, we gain a better understanding of its role in the theater, and of melodrama’s wider cultural and political significance.

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Ch a p t er 6

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Compositional Gestures

Music and Movement in Lenardo und Blandine (1779) Thoma s Bet zwie se r

Approaching a “Multimedia” Work German melodrama of the late eighteenth century is characterized by pieces of different types: different in subject matter and style, in their handling of the poetic text, and in musical composition.1 Common to all, however, is an emphasis on the declamation of passionate text, an element influenced by the German literary vogue in the 1770s and 1780s for Sturm und Drang, and for the extremes of emotional expression associated with it. Given this emphasis on passionate declamation, it is perhaps not surprising that melodramas at this time were primarily designed for actors, mostly female actors, or that sometimes they were exclusively for one female actor, as in Benda’s Medea (1775). Despite the centrality of acting to the performance of melodrama, though, acting techniques were not generally documented to the same degree, or with the same stability, as were the domains of text and music. Partly because of this, acting in melodrama has generally been regarded less as an essential element of the work and more as a problem of performance practice. In the following essay, I draw on extensive research into eighteenthcentury theories of acting and gesture— as well as work directly concerned with early melodrama2— to consider a piece whose uniquely rich source materials offer new insights into the interplay of text, music, and gesture. The piece in question is Lenardo und Blandine, first performed in Munich in 1779 at the Salvatortheater, with text by Joseph Franz von Goez (1754–1818) and music by Peter von Winter (1754–1825). What makes this melodrama so valuable is that it provides us not only with a libretto and score but also with illustrations documenting acting and gesture: illustrations that provide copious indications about how it was performed. This pictorial source stems not from a third person, as is so often the case in the eighteenth century (for example, William Hogarth or Daniel

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Chodowiecki) but from Goez himself, the author of the melodrama text. But Goez was not only the playwright and the illustrator: he can also be thought of as the “producer.” In 1784, he advised, or perhaps led, a theater company of noblemen who staged Lenardo und Blandine in the town hall at Augsburg. In other words, Goez performed three different functions: as author of the text, as illustrator of its integral gestures, and, to use an anachronistic term, as “stage director” of the Augsburg production.3 In addition to this exceptional constellation of authorial positions, Goez also elaborated a theory of gesture around his melodrama and its illustrations. In 1783, he published a treatise entitled Versuch einer zalreichen Folge leidenschaftlicher Entwürfe für empfindsame Kunst- und SchauspielFreunde (Essay on sequential passionate sketches for sentimental amateurs of art and theater), at the heart of which are 160 illustrations relating to Lenardo und Blandine, each accompanied by comments concerning gesture, bodily movement, expression, and the declamation of the particular bit of text indicated. We might also note that the “libretto” in the Versuch embeds ellipses to indicate the appearance of music4 and numerals to key in the relevant illustration. For example:5 blandine: Und diesem Druk! 22 (indem sie seine Hände an ihr Herz drükt)— Gott hörts!— Treue, unzertrenliche Liebe! . . .  23 Nun noch einmal dicht an meinen Busen . . . 24 must du fort? . . . leb wol dann!— ade! blandine: And this touch! 22 (pressing his hands to her heart)— God is our witness!— Faithful, inseparable love! . . . 23 Now once more close to my breast . . . 24 Must you go away? Farewell!— Adieu!

The illustrations in Goez’s Versuch thus constitute an exceptional document on eighteenth- century acting, and for several reasons: first, the sheer quantity of visual material devoted to a single theatrical work; second, the chronological succession of the engravings, which follows the course of the piece exactly; and third, the specificity of text-gesture relations indicated by the captions accompanying each image and the crossreferences to the libretto.6 Goez’s engravings thus provide an opportunity to explore the function of gesture in early German melodrama, as well as an insight into the interplay of the various dramatic elements. Indeed, when the illustrations are taken together with the long introductory section of the Versuch (which concerns the genesis, subject matter, and performance of Lenardo und Blandine), the composite text can be read in various ways: as a systematic theory of gesture; as an essay on the aesthet-

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ics of melodrama; or even as an essay in performance practice. It is in light of these multifaceted functions of Lenardo und Blandine and the Versuch that this essay addresses the extent to which music is embedded in Goez’s general theory of melodrama and, subsequently, the apparent relationship between Goez’s concept and Winter’s music. Before going further, it is worth observing that Winter’s Lenardo und Blandine is by no means unknown: it has been examined by both theater and art historians,7 by scholars of German literature addressing the notion of eloquentia corporis,8 and by musicologists.9 As one might expect, most have been keen to underline the interplay of diverse media. However, only a few (Arne Stollberg and Stephan Hörner in particular) have taken music into serious consideration as part of that interplay.10 Here, I consider whether it is possible to establish a meaningful relationship between the illustrations and the music, a question that also bears on the issue of performance. Moreover, I ask what function the music might have in this apparently new media framework, thus placing Goez’s conception of melodrama within wider debates about eloquentia corporis. I want ultimately to suggest that we might read Goez’s illustrations as evidence of the impact gesture can have on the creation of a theatrical work, even suggesting that we might hear the music as the result of a gesture-driven aesthetic concept. In pursuing these lines of inquiry, I pay close attention to the musical qualities of what is a visually striking melodrama but also, more generally, enlarge our understanding of the varying aesthetic bases of eighteenth-century German melodrama.

From Pictorial Narrative to Melodrama Lenardo und Blandine, based on a ballad by Gottfried August Bürger written in 1776, is divided into two acts. In the first we see the eponymous lovers in intimate dialogue. They are planning to flee the country, since Blandine has been promised by her father to a prince whom she does not love. She is instead in love with the gardener Lenardo, but is forbidden to marry him since he is not of noble descent. At the end of act 1 the two lovers are forced to part for a final time before their escape. But after leaving Blandine’s room, Lenardo is killed by the prince, aided by Blandine’s father. The second act is effectively a monodrama, since only Blandine speaks. At its center comes an extended “mad scene” displaying various stages of the protagonist’s nervous collapse. At the start she is waiting for Lenardo as a storm rages outside. A messenger brings her a letter, a bloody, broken ring, and a sealed goblet. When she sees the ring and reads the letter, she realizes that her lover has been killed. In despair

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she falls to the ground, then rises up again and imagines her lavish wedding to Lenardo, a delusion constantly interrupted by sinister visions. Approaching the goblet, she discovers the heart of Lenardo inside and again sinks to the ground. She recovers and begins to dance as another storm approaches; she then falls to the ground for the last time and dies. Her father, finding his daughter dead, kills the prince. On the one hand, Goez’s piece presents typical Sturm und Drang features found in other melodramas in the late 1770s— passionate feelings and expressions, often underscored by the violent forces of nature. On the other hand, Lenardo und Blandine is unusual in subject matter, since it avoids the Greek mythology used, for example, in Benda’s Ariadne auf Naxos (1775), Medea, and Pygmalion (1779), or in Christian Cannabich’s Electra (1781): in this and in the ensemble cast of the first act, Lenardo und Blandine perhaps shares more with the French “boulevard” tradition than might be expected. Although Bürger’s ballad is ostensibly located in the past, Goez’s melodrama could be thought of as “modern.” Certainly the costumes in his illustrations are contemporary throughout. From this perspective, the second act’s continuous female mad scene gains in importance. Hardly any other German melodrama of this period focuses on madness in this way; just as significantly, this is a psychological study that cannot be explained away as coming from mythology.11 It is, rather, a “bourgeois frenzy” akin to that in Lessing’s Emilia Galotti, premiered in Braunschweig in 1772. No author had gone so far in staging “uncontrolled” passions as did Goez with Blandine. Indeed, his fascination with the poetics of emotional extremes provides an important context for understanding the unique media interplay of his melodrama. Before addressing such issues, however, we need to discuss the genesis of his illustrations.12 Lenardo und Blandine comes down to us in four “librettos”: two from the Munich performances (both published in 1779), one in Goez’s Versuch (1783), and a libretto for the 1785 Augsburg production. Peter von Winter’s music exists in nonautograph full score in one manuscript copy13 and in an arrangement for string quartet.14 The central source for the illustrations and for Goez’s theory of gesture is the aforementioned Versuch.15 What is more, Goez’s announcement (Ankündigung) of his treatise in 1782 must be taken into consideration:16 whereas the prefaces to the 1779 librettos more generally refer to the subject matter of the melodrama (the ballad by Bürger), the 1782 Ankündigung and the 1785 Augsburg libretto deliver more details concerning its genesis and the overall purpose. The latter’s preface gives the fullest account of the musical design of the composition, and of Goez’s aesthetics of melodrama. Here, Goez reports that he was inspired to create this work on a “lonely

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walk” during which Bürger’s ballad came into his mind. The ballad encouraged him both to declaim and gesture. Once home, he started to record his ideas by sketching the gestures. With the encouragement of friends, as Goez tells it, he continued, eventually making 160 sketches, a continuous succession of dramatic actions. Some Munich theater managers then proposed that Goez combine his dramatic declamation and graphic narrative into a melodrama. It was only at this point, according to Goez, that Peter von Winter was engaged to compose an appropriate score. The female title role was created by Madame Heigel, and her “virtuoso acting” (meisterhaftes Spiel) went a long way to ensuring the success of the 1779 Munich performances.17 In the aftermath of the performances— again according to his own account— Goez made great efforts to prepare his sketches for publication in the form of the elaborate engravings that survive today. We must assume, then, that the experience of the Munich performances had an impact on the final state of Goez’s engravings: he reported that the performances gave him the opportunity “to check the effect” of his etchings (deren Wirkung ich auf der Büne zu prüfen Gelegenheit fand).18 In this context, one illustration in the Versuch is telling, and raises important chronological questions (see figure 6.1). It depicts the exhibition of Goez’s illustrations for Lenardo und Blandine in a sort of showroom, with people in attendance. Apart from the self- referentiality of this “picture within a picture,” it is intriguing to ask whether this exhibition occurred just after Goez had finished his etchings (that is, prior to music being written) or at some point after the 1779 performance. According to Goez, it probably records the moment when he presented his etchings for the first time to the public, when the theater management decided to commission the melodrama.19 By this reckoning, figure 6.1 reports a moment in between media. As already mentioned, the 1785 libretto preface offers an alternative view of the melodrama’s genesis: by this point the 160 etchings had been published in the Versuch (1783), and so Goez refers readers of his preface to his treatise. Far more than in the 1779 libretto editions and in the Versuch, the 1785 preface focuses on the issue of genre. In response to the emerging fashion for melodrama, the structure and function of the music are here far more apparent: not by chance does this libretto mention the composer on the title page (“in Musik gesezt von Herrn von Winter”). Goez also mentions that the “musical composition has been supervised” by himself, according to his own “humble” concept (“Einrichtung jener Musik, welche unter meiner Aufsicht und nach meinen geringen Musikbegriffen ausgefürt worden”).20 It is important that this statement— about

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F igur e 6.1. Joseph Franz von Goez, Versuch einer zalreichen Folge leidenschaftlicher Entwürfe für empfindsame Kunst- und Schauspiel-Freunde: Erfunden, gezeichnet, geäzt und mit Anmerkungen begleitet von J. F. von Göz (Augsburg: Akademische Handlung, [1783]), 212. Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, ESlg/4 Art. 43. Used by permission.

Goez supervising the music— is only to be found in the 1785 libretto, at a time when Goez was about to produce his melodrama for the Augsburg stage.21 Taking the statement at face value would mean that Goez considered stagings of Lenardo und Blandine (from 1779 on) as a testing of his concepts: not only of his theory of gesture but of his theories about music’s role in melodrama. It further suggests that Winter must have been asked to respect the existing images, together with their sequence and the intervals between them. For an eighteenth-century composer, however experienced in the melodramatic genre, this was unusual.22 Thanks to the 1785 libretto, we have some details of Goez’s musical requirements. In particular, he instructed Winter to avoid directly mimetic features such as one might find in tone paintings. In Goez’s view, melodramatic composition always ran the risk of being too mimetic, of adhering too strongly to individual images in the text (for example, when the text mentioned a river, the music would depict flowing movement).23 As well as pronouncing on the aesthetic mediocrity of such procedures, a common standpoint in this period, Goez said that the music in between

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spoken passages was often too long, creating a problem both for the performer and the audience, in particular making it unclear “how [the performers] should act or what they should feel” during the music (was sie in diesen langen Zwischenraumen handeln oder denken sollen):24 corresponding gestures and emotions risked becoming haphazard or vague. The composer thus had to create reasonable proportions between musical and declamatory sections: “concentrated speech” (gedrängte Rede) must have its equivalent in music.25 As Goez put it: In my inexpert opinion, only as much music should be used and heard between the words— and not more— as the probable time the soul requires, once in its assumed state, to deduce ideas from apprehensions, or through that to proceed to new ideas. The composer should transport himself into the position of the actor, and fill out with soft harmonies the wordless state in which inner feelings compose and order themselves. He should study the effect of that moment in which passion has not yet risen to such a height that it opens the mouth instinctively and urges speech, or in which, through superfluity of feelings, speech falters.26

Goez was convinced that melodrama could gain in dramatic truth only through a well-grounded interplay of gesture and music: by bearing in mind the perspective of both the performer and the performance. Only when poet, composer, and actor “work together toward one point” (auf einen Punkt zusammen wirken) will “truth and naturalness” be guaranteed.27 Goez’s primary concern, then, was not that music should support the expression of the words (that is, reinforce textual meaning) but rather that it should mediate— even form a transitional state between— the various feelings, actions, and gestures. One key phrase emerges when Goez speaks about music, a phrase crucial to his melodramatic conception: Ruhepunkte des Gefühls (points of rest in the emotions). This is why he often uses terms such as “calm” and “soft” to describe these intermediate sections: one important function of music is “calming down” the high emotion expressed by words and gestures, and allowing the hearer to be receptive to it. Within his argument, Goez addressed the central melodramatic problem of the relationship of spoken word and music when enacted in a temporal continuum. In what ways might music be heard as a carrier of semantic content, and how ought the performer to “react” to or with the music? What is the specific interplay of media, given the different temporal frames of music, text, and gesture? Goez’s ideas retain a certain

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ambivalence, and we have to be aware that his theory is not as coherent or “logical” as those of other writers on acting, such as Johann Jakob Engel. As we shall see, the preexistence of the images was as determining a factor as Goez’s theoretical ideas in the composition of Lenardo und Blandine. There was, though, more clarity in 1785 than in the earlier libretto prefaces. The focus of Goez’s attention on the role of music in the poetics of melodrama seems to have been the result both of experience gained through the Munich and Augsburg performances and of the theory he had been developing for his Versuch. In this respect we would do well to widen the scope with which we view Goez’s melodramatic concept, in particular by considering eighteenth-century acting theory and physiological inquiry. This larger cultural context will help bring the contours of his ideas for Lenardo und Blandine into relief, which in turn will help elucidate Winter’s compositional technique.

Passion and Action in Goez’s Theory In his article on Goez and Winter’s melodrama, Arne Stollberg discusses the intellectual background of Goez’s theory of acting. Following Erika Fischer-Lichte’s distinction between the established system of artificial signs in baroque theater and the idea of natural signs that emerged in the late eighteenth century, Stollberg stresses how this paradigm shift meant that feelings and gestures in the later period had to assume a “natural” relationship, because gestures were considered the visual equivalent of feelings.28 This point was stressed by Engel in his Ideen zu einer Mimik (1785– 86), the first systematic approach to eloquentia corporis. In contrast to Engel’s widely circulated theories, however, Stollberg sees Goez’s Versuch as an exemplary case study— one that aimed to elucidate and demonstrate the relationship between psychic excitation and gestural expression. In Stollberg’s view, Goez’s melodrama and his Versuch are experiments in the search for “proof ” about the interplay of mind and body.29 Given that Engel and Goez pursued different rhetorical strategies (discourse on the one hand, experiment on the other), Günther Heeg has argued for a clearer distinction between their aesthetic theories. Engel is described by Heeg as a follower of a “theory of action,” with Goez a representative of a “theory of passion.”30 In Engel, emotions are active, since they lead to movements controlled to some degree by reason;31 in Goez, emotions are passive symptoms evoked by sensory stimuli. According to Heeg, Goez was fascinated by the idea of continuous “movement of expression,” something driving characters so far that they lose control of rational expression, “only being able to react by gesticulating.”32 The sin-

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gularity of Goez’s conception vis-à-vis Engel and other contemporaries can also be seen in the former’s illustrations. In comparison to the theatrical illustrations of Chodowiecki, for example, Goez’s pictures exhibit no desire to create static moments. Chodowiecki’s etchings for Shakespeare’s Hamlet (1778) are framed by the proscenium arch, foreground and background are clearly defined, and the viewer is always at the same distance from the stage gesture. Goez, by contrast, tends to dissolve these framings, and he tries to make the ephemeral process the main subject of the representation, something also demonstrated by the sheer number of illustrations. Whereas Chodowiecki is interested in what can be preserved or fixed from the performance, Goez tries to depict “movements of expression”; each picture captures the character with a state of inherent restlessness. In Goez’s opinion, any physical stimulus— positive or negative— can trigger a corresponding impression in the brain; the latter then results, almost mechanically, in a direct bodily reaction, bypassing consciousness. And since the intermediate filter of consciousness is absent, the character (in this case Blandine) is entirely subject to her sense impressions; she is only capable of passively receiving stimuli, to which she reacts without reflection.33 To take this theory one step further: since Blandine is in extreme situations (principally in the grip of madness), her body is shown moving from one emotion to the next; the result is one of permanent exertion and exhaustion. Following Heeg, we can see the entire action of the melodrama as structured by this process.34 It would be unbearable were it not for a feature of eighteenth-century acting particularly prominent in melodrama, which Heeg identifies as “figuration” (in German, Figuration). This remedium, a gestural refiguration of emotion, is characterized by attempts to slow down and then suspend the movements of the passions as poses or attitudes— to the point that we can notice their “interpretable contours.”35 It is precisely here, with issues of remediation and retardation, that music comes into play in the wider context of Goez’s theory. The music he asked for should, he hoped, help overcome the speechless states between the different emotions expressed in words (whether before emotion was high enough for verbal expression or when it was too high). Its function seems to be to create transitions between moments of exertion and exhaustion, a feature that goes some way to explaining why Goez constantly stressed the need for musical “points of rest.” Music, in his view, should both prolong the passions and serve as transitions between them— and if there is a tension between these two imperatives, it is not one that Goez was able to resolve in his theoretical writings. However,

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both as theorist and writer, he was acutely aware of the way in which music shapes emotion in time. Moreover, and despite the high emotional stakes typical of the genre, Winter’s transitions are often paradoxically calm and soft, perhaps in response to Goez’s theorizing. Taking Goez’s theory and its intellectual context into account, we might describe the primary— and distinctive— function he assigned to music as palliative: it neither “depicts” nor “illustrates” feelings, but rather it helps to soften the effects of suffering, thus returning the protagonist to a “natural” state of rest.

Musical Gestures and “Passionate” Transitions Goez’s claim that melodrama could achieve “truth” only through the coherent interplay of gesture and music turned out to be more than abstract speculation: it was also the rationale for an experiment.36 As mentioned above, the 1785 preface makes clear that Goez’s primary motivation in creating melodrama was to demonstrate the correlations between emotion and gesture, with music playing a secondary role. The illustrations form the core unit: they inform the music and not the other way round; indeed, gesture and bodily movement help to structure the music just as much as the text does. Accordingly, our main focus when analysing Winter’s music should be on the ways in which the composer realized the (predetermined) interplay of image and text: to look at the relationship of gesture and music, and to explore ways in which Goez’s aesthetics were played out in musical decisions. The music of German melodramas in this period did not follow any set forms, as it did in opera or instrumental music, either in regard to the macro or micro structure.37 Thus the basic issue of examining when a composer decided to write a new musical section is not at all trivial. At first glance there is little that seems to influence the score: neither verse nor rhyme, nor any other poetic framework. Although the appearance of music is indicated in the librettos (as mentioned, by means of ellipses, dashes, etc.), the length of any given musical section is highly variable. Given this circumstance, composers had to structure their compositions according to dramatic factors such as scene changes, characters’ entrances and exits, and so on. If we look at the first act of Winter’s melodrama (see the structural overview in the appendix), this procedure is quite obvious: new musical sections coincide with new plot elements, as exemplified by the B-minor amoroso section starting at measure 133 in act 1, which shadows the beginning of the farewell scene.

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In the second act, however, this procedure occurs on only a few occasions. Here, the music is guided much more by changing passions: new motivic material corresponds to a change in mood and emotion expressed by the text, as for example in Blandine’s monologue at the beginning of act 2. But this feature cannot explain each new musical section in the second act: Winter included many passages whose justification can hardly be found in textual features. In these passages, we must assume that the composer was guided by the illustrations. This assumption is supported by an interesting feature of the score. In passages where we have the highest density of illustrations, we also find the densest succession of musical entries, with correspondingly few measures for each entry. One example of this is the scene in which Blandine approaches the goblet, imagining that it contains the heart of her murdered lover Lenardo, and then falls senseless to the floor (illustrations 116–19; see figure 6.2). O we! . . . O we! . . . 116 (Sie sinkt betäubt—117 an das Gefäs herab. 118 Nun ermant sie sich plözlich, reist den Dekel los und blikt starrend in das Gefäs, ersieht das blutige Herz mit einem Schrei.) Da ist mein Herz! 119 O woe! . . . O woe! . . . 116 (She sinks down, stunned—117 to the goblet. 118 Suddenly she plucks up the courage, rips the lid off, and, staring into the goblet, sees the bloody heart with a scream.) There is my heart! 119

This congruence between image and music is striking: a composer who had only the libretto text might well have produced much more musical material. Winter, however, condensed the passage into a five-measure section to cover all four illustrations. This concentration may have been a direct result of what happens in illustrations 116–18: the music lasts as long as it takes for a body to fall to the ground, a clear indication that Winter was either instructed by Goez or had the illustrations on his desk while composing (see example 6.1). Such real- time relationships between body movement and music— rare even in the ballet-pantomime of the late eighteenth century— can be found in several places. Referring back to the earlier discussion of eighteenth- century acting theory, we might say that such a relationship affords the performance a more “natural” appearance. The music functions to support the dynamics of the body instead of mediating between or expressing emotions. As well as this real-time dynamic relationship, a second procedure can be found in Winter’s score, one that could be described as “expressivepictorial.” Here, music literally enacts gestures. An example can be found

F igur e 6.2 . Engravings 116–19 from Joseph Franz von Goez, Versuch einer zalreichen Folge leidenschaftlicher Entwürfe für empfindsame Kunst- und SchauspielFreunde: Erfunden, gezeichnet, geäzt und mit Anmerkungen begleitet von J. F. von Göz (Augsburg: Akademische Handlung, [1783]). Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, ESlg/4 Art. 43. Used by permission.

E xa mple 6.1. Act 2, bars 335–44, from Peter von Winter, Lenardo und Blandine (1779), based on the manuscript score at the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Mus.ms. 3647. Please note that the text given by Winter in the manuscript score differs slightly from the libretto text given in Goez’s Versuch.

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in the first part of act 2 (the allegro section, measure 223ff., corresponding to illustrations 73– 78), as Blandine imagines that her lover is in danger because of the terrible night outside. Seit meiner Muttertod war keine Nacht wie diese! 73—(es blitzt) Gott Feuer am Himmel . . . Blitze glühn in Wetterwogen— . . . 74 (es donnert in der Ferne . . .) ferne rollt der Donner nach 75 . . . Tod und Verwüstung über ihn! 76 Entsetzen ergreift mich . . . 77 Gott, schütze meinen Gatten! . . . ich will ihn suchen . . . muß ihn finden . . . ! 78 There has not been a night like this since my mother’s death! 73 — (lightning flashes) God, fire in the sky . . . Lightning is glowing in the surges of weather— . . . 74 (thundering in the distance . . .) the thunder is echoing from afar 75 . . . Death and devastation above him! 76 Horror seizes me . . . 77 God, protect my husband! . . . I want to look for him . . . must find him . . . ! 78

Blandine hears thunder and lightning (“fire in the heavens”); she is horrified by the storm, and in the end rushes out of the room crying “I must find him.” This passage embraces a sequence of six illustrations. No. 73 is static, a gesture coinciding with the end of the preceding adagio. No. 74 shows a very strong gesture; the movement is continued in nos. 75 and 76 and ends with the “explosion” of the body expressed in no. 78. The overall movement is mirrored in the music: the whole sequence is covered in a 27-measure allegro split into two-, four-, or six-measure units, each unit corresponding to a specific gesture. The main musical motive is formed by octave scales running up and down in eighth or sixteenth notes. Commentators have referred to this passage nearly exclusively as word- painting, because of the thunder and lightning mentioned in the text. However, the crucial point is not the mimesis of meteorological effects but a musical realization of gesturing. Within the strong dynamic movement of the entire sequence, one point is particularly striking: no. 77 marks a moment in which the energy of the gesture retreats inward, as it were, before it “explodes” as Blandine rushes out. And exactly at this point (no. 77) the musical setting changes significantly: in contrast to the propulsive effect of rapid octave scales, the music now reports a kind of stoppage (see example 6.2). The scales give way to portato repetitions. The fact that the musical gesture suddenly changes (for three measures only) in accordance with the changed gesture of the illustration would seem to support the idea that

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F igur e 6.3. Engravings 73–78 (corrected numbering) from Joseph Franz von Goez, Versuch einer zalreichen Folge leidenschaftlicher Entwürfe für empfindsame Kunst- und Schauspiel- Freunde: Erfunden, gezeichnet, geäzt und mit Anmerkungen begleitet von J. F. von Göz (Augsburg: Akademische Handlung, [1783]). Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, ESlg/4 Art. 43. Used by permission.

Winter intended to depict gestures musically. His overriding interest was not in word-painting but in passion, which he realized by producing congruencies between gesture and music. In light of these examples, it is certainly plausible that Winter designed his music according to gestural dynamics (that is, as the outward mani-

E x a m p l e 6.2 . Act 2, bars 240–45, from Peter von Winter, Lenardo und Blandine (1779), based on the manuscript score at the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Mus.ms. 3647. Please note that the text given by Winter in the manuscript score differs slightly from the libretto text given in Goez’s Versuch.

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festation of an emotional process). Many passages offer similarly striking coincidences between bodily attitudes and musical textures— so many, in fact, that we might think of Winter’s music as essentially gesture-driven. Even though Goez himself did not theorize such a relationship between music and gesture in melodrama, this conclusion is supported both by his description of his work’s genesis and by close reading of the score. Yet gesture-driven features seem to be only one facet of Winter’s music. Another is to provide Goez’s “points of rests” between the protagonist’s emotional states: creating “soothing” sections between moments of high emotion may seem idiosyncratic, but it well suits Goez’s idea that music should also accompany moments without speech, while emotion is recollected and we move from one state to another. This idea differs from Singspiel poetics in a particular way: whereas, for example, in Reichardt’s view music should appear only when the passions are “so high that spoken words are no longer sufficient,”38 Goez was interested not only in this more- than- linguistic emoting but also in the (preceding or following) moments of transition, when the emotions pass from one state to another. This distinctive melodramatic practice can be seen at many points in Winter’s music. If we compare the libretto and its passionate exclamations with corresponding passages in the score, it is surprising how calm and smooth the musical composition can seem. In keeping with Heeg’s observation that Goez’s melodrama is structured by moments of exertion and exhaustion, we might listen in the music for the palliative function alluded to above. Although the second act’s music articulates an increasingly dynamic process mirroring Blandine’s progressive madness— with the fastest passages reserved for the end of the act— the music elsewhere is mostly shaped by slower tempi such as adagio, amoroso, or allegretto (see appendix). In these sections Winter constructs the “points of rest,” also reusing earlier material with the aim of ensuring a level of coherence through repetition or reminiscence. These transitions between the spoken sections unfold within an entirely different sense of time in comparison with the gesture-driven musical features analyzed above. Whereas the latter is close to real-time expression and acting, the musical intermediaries take into account the changing states of the “eloquent body.” Music has, we might say, a framing function: it frames passionate expressions and emotional gestures in order to make the horror bearable; or better still, as we are dealing with an inherently temporal art form, make it endurable. The attitudes are somehow “frozen” even as the music continues.39

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Suffering as Melodramatic Performance The multimedia realization of gestures onstage leads to an issue that has been implicit throughout: that of performance. Goez stated that public performance was not his initial purpose: the fact that his melodrama was staged in various theaters was incidental to his project. Nevertheless, Lenardo und Blandine was a success on the late eighteenth-century stage, although it was only played in southern German cities such as Munich (1779 and 1780), Vienna (1782), Augsburg (1784), and Linz (1796.)40 In Munich, Lenardo und Blandine met with accusations of immorality and, according to Goez, was withdrawn from the season’s programmes.41 However, this “fact” is revealed only by Goez himself and may be related to his being a Freemason, which resulted in his expulsion from Munich in 1791.42 It is possible that he fabricated the story because of a supposed conspiracy against him: there is no evidence of this “scandal” (as told by Goez) in the Munich press. After the first performance on 25 June 1779, a review of Goez’s melodrama was published in a Bavarian art journal.43 The reviewer addresses a central issue in melodramatic aesthetics, coming close to the quintessence of Goez’s intentions even prior to Goez’s own theoretical exposition and the publication of his illustrations in 1783. Although it is unclear whether the reviewer was familiar with Goez’s drawings, he is clear that gesture was the most impressive feature in the performance: The pantomimes and attitudes . . . were admirably contrived from one position to the other, pictorial and expressive— and grand in every moment, so that we have seen wonderful tableaux as much as various attitudes. The performance is one of the masterpieces of our beloved Madame Heigel.44

The observation that the audience is presented with both tableaux (Gemälde) and attitudes (Stellungen) supports the idea that Goez’s point of departure for the overall conception of his melodrama was visual, both in the sense of pictures and of gestures. The review also suggests that the musical “points of rest” were thought of as a necessary precondition to appreciate the sequential affective states. In this context, it is telling that the reviewer says nothing explicitly about Winter’s music. Indeed, by his own admission, he lacked the vocabulary to describe this component of the performance: I end this account sad and unsatisfied, because I cannot find any terms for the most magnificent [thing] that accompanies the drama, any ad-

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equate means to describe the music’s expression. One has to imagine similar features [images] in nature, in order to arouse in oneself similar feelings inherent in the genius of these sounds.45

The fact that the reviewer resorts to nature in order to describe the music is remarkable. This goes beyond the ubiquity of allusions to the natural in eighteenth- century aesthetics. It rather attests— even when Blandine’s strong emotions were seen as “out of control”— to the music as Ruhepunkt, as a mediator between extreme, “unnatural” passions and a “natural” emotional state. It can be concluded that one of the music’s functions resided in its ability to master passions. It is thus tempting to read the review as evidence that Goez’s specific conception of melodrama was borne out in performances, even before Goez had laid out his theory in writing. However, if we are to place such weight on the staging of Lenardo und Blandine, a further question then arises: To what extent can the 160 illustrations also be regarded as a performance document? What, in other words, is the status of the engravings in the Versuch?46 Scholars have been understandably reluctant to claim a direct link between the illustrations and performances, although both Ewert and Stollberg regard the succession of pictures as a species of stage manual (Regiebuch).47 If this point remains moot, what we can say is that the fact that Goez prepared his engravings for print after the Munich staging makes it possible, even probable, that his experience of the performances was integrated into the final design of the illustrations: Goez’s comment that the staging had been a proof of his gestural concept can be read as supporting this.

• Whatever the case, Lenardo und Blandine constitutes a unique example of late eighteenth-century German melodrama. Together with the Versuch it presents a combination of melodrama and theory, or even an example of theory through melodrama. It is scarcely imaginable that Goez might have demonstrated his gestural concept through another genre, such as opera or spoken drama. The genre of melodrama was so infused with gesture and acting that it was the ideal purveyor of the new theories about eloquentia corporis. However, more than other melodramas, Lenardo und Blandine was embedded in a specific “multimedia” conception— one in which music played an important role, both in theory and practice. The fact that a composer was instructed by a poet, not primarily about textmusic setting but about gestural features, is extraordinary in eighteenth-

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century spoken theater or opera. What is more, the notion that music functions to calm strong passions, rather than represent them, seems to be unique within theater music, even if it concords with wider conceptions of music’s function. Whether Lenardo und Blandine is truly exceptional in the late eighteenth-century context is open to question: revisiting Benda’s melodramas from the gestural perspective suggested by Goez’s piece could possibly lead to a new understanding of the interplay of text, gesture, and music in these works, too.48 Equally, Goez’s concept of palliative Ruhepunkte may offer an alternative to conventional interpretations of music’s dramatic and emotional expression in melodrama. A modified analytical approach to melodrama is probably the most instructive lesson we gain from Goez. By alerting us to the importance of gesture— an alternative to the all-too-common theme of the relationship between text and music— this passionate rendering of a heart-wrenching tale raises broad questions about the visual and emotional cultures of early melodrama.

Appendix: Structural Overview of Lenardo und Blandine Act I

Music sections

Measuresa

Text sections (interspersed/ simultanous)b

Grave 4/4

1–2

—

Moderato 4/4 E-flat major

3–95

4/1

Allegro [modulating]

96–102

3/1

8–15

L and B’s dialogue

Allegretto [modulating]

103–32

8/1

16–20

first attempt at farewell

Amoroso 3/4 B minor

133–81

9/4

21–31

farewell and L’s departure

Furioso ¢

182–84

2

32–33

The prince and king (B’s father) murder L

Allegro 4/4 D minor

185–216

—

—

L’s death

Pictures

Plot elements

1–7

[pantomime]

According to the manuscript score at the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Mus.ms. 3647. Number of sections of text appearing within this musical section, whether delivered in between musical phrases (interspersed) or over them (simultaneous). a

b

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Act II Music sections

Measures

Text sections

Pictures

Plot elements

Adagio 3/4 C minor

1–35

4

34–42

B’s monologue

Andante molto 2/4

36–60

4

43–51

Amoroso 3/4

61–75

4

52

Andante

76–92

1/1

53–54

Andantino 2/4 Andante sost.

93–103 104–5

7

[Goez refers in Versuch to earlier pictures]

Adagio 3/4

106–23

5/1

[ditto]

Allegro

124–34

3/2

55

Adagio

135–44

2

[reference to picture 50]

Allegretto grazioso

145–62

8/1

56–59

B takes a rose

Allegro ¢ E flat major

163–209

6

60–69

B goes to the window

Adagio

210–22

7/1

70–73

B’s despair

Allegro

223–49

5/1

74–78

“I must find him”

Grave ¢

250–85

1/1

79–87

arrival of messengers

Allegro

286–321

11/3

88–110

B’s mad scene begins

Andante 2/4

322–26

2

111–13

B approaches goblet

Allegro 2/4 (3/4 346 ff.)

327–78

12/1

114–25 125–37

B discovers L’s heart

Allegro (molto ¢)

379–95

4/1

138–44

Lamentoso

396–407

4/2

145–51

Allegro

408–65

5

152–60

The king (L’s father) murders the prince

•

Ch a p t er 7

•

Music and Subterranean Space in La citerne (1809) Jens He ssel ager

Act 4 of Pixerécourt’s 1809 melodrama La citerne takes place in the setting indicated by the title, a subterranean cistern. According to the stage directions, the cistern is vast, but half in ruins and mostly covered by moss and ivy. Blocks of stone and bricks are dispersed around the place. Staircases at the sides lead up and out in various directions, as does a corridor at the back. What, we might ask, is the significance of this setting? Should we interpret it, for instance, in terms of what Peter Brooks, in The Melodramatic Imagination, considers topoi belonging to the “structures of the Manichaean”? Structures, that is to say, that involve the explicit, often physical and visual, articulation of absolute moral and psychological opposites, and that Brooks sees as characteristic of melodrama, particularly “classical” melodrama (roughly 1800–1830). The principal topoi Brooks identifies are, on the one hand, the enclosed garden: a space of innocence, which will typically be violated by the intruding villain. On the other hand are various spaces of incarceration: Gothic chambers, prisons, frightful dungeons, oubliettes, and so on. These latter settings— of which La citerne’s act 4 provides a further example— often function, in Brooks’s analysis, as places from whence an innocent heroine will seek to escape.1 A topos, in this sense, is a legible spatial arrangement that serves to concretise or realize a conventional sign. As such, its legibility depends on two contexts: first, the totality of the theatrical event of which it is a part, and second, the larger contemporary culture— including other melodramas, plays, operas, events, novels, images, and objects— in which it takes place. The legibility of a topos, then, depends on both the internal workings of the drama and the latent intertextuality of its constituent parts. Moreover, this dual process concerns not only the visible, but also the audible, i.e., the dialogue and the music, in which conventional patterns, quotations, and allusions may be articulated in ways that are as

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recognisable as the visual patterns of a physical setting. What I want to argue here is that the music of La citerne— composed by Louis Alexandre Piccinni, the grandson of Gluck’s great rival Niccolò Piccinni and a student of Jean-François Le Sueur— made use of elements that would have been recognizable as conventional musical idioms and that could even occasionally have been perceived as direct allusions to other works: as quotes, near-quotes, or microquotes— a type of allusion I shall term an “aural tag.” I will be concerned also with considering these sonic elements in light of a tendency, which I believe can be observed at various moments in La citerne, whereby music, as well as the emotions or moods evoked by it, appears occasionally to have been calculated for comic effect. Elsewhere, Sarah Hibberd and Nanette Nielsen have argued that music in melodrama may not always support the text of the play— that it may instead sometimes “complicate our understanding of a particular moment,” for instance by alluding to or quoting previously heard themes at strategic moments. This, they add parenthetically, “might even bring to mind the dramatic situation of another work.”2 My reading of La citerne seeks to take this argument out of parentheses and onto the subterranean stage set of one of Pixerécourt’s most successful melodramas.3 In the process, I hope to reconsider one of Brooks’s central claims about the “mode of excess” in melodramatic theater: rather than observing a cumulative process of mutually reinforcing formulae in different media— text, gesture, music, and décor all delivering the same “message”— I explore instead how a dramatic economy trading on the formulaic could result in less monolithic conceptions; how, in practice, an overlayering of past experiences and present drama might enable authors, actors, and audiences to make light of dark places without sacrificing the pleasure of theatrical horror.

A Horrible Place Judging from the stage directions, the cistern in act 4 of La citerne is precisely the sort of legible spatial arrangement sketched above— the sort of dramatic trope Brooks’s theory sought to capture with reference to fundamental psychological conflicts. Various conventional patterns, involving clearly articulated moral oppositions, are evoked. As the curtain rises, torches light the scene and we see pirates all over the stage, arranged in different attitudes, sleeping. The cistern, as we have already learned in previous acts, is the secret hideout of these outlaws, who are led by Octar. In moral terms, the cistern is recognizable as a space unregulated by the law, governed instead by criminals. As such it could be considered a reiteration of a trope familiar from the dark woods where Karl Moor’s band

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of robbers reside in Schiller’s drama Die Räuber (1781), or where Robert and his brigands hide in La Martelière’s French version of the play, Robert, chef de brigands (1792). Or it could be considered a variation of the subterranean cavern of Dercy and Le Sueur’s drame lyrique, La caverne; ou, Les voleurs (1793), where Rolando, the robber captain, and his accomplices hold captive the innocent heroine, Séraphine (see figure 7.1). Before the curtain rises on La citerne’s act 4 scene, we hear some 35 bars of somber music in E minor (to which I will return later). The revelation of the subterranean tableau with pirates (indicated in the orchestral parts at mm. 36–38) is musically accompanied by an effect of dynamic contrast, as the music moves from piano into dramatic fortissimo (see example 7.1).4 The bass starts pounding (m. 38), and a solo flute plays a brief motif, starting on an accentuated pitch, descending to a diminished seventh chord, also accentuated, over a pedal tonic. The agitated flute is then answered by violins repeating the same gesture, but this time leading back to the tonic. With Brooks in mind, such an effect at the rise of the curtain could be interpreted as underpinning the moral implications of the setting— adding, that is, a sense of excitement, a kind of shuddering gesture, to complement the visual experience. As one might expect with such a gesture, the initial “shock” soon appears to wear off; as calm returns, a solo horn takes over. A variation of the curtain-music passage above is heard again a little later in act 4, as the B section of a number separating the second and third scenes of the act (see example 7.2, mm. 11ff.). Between these two moments (the curtain music and its varied repetition) there has been much stage action. In the first scene, Spalatro, one of the pirates, warns his comrades that he has heard gunshots near the entrance to the cistern; the pirates immediately get to their feet and leave via the corridor at the back (accompanied by a fast march), carrying the torches along with them and thus leaving the cistern in “the deepest obscurity” (stage directions, 4.1). Then comes the second scene, in which the innocent Séraphine and the not-so-innocent Picaros enter via the staircase stage left. Picaros is a former pirate who is presently working for the unsympathetic Don Fernand, who in turn wants to marry Séraphine (against her will, to get his hands on her inheritance). To help Don Fernand accomplish this, Picaros impersonates Séraphine’s long-lost father, Don Raphaël. As the pair descend the stairs, Picaros carries a lamp in one hand, supporting Séraphine with the other. After some dialogue (again, to which I shall return), Picaros takes leave of Séraphine, who is left alone in the dark cistern; the musical number just referred to is then heard. The repetition of the curtain music prepares for Séraphine’s scene 3

F i gur e 7.1. The title page of the published score for Dercy’s [=Dercia] and Lesueur’s La caverne, depicting the ambitious mise- en-scène, with a horizontally split stage (Paris: Nadermann, 1796). As in the setting of La citerne’s act 4, there are several exits at the back of the large and dimly lit space, leading in unknown directions. The illustration refers to the penultimate scene, involving onstage fighting between the intruding rescue party and the outlaws. This fight scene finds its analogy in the spectacular finale of La citerne (cf. Sarah Hibberd’s chapter in this volume). Thanks to University of Toronto Libraries for use of this image.

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E x a mpl e 7.1. La citerne, act 4, introduction, bars 32–44.

monologue, in which her first words are “What a horrible dwelling-place! What will become of us, dear God, if we have to stay here for several days?”5 Here the music functions as a kind of recognition or reminiscence motif— an “oh no, it’s a pirates’ den” moment, if you will— and the gestural content of the cue seems to fit the mood of a “horrible” place in which one shudders. Surely, then, this is an instance of one of those melodramatic topoi Brooks had in mind. Indeed, when Séraphine exclaims, “What a horrible dwelling-place!” it is as if she “reads” the implications of the setting aloud for the audience, locating it in— or perhaps locating in it— a specific imaginative context, asking the audience to recognize the cistern as a site of horror. Here text, music, and scenery accumulate to mutually reinforce. Thinking more broadly, one might suggest that this particular melodramatic setting belongs to the type of place whose aesthetic legitimacy Edmund Burke, some decades previously, sought to account for by arguing that while they did not elicit an experience of beauty, they could instead elicit experiences of the “sublime.”6 The point here is to acknowledge an intertextual dimension to the cistern as a topos. Yet this does not mean that the cistern’s expressive value is entirely fixed by convention. However legible the theatrical setting may

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E x a m p l e 7.2 . La citerne, act 4, scene 2. The music accompanies the following dialogue and actions (the words functioning as cues for the musicians are marked in bold): picaros: Be calm, my child. (He embraces her and mounts the grand staircase at the back.) This corridor no doubt leads to an opening in the countryside, let’s see. séraphine: Please be careful. (Picaros advances into the corridor and is lost from view.) [picaros: Calme toi, mon enfant. (Il l’embrasse et monte le grand escalier du fond.) Ce corridor souterrain a sans doute une ouverture dans la compagne, voyans. séraphine: N’avancez qu’avec précaution. (Picaros s’enfonce dans le couloir, et on le perd de vue.)]

appear— especially with the benefit of scholarly hindsight— its meaning for any audience was also dependent on the dramatic event in progress. Indeed, with this turn to performance we begin to see the complexity that can result from stage conventions within and beyond the melodramatic genre.

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A Comic Turn Pertinent to audiences’ experience of the cistern and its moral and emotional ambience is the way the characters behave within it and toward it, not to mention who the characters actually are. For the pirates, the cistern is something like a comfort zone, a space of freedom. Much less so for Séraphine, of course. Picaros, meanwhile, is a former pirate, so one would expect him to be accustomed to such places. Nevertheless, the dialogue reveals an element of discomfort on his part. “Where do you lead me, my father?” asks Séraphine as the two descend the stairs. “I say! I don’t know it myself,” Picaros confides to the audience in an aside.7 A little later, in a further aside, his thoughts run as follows: “I say, what a pretty apartment D. Fernand has pointed out to me. . . . I’m starting to regret having become involved in this whole affair. . . . On the other hand, one thousand ducats! . . . That merits consideration.”8 We already knew that Picaros was a crook, but now we learn he is also a coward. This tallies with the published list of characters, which tells us that the role was to be performed be a leading comic actor. To one reviewer, in Journal de l’empire, the role resembled that of Figaro (in Beaumarchais’s Le mariage de Figaro), but “more pronounced, more of a swindler and even a brigand.”9 In the end it turns out that Picaros has his heart in the right place: he swaps sides, defends Séraphine, fights the pirates, and helps Séraphine reunite with the real Don Raphaël and with Clara, her sister, as well as with Don Alvar, whom she really loves. But when we first get to know him, at the beginning of act 2, we are unaware of this. At that point, Picaros has just been released from prison. A mute black slave in the service of the powerful Don Fernand was sent to release him, and Picaros now approaches a pavilion in the gardens of Don Fernand. Crucially, this scene requires the skills of a comic actor, and music takes part in producing the comic effects. This is the case, for instance, when the slave signals that Picaros should wait in the pavilion until he returns, a pantomime accompanied by 22 bars of light music in 3/8 (a flute backed by pizzicato strings). Picaros observes these gestures and comments: “Strange conversation! I understand nothing,”10 then makes to follow the slave. Another rather long pantomime scene (37 bars of music) ensues, the “dialogue” of which consists of little more than the slave showing Picaros a chair and inviting him to sit. Finally, at the end of the pantomime, Picaros exclaims: “Ah, look what’s starting to dawn on me. I have to stay here? No problem.”11 While mute characters and the expressive potential of their gestural language are often, as Peter Brooks has demonstrated, taken entirely seriously in melodrama— and by Brooks himself, for that matter12— Picaros’s

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E x a m p l e 7.3. La citerne, act 2, scnme 5. picaros: Let’s go, Picaros, there’s money to gain and glory to acquire; show yourself worthy of your reputation. [Allons, Picaros, il y a ici de l’argent à gagner et de la gloire à aquérir; montre-toi digne de ta reputation.].

stubborn attitude of incomprehension as the slave shows him something that is patently very easy to communicate through gesture not only seems comic in itself but also seems to function as a metacommentary and a parody of a prevalent melodramatic convention. This irreverent and self- conscious use of the generic becomes even more explicit later in the scene: Don Fernand arrives and explains that he wants Picaros to impersonate Don Raphaël, then use his authority as Séraphine’s father to reject Don Alvar as her suitor, later consenting to a marriage between Séraphine and himself. The reward will be 1,000 piastres (which Picaros later manages to raise to 1,000 ducats, four times as much), and the task is presented as a “brilliant and difficult” role for Picaros to play, requiring much art and audacity. Picaros is flattered and accepts. Then the slave returns and expresses himself in pantomime to Don Fernand, who has no difficulty in interpreting the exact message, namely that Don Alvar and an attendant company are approaching. To end the scene, Picaros gives himself a little pep talk, which is followed by a musical number: “Let’s go, Picaros, there’s money to gain and glory to acquire; show yourself worthy of your reputation.”13 While the self- important pride Picaros takes in a glorious reputation as a competent crook seems comically inappropriate in itself, the musical number that follows underscores the inherent irony of the situation: a solemn, ascending sequence, drawn out for too long, dissonances on the downbeats, all of which are dutifully dissolved by the same tediously serene, quasi-church-style cliché (see example 7.3).

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The function of the music at this moment is significant. To be sure, the music intensifies the emotional content of the situation— Picaros’s vision of pride and glory— to excess. But it does so by engaging the “structure of the Manichaean” in a rather carnivalesque way. While the music is exaggeratedly sincere, almost pious in tone, the emotion that it serves to heighten is an immoral one. In other words, there is an element of irony, or at least insincerity, in the way the music functions in relation to text and narrative; it is this that makes for the comic effect.

A Touching Goodbye Another instance of such conspicuously oversincere music appears, I would suggest, at the end of the second scene of act 4, in the cistern. At this point in the action, Picaros is in trouble. Don Alvar has discovered that he is not the real Don Raphaël and is out to get him, bringing with him a group of officers, the Alguazils. Meanwhile, Picaros is on the run from other men, the real Don Raphaël included; perhaps most importantly, he fears that his enemies might get their hands on the 1,000 ducats he obtained from Don Fernand earlier on, and so he is looking for a place to hide it. While still pretending to be Séraphine’s father and protector, Picaros tells her that he must search for a way for them to escape. “Be calm, my child,” he says; he embraces her and then leaves her in the dark cistern.14 “Be calm, my child” is the cue for a piece of music in two sections, the first featuring a 10-bar plaintive bassoon solo (furnished with the expression mark doloroso and doubled by violas) in E minor (see example 7.2, again, and figure 7.2). This, as the context tells us, is “farewell” music. Judging from the character of the number, it is an emotional leavetaking, containing a heart-rending moment as the melody arrives on an F natural accompanied by a Neapolitan sixth (m. 7)— an effect normally reserved for emphasizing syllables expressing deeply felt and/or painful emotions— and followed by a sobbing phrase in the bassoon (m. 8). But how is it that this moment is accompanied by music expressing emotions as tender as these, and why does it last so relatively long? What is the relation between Picaros and Séraphine at this moment? On the surface, this is a father and a daughter taking leave of each other under dangerous circumstances. But the underlying text, as the audience is well aware, is a different one. Picaros’s display of paternal tenderness is simply part of his disguise. We know from previous asides and monologues that he is there for the money and plans to run off, alone, to Madrid as soon as he gets the chance.15 Séraphine is also inclined to appear more tenderly attached to Picaros than she really is. At the end of act 2 the young,

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F igur e 7.2 . The bassoon solo that accompanies Séraphine’s and Picaros’s taking leave of each other (Bibliothèque nationale de France, MAT TH8). The bassoon part has several solos in La citerne, yet these are mostly marked simply solo, with the occasional further qualification doux (soft). The performance material generally contains very few expression markings in any of the instruments, and the explicitly emotional doloroso (painful) is unique to this particular passage. It would appear, in other words, that the passage is intended to be performed “with emotion” in a perceptible, perhaps even perceptibly self-conscious (excessive, overdone) way.

mute boy Carlo— who is in fact Séraphine’s sister, Clara, in disguise— approaches her, while Don Raphaël (Picaros in disguise) and Don Fernand are in the midst of a friendly embrace. “Adieu, my sister!” the mute boy says, in a subdued voice (revealing to Séraphine that he is not mute after all), at which point the stage directions add: Surprise on Séraphine’s behalf, which she does not dare display.16 So: Séraphine does not dare to let Picaros and Don Fernand know what she knows, or what her real emotions are. Pretending to trust Picaros (and Don Fernand), she secretly speculates about what is really going on. This becomes explicit in the monologue in the dark cistern, which follows the music of example 7.2: “What did those words signify, coming from the young Carlo: adieu, my sister. . . . Could it be, in fact, that this was Clara, whom I have never seen? . . . But why the mystery, the disguise? O heavens! What a horrible suspicion troubles my soul! What if all that has happened these past fifteen hours is nothing but the consequences of a perfidious scheme . . . of a plan, contrived by D. Fernand.”17 When Picaros and Séraphine take leave of each other in the dark cistern, it is opportune for both of them to let each other believe in the sincerity of their emotions. The audience, meanwhile, knows that they are merely play-acting. Insofar as the music expresses the touching emotions of father and child

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reluctantly and tearfully taking leave of each other to excess, this is not because the music serves, at this particular moment, as a means of magnifying “real” emotions to grandiose proportions but because by exaggerating them it makes all the more obvious that they are faked. This argument runs counter, of course, to the assumption that melodramatic excess should necessarily be interpreted in light of Peter Brooks’s hypothesis that melodramatic rhetoric, and the whole expressive enterprise of the genre, represents a victory over repression. To the extent that Brooks included music in his considerations, it was generally with a view to how it takes part in this project, by heightening the mood— providing, as he put it, “additional legibility.” But acknowledging moments in which music behaves exactly as Brooks describes should not blind us to the fact that music in melodrama can also do the opposite. Indeed, Brooks’s own theoretical project should allow as much: the prevalence of mute characters in melodramas concerns precisely the repression of speech in order that we may later experience a victory over this repression. Similarly, during the farewell scene, accompanied by the music shown in example 7.2, the situation is such that Picaros and Séraphine cannot or will not express themselves freely. Picaros is in disguise and not (yet) convinced that he should help Séraphine rather than focus on the money. Séraphine does not (yet) trust Picaros enough to speak her mind to him freely. This produces a situation in which melodramatic music is given a different function: it is far from a vehicle of melodramatic excess, in the sense of providing us with the “joy of a full emotional indulgence.”18 Indeed, in this case it is hard to imagine an audience indulging in an emotion that is presented as strategic, calculated, and insincere.

(Up)setting the Tone With this alternative mode of attending to melodramatic music in mind, we might also consider how the orchestral introduction sets the tone for act 4 of La citerne. Given that the act begins with relatively slow, somber music in a minor mode, an obvious starting point is to note how the music relates to the aforementioned topos of subterranean space as Gothic and gloomy. My question, however, is whether at the same time the plaintive strains of example 7.2 might contain an element that threatens to turn this interpretation on its head. The orchestral introduction begins with a thrice-repeated unison E, pianissimo (see example 7.4). The heavy first beats of the second and third bars are prepared by an anticipatory figure coming from the lower dominant, B— a characteristic effect sounding like a quasi-glissando gesture

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E x a mpl e 7.4. La citerne, act 4, introduction, bars 1–12.

in the strings. This effect is a central element during the first part of the introduction. Such an opening gesture, of course, is relatively common. Mozart’s C-major Symphony (Jupiter, K. 551), for instance, begins in a similar way, but fortissimo and in an allegro vivace tempo— which makes for a rather different effect. The overture to Le Sueur’s La caverne; ou, Les voleurs (1793) employs another variant of this type of opening gesture, this time pianissimo, in a minor mode and in an andante tempo, but marking every quarter note, rather than just the first beats of the bar (see example 7.5). The effect is not identical to the one at the beginning of La citerne’s act 4 but builds on the same sonic element— the ascending anticipatory figure in the strings, pianissimo. Louis Alexandre Piccinni, the composer of La citerne’s music, probably knew Le Sueur’s opera well, having studied composition with him at the Paris Conservatoire, and also— at some point before 1802— having served as accompanist and rehearsal pianist at the Théâtre Feydeau, where La caverne had been performed.19 Pixerécourt was also familiar with La caverne: when in 1818 he claimed— in an oft-quoted statement— that a melodrama is nothing but a drame lyrique in which the music is performed by the orchestra instead of being sung, he cited La caverne as one of the obvious examples to prove his point, expecting his readers to recognize the title.20 It seems probable that many would indeed have recognized it, for La caverne was a high-profile work in the Revolutionary years. The

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E x a mpl e 7.5. Jean Francois Le Sueur, La caverne (1793), overture, bars 1–3.

online database césar, which covers the period up to 1799, lists 153 performances of La caverne during the six years between 16 February 1793 and 14 September 1799, meaning that it was performed on a weekly basis for several years in succession.21 Although the same could be said of other theatrical works in Paris at that time, it can be assumed that La caverne would have been within living (and audible) memory for many in 1809. Since the action of La caverne takes place in a subterranean setting inhabited by brigands,22 the musical parallel may not, I think, be entirely coincidental. Indeed, I would suggest that the gesture of the ascending anticipatory figure could, in the case of La citerne, be understood as a kind of intertextual reminiscence motif— yet another means of suggesting to the audience that the cistern onstage belongs to a larger “family” of subterranean spaces: to mark it, that is, as a conventional space, or topos. And yet the term “reminiscence motif ” is not quite apposite: the brief anticipatory figure is indeed hardly a motif. Its central quality has less to do with pitch structure than with the gesture it implies, and with the sonic effect. In a different context, David Charlton has referred to a conventional cadential idiom associated with Pergolesi’s style as “the Pergolesi ‘tag.’ ”23 We might borrow that term here, both because it seems to designate an aural effect that is at once conventional and characteristic and because it might still carry specific associations under certain circumstances. Departing a little from Charlton, I would also suggest that “tag” could refer to a very brief musical unit, a microquote, so to speak: a sonic event that despite its brevity has the potential to invoke recognition or reminiscence within related contexts. One of the most readily available contexts for melodrama audiences in early nineteenth-century Paris was opéra comique, and so it is to this genre we should now turn to gain a better sense of the reference points available at the time La citerne reached the stage.

Music and Subterranean Space in Opéras Comiques Not a few of the opéras comiques that Pixerécourt in 1818 included in his abovementioned list of melodramas avant la lettre— librettos that

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had “served for our best composers as occasions to produce excellent scores”24 — featured acts that take place in prisons, dungeons, and the like, some of them subterranean: Richard Coeur-de-lion, Le comte d’Albert, Raoul de Créqui, La caverne, Lodoïska, Camille, and La tour de Neudstat. As a topos of musical dramas, in other words, prisons and subterranean settings could be seen as part of the melodrama genre’s “inheritance” from opéras comiques of the preceding decades. There is another element in the introduction to act 4 of La citerne that appears to relate to this heritage, and that I would suggest could also be considered an “aural tag” in the sense just discussed: this is the effect of two horns performing a slow crescendo on the tonic, E, at an octave’s distance. The effect is highlighted by the fact that the rest of the orchestra pauses at this point. It is heard in mm. 6–7, 8–9, and again a little later, in mm. 18–19 and 20 (see, again, example 7.4). The effect is simple, of course, but nevertheless very striking. A similar effect is found in Pierre Gaveaux’s introduction for act 2 (the dungeon scene) of Léonore; ou, L’amour conjugal (1798)— his most successful opéra comique—that today is primarily remembered because Sonnleithner and Beethoven’s Fidelio (1805, 1806, and 1814) was based on Bouilly’s libretto for Gaveaux’s opera.25 In Gaveaux’s introduction, the effect of two horns an octave apart interrupts the rest of the orchestra in mm. 10–11, 12–13, and again in mm. 29–30, in a manner analogous to that heard in La citerne, just as the sound of the two horns in octaves also appears in the very first bars of Gaveaux’s introduction (see example 7.6). The effect of the horns, swelling on a single tone while the rest of the orchestra is silent, might be seen as belonging to a set of conventions that Stephen Meyer has summarized as a musical vocabulary of operatic “prison soundscapes” of this period. As one component of such a vocabulary, Meyer mentions echo effects and grand pauses, meant to depict “the vast empty spaces” of the prison.26 The horn effect relates, I think, to this category. And this observation in turn points to a special type of connection between music and space in such settings. Unlike many other types of setting (a room in a castle, a kitchen, a garden, a courtyard, or a public square), subterranean spaces are often emphatically marked as spaces. The characters present in such environments are often acutely aware of their surroundings, listening for sounds. As Meyer points out, prison scenes— and this goes equally for subterranean scenes in general— often begin with the hero or heroine describing or commenting on the surroundings. Séraphine’s “What a horrible place!” at the beginning of her monologue in La citerne is an example of this type of utterance. The beginning of act 2 in La caverne provides another one, as

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E x a m p l e 7.6. Pierre Gaveaux, Léonore; ou, L’amour conjugale (1798), act 2, introduction, bars 1–12.

the innocent heroine, this one also called Séraphine, starts her monologue with the words “What a horrible den!” and soon adds an aural observation to this: “The profound silence that reigns all around me . . . redoubles the terror of my frozen spirits.” 27 The phrase “Gott, welch’ dunkel hier! O grauenvolle Stille!” (God, what darkness here! Oh, horrible silence!) will be familiar to many as Florestan’s first words at the beginning of the dungeon scene in Beethoven’s Fidelio, act 2, scene 1, a direct translation of the French original wording in Bouilly’s libretto for Gaveaux’s Léonore. In Sonnleithner and Cherubini’s Faniska, similarly, the heroine cries: “What a place of terror!” (Welche Wohnung des Schreckens!). Continuing the above terminology, we could say that these exclamations might be variations of a common “aural tag.” The words may vary somewhat, but the semantic content is constant: as a sonic and vocal gesture their effect seems closely related. It is easy to imagine that the tone of voice applied to such exclamations would have adhered to a common convention.

Descending, Trembling The suggestion that the two horns of the introduction to act 4 could be considered an “aural tag,” alluding to the dungeon scene in Gaveaux’s Léonore, can find support in a few other parallels between the two works. Picaros and Séraphine enter the dark cistern by descending the stairs to the left of the scene. I have already quoted a few fragments of their dialogue as they descend. Here is a slightly longer excerpt:

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séraphine: Where are you leading me, my father? picaros: (aside) I say! I don’t know myself. (aloud) You will know shortly, my child, but you should not be afraid; are you not with your best friend, your prime protector? séraphine: Well, I’m not afraid. picaros: But you tremble? séraphine: That is a natural emotion. picaros: You have, it is true, been exposed to many different sensations today . . . but we only need a happy turn of events to be completely safe from harm. Until then, my child, have patience, take courage. séraphine: I have it.28

The second scene of act 2 in Gaveaux’s Léonore contains many of the same elements. Roc, the prison guard, and Léonore (dressed up as a man, Fidelio), descend into a dark, subterranean dungeon, where Florestan, Léonore’s husband, is imprisoned. Roc carries a lantern and leads the way. The dialogue starts with a short exchange concerning the surroundings: léonore (in a subdued voice): How cold it is in this subterranean place! roc: That’s not surprising . . . we’re very deep down!29

And a little later: roc: I believe you’re trembling, are you afraid? léonore (taking on an air of firmness and assurance): Oh no! . . . It’s just that I feel cold.30

While several elements are common to the two situations (descending into the darkness, one carrying a light and leading the other, one of them trembling, one in disguise), there are also telling variations. It is almost, in fact, as if the dialogue in La citerne offers a kind of topsy-turvy version of that of Léonore. Picaros’s aside as Séraphine asks him where they are going

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reveals a reaction similar to Léonore’s as Roc asks her if she is afraid. Picaros first reveals to the audience that it is he who is not really at ease with the situation. But, being a man, and pretending to be Séraphine’s father, he must appear unafraid— as must Léonore, pretending to be Fidelio, a man and Roc’s helper. The gesture of “taking on an air of assurance” is, in other words, common to the two situations. But while in the case of Léonore this only adds to the impression of her as courageous and heroic, Picaros appears yet more deceitful, even cowardly, and again perhaps comical. And while Picaros appears uneasy, Séraphine seems confident and unafraid (“Well, I’m not afraid”). Similarly, when Picaros asks Séraphine “But you tremble?” the roles are once more reversed, in comparison to Léonore. Séraphine finds her reaction quite natural, given the circumstances, more or less along the lines of Roc’s “That’s not surprising . . . we’re rather deep down!” Finally, as Picaros after this— in an attempt to appear on top of things after all— insists on advising Séraphine to take courage, she hardly accepts the role of the frail girl, which he has sought to press on her, but merely tells him, in effect, not to worry (Picaros: “Take courage!” / Séraphine: “I have it”). The questions of whether such parallels were intentional or coincidental, and whether they were noticed or not by contemporary audiences, is beyond what I am able to demonstrate here. But considering the similarities and differences may nevertheless be of some help in addressing the central question that concerns me here, namely how we might understand the music’s function in relation to the articulation of the topos of the subterranean space. Does the music merely function as a means of underscoring or heightening the mood, adding to the legibility of the setting as an uncanny, Gothic setting? Or does it also participate in negotiating the significance of this space in other ways, complicating the audience’s understanding of such moments, for instance by hinting at parallel dramatic situations in other works? Perhaps the idea is that the audience should in fact get the impression that the cistern is not, after all, as scary as the dungeon in Léonore. What I seek to argue, of course, is that the latter is at least a possibility: that we should not presuppose that melodramatic music is always to be taken seriously as communicating an ineffable, emotional “truth”; that it could also engage in a more playful game of allusions. There is the possibility that the recycling of conventional prisonsoundscapes, or “aural tags,” from works such as La caverne and Léonore in the introduction may have achieved a heightening not only, or primarily, of the sense of a truly horrible place but also, perhaps, of a more subtle scene of amusement.

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A Rare Specimen? La citerne premiered at the Théâtre de la Gaîté on 14 January 1809 and was unanimously greeted by the press as a brilliant success.31 On 19 January, the Journal de l’empire described it as having been long awaited, surpassing expectations, exciting an extraordinary enthusiasm, and attracting an unprecedented crowd.32 On 20 January, still less than a week after the premiere, the trendsetting ladies’ magazine the Journal des dames et des modes called La citerne “the rallying cry for our young men and for our beautiful ones,”33 ending the short eulogy as follows: You will be forgiven for being ignorant about Athalie and le Cid, to know nothing about Manlius and Zaïre, but anyone living today who has not seen La citerne is inexcusable.34

The classics of the ancien régime, Racine, Corneille, and Voltaire, had apparently been surpassed, at least as far as the young and beautiful were concerned.35 But it would seem that a sense of amusement is also part of the critical vocabulary. The journalist seems to have taken pleasure in noting the newness of La citerne, and of the opportunity it offered for the younger generation to distance themselves from old repertoires. And the hyperbolic statement that missing out on La citerne would be “inexcusable” suggests a certain levity on the part of both the author and his imagined readers. Four weeks after the premiere, on 12 February, the Journal de l’empire published a short follow-up on the earlier review, stressing once more the fresh, exceptional character and quality of the piece: The interest is not halted by commonplaces; the dialogue is rapid; and within its genre (such as it is), which I certainly do not approve of, it is a rare specimen.36

The interjection of a disapproving remark on melodrama in general, amid otherwise unqualified praise, indicates that for this reviewer at least, La citerne was attractive not because of but in spite of its use of conventional melodramatic elements. The idea of a subterranean setting in a melodrama would not in itself figure as a novelty in 1809. Quite the opposite. Pixerécourt had himself used various subterranean settings several times before, and examples would also include melodramas by other authors.37 Certainly such settings were recognized as stereotypically melodramatic only a few years later, in a critique of the genre published by the playwright, theater administrator, and man of letters Jean-Baptiste-Augustin

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Hapdé (1781–1839) in the aftermath of Napoleon’s first abdication in April 1814. Hapdé’s critique was entitled Plus de mélodrames (No more melodramas), and his concluding remarks are as follows: Defenders of religion and taste, stand by me: the political monster [i.e., Napoleon] is overthrown; now the literary monster has to be overcome; it must be chased to the depths of its caverns, thrown into the depths of its dungeons, until good sense and prudence has put an end to it, and condemned it to an everlasting exile.38 (italics in original)

An even more explicit critique of these types of setting as all too stereotypical appeared yet another few years later, in the anonymous Traité du mélodrame— a satire, published in 1817, in which one chapter concerns “abysses” in melodramas. “At the boulevards,” we learn, “one of the great principles is that in order to please, one has to astonish. . . . The sublime, the terrible, the terrifying is required.”39 As a logical consequence of this principle, certain (abysmal) settings are particularly useful: “First of all, we want to see a prison.”40 And a little later: A cavern is equally indispensable for the perfection of the work: situated in the midst of a dark forest, it is visited only by wolfs, boars, bears, and by folks a hundred times more ferocious even than that! This is where we witness the most terrifying plots being made against the innocent; this is where dull echoes repeat the cries of murder! murder! and carry them to the souls of spectators who, more sensitive than the echoes, cannot help but release a painful moan.41

While this was written some eight years after the premiere of La citerne, the stereotype at which the satire was directed was well established in 1809. But the reviews of La citerne nevertheless reflected an impression of novelty, suggesting that it was perceived as more than simply another rehash of well-worn clichés. One aspect of this perceived novelty of style, I would suggest, would have had to do with the sense of amused distance, occasionally undercutting the evoked conventions— a quality that the music, at least arguably, was complicit in articulating. In short, I fully agree with Brooks that the melodramatic “mode” is unthinkable without the playing out of convention and cliché. But I would argue that the matter of how these conventions were played— by the orchestra as well as the actors— is a matter of considerable complexity. La citerne may indeed have evoked a horrible place, rich in the sublime and the fearful. Yet the interplay between the play’s dramatic elements— text, music, gesture,

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scenography, and performers— both within the work and in relation to other works suggests that it was also an occasion for humor: that audiences may have entered into the subterranean trope with a level of knowingness and interpretive subtlety that we have been far too reluctant to attribute to the world of early melodrama.

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Ch a p t er 8

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The First English Melodrama Thomas Holcroft’s Translation of Pixerécourt George Tay l or

In this chapter, I tell the story of how and why Thomas Holcroft translated Pixerécourt’s Cœlina; ou, L’enfant du mystère as A Tale of Mystery— the first drama to be advertised in England as a “Melo-drame” (Covent Garden, 13 November 1802).1 My biographical narrative will reveal the particular circumstances of its composition, translation, and performance, and also discuss how it expressed the attitudes and taste of the two authors, and, by treating the narrative itself as a metaphorical conceit, it will also cast light on the wider culture and politics of the age. Holcroft arrived in Paris toward the end of 1801, shortly before the Treaty of Amiens (25 March 1802), which promised to bring eight years of conflict to an end. It would not have surprised him that the peace proved short-lived, as he had observed at first hand the arrogance of General Bonaparte, who had been appointed First Consul after the coup of 18 Brumaire (9 November 1799) ousted the corrupt Directory: “I never beheld a physiognomy more apparently capable of all the grandeur of benignity . . . which might have been so dignified in benevolence . . . be perverted to ends at once so pernicious, so hateful and so contemptible!”2 The political circumstances in both England and France were of considerable significance to Pixerécourt’s play and Holcroft’s translation: both their lives had been transformed by the events of the French Revolution, and, I will argue, their plays expressed that transformation. Holcroft is an eminently suitable protagonist for an account of the melodramatic moment because his life and beliefs exemplify the essential contradictions of a wider historical and ideological turn: between Enlightenment and Romanticism, stability and revolution, insularity and cosmopolitanism, utopian optimism and existential chaos. These large theoretical binaries are difficult to address in a short chapter: hence my focus on the individual. How did the son of an itinerant cobbler, someone who scavenged for scraps in the marketplace, become a leading dramatist?

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How did a Newmarket stable lad become the friend of radical philosophers? How did a hack journalist nearly become a martyr for parliamentary reform? In particular, why did a passionate advocate of rational enlightenment translate a popular melodrama by a disinherited French aristocrat? By addressing these questions of Holcroft, I am putting myself in dialogue with a generalization proposed by Michael Hayes and Anastasia Nikolopoulou in the introduction to their 1996 collection of essays on melodrama. According to them, the link between melodrama and the political and social conditions of the world in which it emerged seems quite unproblematic. Most critics would agree, for example, that the work of Thomas Holcroft, who is credited with launching the genre in England, is grounded in the populist radical rhetoric that erupted in England in the aftermath of the French Revolution. He was specifically accused of Jacobin activities, it must be remembered.3

This statement seems to endorse Coleridge’s famous denunciation of the genre as “jacobinical,”4 although in the same volume of essays Jeffrey Cox asserts quite the opposite, namely that “imported from revolutionary France in A Tale of Mystery by the ‘Jacobin’ writer Thomas Holcroft, the melodrama may have revolutionized the British stage, but it supported conservative values.”5 Similarly, Rohan McWilliam proposes that in its eighteenth-century origins, “the melodramatic imagination was in conflict with the Enlightenment project; it dealt with high emotions, with hysteria and horrors that defied rational understanding.”6 Elaine Hadley, who argues that the genre informed patterns of thinking throughout the nineteenth century, suggests that “the melodramatic mode was a reactionary rejoinder to social change, but not, it must be stressed, necessarily a politically reactionary response. For both the opinions it embodied and its objects of protest did not always fall neatly within predefined categories of parties.”7 My own argument is that although the political significance of the genre as a whole changed in response to circumstances, Holcroft’s decision to translate Cœlina, and the melodrama that resulted, were much influenced by his own political principles.

Holcroft and the Enlightenment In terms of self-improvement, political ideology, culture, taste, and moral seriousness, Holcroft was a quintessential example of eighteenth-century Enlightenment: a figure well known not only for his literary achievements

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but as a notorious atheist, a revolutionary apologist, and a close associate of the radical philosopher William Godwin. Throughout his early life he educated himself in literature, languages, and politics. Apart from two years as a stable lad and brief periods when the family settled together, his youth was spent tramping the roads of the Midlands and the north of England with his father, an itinerant cobbler and peddler, together with the countless thousands who had been displaced by agricultural enclosure or were seeking work in the new industrial centers. In 1767, when he returned to London for a couple of years, he started writing and became secretary to Granville Sharp, the antislavery campaigner, but then followed ten years back on the road as a strolling player, a life described in his novel Alwyn; or, The Gentleman Comedian (1780). He had begun a more provocative novel in 1778, Manthorne; or, The Enthusiast, which contrasted the religiosity of Methodism to his own rational skepticism, but only seven chapters were published in Town and Country Magazine.8 As a stroller he had written songs, prologues, and occasional pieces; when finally settled in London as a bit player at Drury Lane, he contributed columns to Town and Country as “the Philosopher” (1777–79) and to the Westminster Magazine as “the Actor” (1780).9 His choice of bylines reflects the two guiding principles of his life: philosophy and theater. In 1783, he made his first visit to Paris as a correspondent for the Morning Herald and returned with a pirated translation of Beaumarchais’s satirical comedy Le mariage de Figaro.10 Presented at Covent Garden as The Follies of a Day (14 December 1783), it was a great success and was performed over many years. In Paris he had met Louis-Sebastien Mercier, a writer of drame bourgeois who argued, following Diderot, that a play should have moral force, “that the image it presents might serve to bind people together through victorious feelings of compassion and pity. . . . Its moral goal, without being hidden or too obvious, must capture the heart and establish its influence there.”11 Holcroft also arranged to translate Les veillées du chateau by Mme de Genlis. She was the mistress of the radical Duke de Chartres, later Philippe Egalité, and governess to his children, including the future King Louis Philippe. Like Rousseau, she advocated the use of stories, theater, and physical activities to instill moral education.12 Holcroft also started translating Chaudron’s collection of Voltaire’s writings.13 It was in this way that the cobbler’s son entered the sphere of French Enlightenment. His new acquaintances encouraged him to believe that art, science, and philosophy could change the world. Even before visiting Paris, Holcroft had claimed that “it is the general opinion of the Philosophers of Europe . . . that the Theatre is the best Pulpit, and the Actors the most powerful Preachers;”14 small surprise that his

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first successful play, Duplicity (Covent Garden, 1781), had been unashamedly didactic. Like his greatest comedy, The Road to Ruin (Drury Lane, 1792), it criticized the fashion for gambling, and like his novel Anna St. Ives (1792), it argued that love should be based on rational esteem rather than passion or self-regard. In the same vein as Beaumarchais’s Figaro, most of Holcroft’s plays conformed to the rules of classic comedy: they were set in contemporary society, addressing pertinent issues either directly, through plots driven by various social oppressions, or through satirical characterisations. Until he chose to translate Cœlina, Holcroft eschewed the increasingly popular “mixed” forms of drama— comic operas, historical romances, gothic or Oriental fantasies.15 That his plays and novels aimed consciously to enlighten, concluding in the triumph of good sense over affectation and exploitation, has led him to be included in the ranks of the Sentimentalists, but his tone is never mawkish and his heroes and heroines are motivated by rational benevolence rather than uncritical sensibility.16 Indeed, he once wrote that “mere sentimental comedy is indeed a puling, rickety, unhealthy brat, and no fair offspring of the muse: not because it draws tears, but because it wants energy.”17 Holcroft was nothing if not energetic in his views. In 1805 he wrote that “the pleasure given by a dramatic work scarcely can be exquisite, unless the future happiness of man is kept in view; that is to say, unless some essential moral truth, or truths, are inculcated.”18 As for the future happiness of man, Holcroft repeatedly proclaimed that Reason alone was the key. He argued that Reason could overcome not only misfortune but ill health and even death. Thomas Ogle’s description of him in full flight is probably only a little exaggerated: “Mind will cure cancer, or any other disorder; there is no necessity to die; man’s nature is to reproduce himself and not decay; it is nonsense to say we all must die; in the present erroneous system I suppose that I shall die, but why? Because I am a fool!”19 Nevertheless, although Holcroft’s commitment to rationality was extreme, it can be taken as exemplifying the “Enlightenment Project.”20 Even before he left for Paris in 1783, Holcroft had published a poem, Human Happiness; or, The Sceptic, that proclaimed his atheism.21 This work led him to William Godwin, the radical philosopher who acknowledged Holcroft’s contributions to his Enquiry concerning Political Justice (1793),22 and it is possible that both men were involved in negotiations over the publication of Paine’s The Rights of Man (1791).23 They certainly welcomed the French Revolution enthusiastically; in 1794, after war broke out with France, Holcroft was indicted for treason as a member of the Society for Constitutional Information, although his only recorded contribution to its activities was a lecture, given shortly before the warrants were issued and

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entitled “On the Powers of the Human Mind.” “Mr Holcroft talked a great deal about Peace, of his being against any violent or coercive means. . . . [He] urged the more powerful operation of Philosophy and Reason, to convince man of his errors.”24 After the arrest of the leading members of the society, Holcroft presented himself at court demanding “a full, fair and public examination.” He spent two months in Newgate until, after Hardy, Horne-Tooke, and Thelwall were acquitted, he was released without trial. Nevertheless, Holcroft refused to repudiate his revolutionary sympathies despite the atrocity of the September Massacres and the extremism of Robespierre’s Reign of Terror, which led many— most famously Wordsworth, Southey, and Coleridge— to reconsider their attitudes. Audiences declined drastically for those of Holcroft’s plays that managers agreed to produce. Sometimes they even withheld his name as author, but once he was identified audiences fell away.25 His next novel, The Adventures of Hugh Trevor, a more complex and thoughtful work than Anna St. Ives, was interrupted by his arrest and not completed until 1797. In 1799 he was forced to sell his library and, to escape further debts, left the country with his fourth wife, Louise, the twenty-year-old daughter of his old friend LouisSebastien Mercier.26 The couple went first to Hamburg, where his daughter Sophie was married to a Baltic trader, and then in 1801 to Paris, just as preliminaries for the Peace of Amiens were being negotiated. There he saw Pixerécourt’s plays at the Ambigu-Comique on the Boulevard du Temple.

Pixerécourt and the Revolution The life of René- Charles Guilbert de Pixerécourt (born 1773) was a complete contrast to that of Holcroft. His father, Charles-François, was seigneur de Pixerécourt and marquis de St. Vallier, with estates in Lorraine— although he lost his income with the abolition of feudal rights on 5 August 1789.27 After writing a counterrevolutionary play depicting the brutality of Marat-Maugier, the Jacobin représentative en mission to Nancy, twenty-year-old Guilbert was sent by his father to join the émigré army gathered at Koblenz. However, within the year he had returned to Paris under a false name and eventually gained a minor post in the Ministry of War under Lazare Carnot. Both he and Carnot survived the coup of 9 Thermidor that deposed Robespierre; when Carnot joined the Directorate under the Constitution of 1795, his protégé was able to combine government employment with playwriting. Unlike Holcroft, whose plays were produced exclusively at the London Theatres Royal, Pixerécourt wrote for boulevard theaters that, despite the abolition of theatrical privileges in 1791, chose to continue performing

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“illegitimate” drama accompanied by music. With the Directory, the theatrical free-for-all came under question. In 1798 the Council of Five Hundred had failed to restrict the number of Parisian theaters and reestablish their genre specificity, but after the coup of Brumaire, First Consul Bonaparte began to reconstitute the theatrical monopolies. In 1804 the Comédie-Française was renamed Le Théâtre de L’Empereur, the Odéon became Le Théâtre de l’Impératrice, and specific genres were reimposed on the boulevard theaters, so that by 1807, according to Marvin Carlson, “the theatrical situation [was] almost identical to that of 1789.”28 While Bonaparte returned the theaters to their pre-Revolutionary state, he also encouraged émigrés to return and regain some of their lands, if not their aristocratic privileges.29 This policy of reconciliation informs the first two of Pixerécourt’s melodramas, Victor; ou, L’enfant de la forêt (La Gaité, 12 May 1798) and Cœlina; ou, L’enfant du mystère (AmbiguComique, 2 September 1800). Both were about the lost, betrayed, and disinherited. In the first, a foundling called Victor, in order to win the hand of Clemence, the daughter of his guardian, enters the forest to persuade his birthfather, Roger, a notorious brigand, to renounce his life of crime. Roger claims his followers are fighting for independence and urges Victor to join them. Eventually defeated by the forces of law and order, Roger repents and blesses Victor and Clemence. This can be read as a plea for clemency for the “brigand Jacobins,” who committed crime but were still part of the family of France. Roger claimed, like Robespierre, to have been motivated by Virtue: “My love of humanity [led me to] defend the weak against the harassment of the insolent and oppressing rich,”30 so forgiveness should be extended to him, once he has acknowledged his crimes. Cœlina also reveals broken family ties and reconciles the disinherited, although in this case we can read such figures as the returning émigrés.31 The evil Truguelin has not only usurped his brother Francisque’s inheritance but silenced him by having his tongue torn out. Some years later Truguelin tries to frustrate Cœlina’s marriage to Stephany by denouncing her as Francisque’s illegitimate daughter, by this means allowing his own son to marry her and thus legitimize his hold on the family estates. When his crimes are exposed Truguelin flees to the mountains, specifically to the site of the original assault, a mill beside the torrent of Arpennaz. The miller, Michaud, who had originally rescued the mutilated Francisque, now unwittingly helps the villainous Truguelin. All the characters gather as Truguelin is cornered by the Archers (officers of the law) and a mob of peasants, revolting against their master. Cœlina and the mute Francisque plead that Truguelin be spared, and Michaud cries out: “Let the law take care of vengeance for you. An honest man may punish, but does not assas-

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sinate.” Truguelin is arrested and the lovers united. Thus it would seem that under the reconciliation policies of the First Consul, disinherited exiles might return and regain a place in society. That Francisque and Cœlina, the victimized and the disinherited, plead for the villain’s life has led Dana Van Kooy and Jeffery Cox to describe Cœlina as essentially reactionary in its happy ending: “[It] reassured audiences that, regardless of any momentary disruptions, the patriarchal order of God, king, father . . . remained secure. . . . The structure of melodrama, with its reliance on spectacle and headlong plots pushed along by continuous music, served reactionary ends.”33 Similarly, Gabrielle Hyslop argues that Pixerécourt’s plays “provided a much needed form of social control for the potentially dangerous subordinate classes at a crucial stage in French political history.”34 Bruce McConachie sees the plays as extolling the communality of family and nation, thus rejecting “Enlightenment rationalism and embrac[ing] traditional notions of mysticism and authority,” in that the defeat of the villain is not a logical outcome of the action but “a denouement attributed to ‘providential revelation.’ ”35 If this was so, then why did our radical Man of Reason, Thomas Holcroft, choose to translate it? He, who had dedicated his life to the triumph of rationalism, and in his own works and criticism championed the classic forms of comedy and tragedy?36 32

A Tale of Mystery I want to suggest three reasons that might have motivated Holcroft, and that may also explain the immense audience appeal of the new genre. First, he could have been pragmatically capitalizing on an entertainment he may accurately have predicted would be a hit in London as it was in Paris. He had left England penniless and needed a popular success to reestablish his career; as he noted in his Travels, a popular piece might play on the Boulevard for eighty to a hundred nights, while “novelties at the Théâtre Français played for only twenty.”37 Cœlina was certainly a popular piece, and Holcroft’s adaptation of it was a definite change of strategy. Since The Follies of a Day, he had shunned the popularity of the gothic or operatic drama as developed by George Colman, Matthew Lewis, and Richard Cumberland. Although he anonymously wrote the book for a comic opera by Thomas Attwood, The Old Clothes Man (Covent Garden, 2 April 1799), it was only in the hope of avoiding bankruptcy,38 and it lasted only two nights, with its leading actor, Thomas Knight, refusing to be seen in company with a “known political character.”39 Moreover, the “bourgeois drama” that Holcroft had been working on since 1799, under

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the title of The Lawyer, had been put aside after criticism from Harris, manager of Covent Garden, and Holcroft’s old friend William Godwin.40 When eventually produced at Drury Lane (29 January 1802) as Hear Both Sides, it met with little success, despite a spirited performance from John Bannister, whose biographer described it as “a sombre, sermonising drama.”41 However, shortly after arriving in Paris in 1801, Holcroft had translated a French drama, Jean Bouilly’s L’Abbé de l’Epée, a great success at the Théâtre de la Republique from 1799. This was presented at Drury Lane shortly after Hear Both Sides, as Deaf and Dumb; or, The Orphan Protected, under the pseudonym of Herbert Hill (24 February 1801); it ran for twenty-four nights, with an initial run of nine. Thus it would seem that translation from the French was a better career move financially than continuing with his own style of rational comedy. However, Deaf and Dumb suggests a second, less mercenary, motive for Holcroft’s translation of Cœlina. L’Abbé de l’Epée, was essentially a drame bourgeois like those of Jean-Michel Sedaine or Mercier, which had inspired Holcroft since his first Paris trip. It was based on the true- life case of the comte de Solar. A profoundly deaf foundling, Theodore has been taught sign language by L’Abbé Charles- Michel de l’Epée, who in 1760 had founded the Institution Nationale des Sourds- Muets in Paris. The boy recognizes the uncle who had dispossessed him and, with the abbé’s assistance, wins a court case to reclaim his inheritance (as the comte de Solar). The whole play celebrates the “enlightenment” that de l’Epée brought to his clients, giving them a voice and an identity.42 Holcroft may have been reminded by his close friend Elizabeth Inchbald of Such Things Are (Covent Garden, 1787), another true story of philanthropy, which had presented a portrait of John Howard, the penal reformer. Inchbald shared Holcroft’s radical sympathies and dramatized rational benevolence rather than mere sentiment. A repentant prisoner responds to Howard’s forgiveness: “’Tis something I never felt before— it makes me like not only you, but all the world beside— the love of my family was confined to them alone; but this makes me feel I could love even my enemies.” The Howard character replies: “O nature! Grateful! Mild! Gentle! And forgiving!— worst of tyrants they, who, by hard usage, drive you to be cruel.”43 Similarly, Deaf and Dumb confirms Holcroft’s lifelong belief in education leading to enlightenment, as his de l’Epée says: “Judge my sensations, when, surrounded by my pupils, I watch them gradually emerging from the night that overshadows them . . . till the full blaze of perfect intellect informs their souls with hope and adoration. This is to new- create our brethren.”44 In his account of Pixerécourt’s melodramas, Alexander Lacey has argued that “the Revolution forced ‘le drame bourgeois’ to find refuge on

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the boulevards, there to surrender itself to a process of transfusion [yielding up] its life-blood to its more plebeian descendant, the melodrama.”45 This early twentieth- century remark amplifies, rather extravagantly, Charles Nodier’s mid-nineteenth-century claim that, in the circumstances of Revolution, Pixerécourt’s plays “were a necessity” because, since religious practices had been proscribed, melodrama replaced them as “the morality of the Revolution.”46 This didactic quality in melodrama is of course what Holcroft sought more generally when he stated that “the Theatre is the best Pulpit.”47 So, although Pixerécourt’s Cœlina made no claim to enlightening education, it did offer a rational and moral message, even if in the hybrid form of a “Melo-drame.” Francisque, despite ill treatment and apparent powerlessness, pleads for the forgiveness of his evil brother, just as Holcroft had advocated forgiveness in his own plays as an act of rational morality.48 Furthermore, if Pixerécourt was consciously supporting Bonaparte’s policy of reconciliation, Holcroft may have hoped that a similar policy might be extended to the persecuted radicals in England, now that an armistice had been reached with France. He may even have recognized that the fanciful turn of melodrama meant that its characters and events could be read very differently in different circumstances. In France the political “villains” had been both the Jacobins and the aristocrats; in England it was the Francophile Radicals who were cast in this role. It is more likely, however, that Holcroft the rationalist was responding to the moral principle of forgiveness for the repentant— and, according to my interpretation of his story, that principle was a philosophical rather than an emotional one, Enlightened rather than Romantic. For Holcroft, Cœlina had none of what he condemned as the irrational spectacle and artificial conventions of the gothic drama and of pantomime. The Times described the dialogue of his script as “natural and characteristic. . . . There is no extravagance of idea— no elaborate research after simile and metaphor, no display of pomp and inflated expression: the thought seems to arise from the moment, the words appear to be suggested by the circumstances which pass under the eye of the spectator.”49 So my story might conclude that Holcroft found Cœlina morally legible, emotionally stirring, and intellectually coherent, and thus not, as one might have supposed, incompatible with his rationalist beliefs. That Holcroft considered it more than a sensational adventure story is borne out by the changes and additions he made in translation. First, he enlarged the role of the housekeeper, a voice of common sense in both plays. Pixerécourt’s Tiennette is essentially comic, interrupting her master’s story like Dorine in Tartuffe; Holcroft’s Fiametta is more robust in reproaching her master for condemning Selina:

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bonamo: You are not to be silenced. fiametta: No, I am not. Francisco is an angel. Selina is an angel, Stephano is an angel; they shall be married and all make one happy family; of which, if you repent, you shall be received into the bosom. bonamo: Pray, good woman, hold your tongue. fiametta: Repent then! Repent! (Here distant thunder is heard and the rising storm perceived.) bonamo: I do repent. fiametta: Then I forgive you. (Sobs) I won’t turn you away. You are my master again.

Simon Shepherd writes of this interpolation, “The housekeeper . . . is one of the disenfranchised to whom radical melodrama not only gives a voice, but also, by summoning up the specific facilities of the stage, amplifies that voice with the reverberation of distant thunder.”50 The new dialogue gives extra emphasis to the theme of forgiveness that in the original only emerges in the final confrontation. But here too Holcroft gives forgiveness greater emphasis by pruning dialogue from Pixerécourt’s scene by the torrent and cutting all explanation after the villain is arrested. When the brothers meet, Romaldi (Holcroft’s Truguelin) threatens Francisco with his pistol: (Francisco opens his breast for him to shoot if he pleases. Selina falls between them. The whole scene passes in a mysterious and rapid manner. Music suddenly stops.) romaldi: No! Too much of your blood is upon my head! Be justly revenged; take mine!

He retreats to the bridge above the torrent, where he is intercepted by the Archers. After a struggle he falls, and the Archers prepare to shoot. (The entreaties of Francisco and Selina are renewed. The Archers forbear for a moment, and Francisco shields his brother. The music ceases.) selina: Oh, forbear! Let my father’s virtues plead for my uncle’s errors!

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bonamo: We all will entreat for mercy; since of mercy we all have need; for his sake, and for our own, may it be freely granted! (The curtain falls to slow and solemn music.)

Thus Holcroft intensifies the plea for forgiveness and reconciliation. The Miller in Pixerécourt calls for the law to avenge; in Holcroft the call is for mercy and forgiveness. It is unclear from the text, however, if the Archers lower their bows. Perhaps, like the soldiers at the end of Walker’s Factory Lad (1832), the curtain falls on an unresolved threat of state retribution.51 In this way the radical Holcroft may have subverted the reactionary reputation that we have seen attached to Pixerécourt’s melodramas.

The Mute Appeal I can, however, propose a third reason for Holcroft’s attraction to this play, one that perhaps touched him more deeply than either profitable theatrical success or the rational appeal of benevolence. Francisco’s mute passion, communicated through the music and the gestures of the actor, demonstrated more than just his own form of eloquence on behalf of justice and benevolence.52 Rousseau and Diderot had already engaged with the issue of being deprived of language. If a ‘wild child’ is brought up by animals, or without being taught to speak, can he be considered truly human? Can the inarticulate, so- called “savage” be truly noble?53 While there is no evidence in either letters or memoirs to confirm that our Enlightenment atheist recognised anything more than rational morality in an implausible drama, he was drawn to two plays that centred on a voiceless character. No doubt the techniques used by the performers of Theodore and Francisco were similar to the mime already well established in the illegitimate drama: in the pantomime; in the “attitudes” of Andrew Ducrow on horseback or Emma Hamilton in her Poses Plastiques; and the gesticulation of burletta performers deprived of prose.54 However, in Holcroft’s plays the muteness is logically justified. Theodore was born deaf and dumb; Francisco has been mutilated. Their voicelessness is part of their identity rather than an assumed theatrical convention. Consciously or not, Holcroft may have responded to the metaphorical power of these characters, who are not only literally voiceless but also powerless victims of usurpation. Peter Brooks analyzes the use of muteness in melodrama as a form of silent eloquence, a communication through signs and gestures, the significance of which goes beyond their

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literal meaning: “Things cease to be merely themselves, gestures cease to be merely tokens of social intercourse whose meaning is assigned by social codes; they become the vehicles of metaphors whose tenor suggests another kind of reality.”55 He further argues that melodramatic metaphor can take one into the realms of psychoanalysis, particularly through the excessive physicality of mute action: “Melodrama constantly reminds us of the psychoanalytic concept of ‘acting out’: the use of the body itself, its actions, gestures, its sites of irritation and excitation, to represent meanings that might otherwise be unavailable to representation because they are somehow under the bar of repression.”56 Ann Kaplan links this perception to Frederic Jameson’s proposal in The Political Unconscious: “Personal and social traumas were displaced into fictional melodrama forms where they could be more safely approached.”57 A similar point is made by Katherine Astbury in Narrative Responses to the Trauma of the French Revolution, with specific reference to Pixerécourt, whose “Cœlina and Victor, ou l’enfant de la forêt . . . are amongst the most important examples of trauma literature of the decade.”58 However, “trauma literature” cannot be taken as a synonym for politically inspired drama, nor simply equated to an individual author’s psychological experience. Holcroft was clearly disappointed by the failure of the idealism of the Revolution, but can such a disappointment be described as “traumatic” in its effect on a British sympathizer, when compared to the executions and persecutions of the French? Of the three Revolutionary principles, Fraternité had been the first casualty, and after the coup of 18 Brumaire Parisians needed to extend forgiveness to ex-Jacobins and exiled aristocrats— the brothers and uncles who had misguidedly betrayed the family of France— and to the crimes committed by and on them. That was the political trauma of the Revolution, but Holcroft’s desire for reconciliation was personal. It seems at least possible that the voicelessness of Theodore and Francisco stirred a deep unconscious response. Holcroft felt his political unpopularity was unjustified: surely his desire to enlighten his compatriots was supported by Reason, and yet they had driven him into exile— he had been rendered mute. After a challenging childhood he had found a voice in his novels, plays, and translations, but when, in 1794, he asked to defend himself before the magistrates, he was denied his day in court. For the next five years his plays closed as soon as patriotic audiences learned that “Jacobin Holcroft,” an “acquitted felon,” was the author. He also saw his friends silenced. When Mary Wollstonecraft died in childbirth, her husband, William Godwin, wrote an open, honest account of her life, for which he was derided and her reputation

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besmirched. Debts forced Holcroft to sell his beloved library, and in 1799 he fled his country.60 Robbed of a voice, he had lost his identity. It is in this sense that Holcroft himself provides evidence of the psychological power of early melodrama: the power symbolically to embody unconscious anxieties and distress. In part the very theatricality of the form— the music, scenery, grand eloquence, and gesture, the adoption of a quasi-operatic idiom— heightened both the emotional and the metaphorical power of the enactment. Holcroft’s personal distress was essentially professional and political, but many people shared a sense of displacement, bewilderment, and inarticulacy. Pixerécourt often referred to le peuple in his audiences— even if it is apocryphal that he claimed to “write for those who could not read”61— and these common people were the new citizens forced into urban living by economic, social, and political pressures. Their experience had been eloquently described by Rousseau in 1761, twenty-eight years before the political revolution. He claimed that generations had passively accepted the chains of feudalism in the countryside, but as new citizens in the town they found that “Paris is a stream . . . a whirlwind [where] everything changes at any moment. . . . Everything is absurd and nothing is shocking . . . [In] great cities men become different from what they are; society gives them a being different from their own. . . . [They] know only how to live outside themselves, in the judgement of others; indeed it is only from the judgement of others that he gains consciousness of his very existence.”62 A generation later Marx would describe this experience as “social alienation”; later still it would be defined as “psychological alienation.” 59

Conclusion Both Holcroft and Pixerécourt used the mute and exiled characters of melodrama to embody their own sense of disempowerment. Although Pixerécourt may have been aware of the plight of others of his class forced into exile, Holcroft’s experience was not entirely typical of his own class. He had chosen exile because his British fellow citizens considered him subversive and had boycotted performances of his plays. In this his individual experience was not common; but if, as I have suggested, his journey is considered metaphorically, his position as an outsider and a victim of cultural repression exemplifies not only his own personal persecution but also a wider anguish at the failure of the aspirations of the 1790s— indeed, of the whole Enlightenment project— in the chaos engendered

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in France by the terrorism of Robespierre, in Britain by political repression, and across Europe by Napoleonic conquest. Political reformers in both countries may have shared Holcroft’s political disappointment, but for many more a sense of bewilderment, alienation, and lost identity was caused not only by revolution and war but also by the social and cultural disruptions of rural displacement, industrial exploitation, and enforced urbanization.

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Ch a p t er 9

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Benevolent Machinery Techniques of Sympathy in Early German Melodrama Mat the w He a d

In truth, there is nothing enlarges the mind to every social and laudable purpose, so much as this delightful intercourse with harmony. They who feel not this divine effect, are strangers to its noblest influence: for whatever pretensions they may otherwise have to a relish or knowledge of its laws, without this criterion of the musical soul, all other pretended signatures of genius we may look upon as counterfeit. Charles Avison, An Essay on Musical Expression (1752)

This chapter sets melodrama in the perhaps unlikely context of later eighteenth-century benevolence, conceived as a continuum from sympathetic identification with the misfortunes of others to practical and financial assistance for the (deserving) distressed. I say “perhaps unlikely” because benevolence does not figure in existing histories of melodrama, which are more concerned with what melodrama is than with what it does: with melodrama as a genre, rather than the cultural work undertaken by a theatrical technique. This emphasis is an understandable reaction to melodrama’s Cinderella status in the history of opera; to research melodrama as a genre is to shore up its identity, to invoke the classical decorum of genre as a construct and so to lend the technique of orchestral music with spoken text a gravity denied it when treated as (variously) an experimental, hybrid, occasional, or even failed practice. Mozart’s professed fascination with the melodramas of Georg Benda (“I carry them about with me”), his emulation of them in the unfinished Zaide (1780), and his subsequent abandonment of the technique leave a long shadow in the history of opera.1 The death blow for melodrama is delivered by the story of Mozart’s transformation of it. The idea that in Die Zauberflöte Mozart transformed melodrama into extended orchestral prose accompanying Tamino’s spiritual Enlightenment at the gates of the Temple of Wisdom validates the technique for Romantic (even Wagnerian) aesthetics.

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As Parker and Abbate have it, “Against the gradual emergence of Tamino’s enlightenment, Mozart has also plotted the emergence of music: from speech, to Melodram-like accompanied recitative, and then to fully fledged [orchestral] song.”2 Without dismissing that redemptive and developmental reading, this chapter explores melodrama in an earlier social context and through a hitherto unknown example by a forgotten composer: Gemälde der Natur, a monodrama with words and music by Maria Magdalena Kauth. This piece was performed and published in the wake of floods in Linz and was intended to raise funds (the title page informs us) “for the benefit of the unfortunate poor affected by the water” (see figure 9.1).3 Initially, the charitable purpose of this piece, its short sermonlike text presenting a Christian idyll of nature and family, and performance in the public sphere might be thought to distinguish it in kind from the models of Benda, those Shakespearian monologues for characters from classical myth, produced for the Gotha court and, however in thrall to the sublime of terror, involving a forensic dissection of their heroines’ states of mind. But gradually Kauth’s Gemälde der Natur changed my understanding of the pieces from which it appeared to differ. Specifically, its charitable mission and commemoration of natural disaster turn on (notions of) benevolent and sympathetic feeling endemic to the period and targeted by the melodramatic technique. The mechanical element announced in my formulation “benevolent machinery” seeks to recover a historical specificity, a theory that music-theatrical performances worked on the mind and body of the audience in direct and predictable ways: sensory stimuli, the theory predicted, set the nervous system in motion, caused sympathetic resonance, and triggered morally laudable identification. This identification was the engine of benevolent impulses and actions, opening out onto the period’s giddy optimism about charity, poor relief, and doing good. Needless to say, I do not treat this theory of music’s effects, nor the culture of benevolence, as unproblematic, but I do attempt to bring them to light as contested Enlightenment ideals rather than dismiss them out of hand. Benevolence (as specialists hardly need reminding) achieved peculiar centrality in the self-imagining and practices of the later eighteenth century— the moment in which melodrama came into being. Dorinda Outram launches her finely illustrated Panorama of Enlightenment with nine archetypes of the period, among which features “the benevolent man.” In comments that go to the heart of this chapter, she observes that “benevolence was one of the central values of the Enlightenment. It was closely linked with ‘feeling,’ that is, sympathy and compassion for the objects of benevolence.” Her chosen image, Jacques-Louis David’s

Figur e 9.1. Maria Magdalena Kauth’s Gemälde der Natur, published by subscription in 1789, the year of floods in Linz for which it was a fundraiser. Thanks to the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin for use of this image.

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Belisarius Asking for Alms (1781 or 1785), shows the eponymous military hero now blinded and reduced to begging. He is relieved by a Roman matron who places coins in his upturned helmet, the artist capturing a moment of emotional and financial release. The image highlights how the social work of charity did not end with giving alms. As Outram notes, “Benevolence . . . was a way of marking the distinctions in wealth and status between giver and recipient”— it articulated difference, including (as Outram is no doubt aware) gender difference.4 If David figures benevolence as “the perfect virtue of the middle class” (the Roman matron appears of middling rank), he also establishes equivalence between giving alms and fighting for one’s country, an equivalence that rests on shared ideas of selflessness and at least some notion of patriotism. The existence of a painting on this theme also highlights the role of artistic representation in regulating the meaning of benevolence. David’s didactic canvas enacts a discerning benevolence of its own: in its implicit advocacy for the welfare of returning military heroes and in its apparent conviction that the responsibility for their welfare falls, at least in part, to charitable women. That conviction was widespread, Amanda Vickery reports of the English context, with gentlewomen participating “in a proliferation of charitable institutions through which [they] could garner a new kind of public standing and radiate something of that public spirit revered by their brothers.” In penetrating terms that highlight the transactional character of doing good— its benefit to both the benefactor and the beneficiary— Vickery observes that “the institutionalization of fashionable benevolence constructed altogether new arenas for the expression of female conviviality and officiousness.”5 In other words, benevolence both gave pleasure and granted status. Writing of the staged charity events of the bluestocking Elizabeth Montague, Elizabeth Eger speaks wryly of the payback delivered by good deeds: Montagu perceived her acts of charity and assistance to the lower classes as a social duty, and perhaps also, more pragmatically, as a matter of good management. Moreover, there is a sense in which her charitable ambitions were inextricably linked to her act of self- fashioning as a woman of society, a bluestocking hostess with cultural and financial capital. Her benevolence was often extremely public, as can be seen in Fanny Burney’s description of her gift of an “annual breakfast in front of her new mansion, of roast beef and plum pudding, to all the chimney sweepers of the Metropolis.”6

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The Earl of Shaftesbury’s ideal of disinterested benevolence notwithstanding, few in the wake of Thomas Hobbes or Bernhard Mandeville— those notorious theorists of innate human selfishness— contended that charity was a one-way street. Future compensation aside, good deeds for David Hume writing in 1777 ensured “inward peace of mind, consciousness of integrity, a satisfactory review of our own conduct; these are circumstances, very requisite to happiness, and will be cherished and cultivated by every honest man, who feels the importance of them.”7 The pleasures of benevolence, far from a guilty secret, were part of its theorization. The verdict of two art critics on such iconic images of benevolence as Gainsborough’s Cottage Girl with Dog and Pitcher (1785), Charity Relieving Distress (1784), and A Lady and Her Children Relieving a Cottager (1781) are chillingly on target: “[Such images,] while eliciting sympathy, also reminded the public of its own capacity for carrying out good works, the existence of the poor being regarded as an enduring opportunity for philanthropy rather than a problem to be eradicated.”8 For women, this opportunity offered unassailable occasions for selfassertion, public agency, and authorship. In the German context, it is probably no coincidence that the first epistolary novel of sentiment published by a woman— Sophie von La Roche’s Die Geschichte des Fräuleins von Sternheim (1771)— features a heroine whose exemplary womanhood is conveyed primarily through her benevolence.9 Following the eponymous heroine’s undoing— she suffers a sham marriage to a vicious rake— she lives out her days in charitable and educational projects for children, domestics, and families ruined by profligacy. In the words of her unflinching editor, James Lynn, “Sophie Sternheim delights in the reported joy of a poor family at the coins she has tossed at them from her passing coach, and we probably lose count of the number of times we are offered the sight of hands bathed in the tears of grateful recipients of her kindness and instruction.” Rarely, Lynn implies, has benevolence weighed so heavily on a reader. True to pietistic conviction about the “the regenerative and redemptive effects of living for others rather than oneself,” La Roche reportedly donated the profits of her novel to a bereaved friend.10 To begin to understand the broad diffusion of ideals of benevolence, it is useful to return to Outram’s gallery of archetypes. The figure of the “benevolent man” at once discloses and obscures the explanatory power of sympathy in the period’s self-imagining; benevolence seems to link rather than distinguish Outram’s period archetypes. “The Reader,” for example, pictured in candlelit communion with a well- thumbed book in David’s portrait of Mme Buron (1769), testifies, as Outram has it, to the centrality

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of reading in the transmission and internalization of “the major works of the Enlightenment.”11 But silent and solitary reading also fostered imaginative absorption in, and sympathetic identification with, the trials, misfortunes, and moral triumphs of real and fictional characters that characterized the consumption of literature, painting, and music in the “age” or “culture” of sensibility.12 “The Liberal Monarch,” whom Outram illustrates with an image of Emperor Joseph II of Austria helping a farmer to plow a field, involves a related idea of sympathetic presence across a social gulf. Even Outram’s “Bureaucrat”— a perhaps unpromising archetype for today’s management-weary readers— looks out, in Goya’s portrait of the Spanish reforming minister Gaspar Jovellanos, as a figure both evincing and deserving of compassion. Not “the splendours” but “the cares” of office are conveyed in Jovellanos’s “quiet and reflective” pose.13 His implicit benevolence stimulates the viewer’s own fellow feeling, some notion of sympathy temporarily dissolving (even as it rhetorically validates) the gulf between artist, his subject, and the viewer. Sympathy (Mitgefühl) was central to the now more familiar concept of sensibility (Empfindung and related words such as Empfindsamkeit). Sensibility, denoting “the receptivity of the senses,” and predicated on “the psychoperceptual scheme explained and systematized by Newton and Locke,” invested fellow feeling with elevated moral value, despite the mechanical basis of the underlying physiological theory of the sensitivity of the nerves.14 Formerly constrained by scholars as style categories within relatively autonomous histories of literature and music, sensibility is now understood in period terms as a human capacity to be moved, one that allowed the subject to enter into (often imaginary) relationships of feeling with nature, art, and others.15 This community-forming potential of sensibility has perhaps been obscured by scholarly habits and disciplinary conventions. The venerable Marxist diagnosis of literary Empfindsamkeit as a bourgeois flight from the collective into private, politically impotent subjectivity in the twilight of feudalism has tended to inhibit study of sensibility as a binding force in an emerging public sphere.16 But sensibility was always about relationships— even when it appeared to take refuge in interiority. As Annette Richards has explored, “solitude” was sometimes recommended to young German artists and appears as a literary and musical topos in the 1770s and 1780s.17 Perhaps, though, the idea was more dialectical: arguably the point was to make being alone a collective experience based around shared feelings. The solitary person entered passionately into a relationship with nature and with his/her own interiority, eventually communicating experiences with others in the first person, and so making the

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private public, and the solitary collective. Solitude itself tended to involve passionate attachments to others, an ultimately unattainable beloved (in Werther’s case) or, for young ladies at music, a clavichord, apostrophized in songs “to my clavichord” as a communicative, if mechanical, second Self.18 In traditional music histories, the construct of empfindsamer Styl (sensitive style), associated with the keyboard music of C. P. E. Bach, has tended to foreclose discussion of sensibility, because of formalistic conviction that sensibility resides in the score as something to be analysed like a fugue. The putative style proves difficult to displace, persisting in no less authoritative a venue as The New Grove Dictionary, notwithstanding Darrell Berg’s demonstration that the adjective empfindsam was barely, if ever, used to describe musical materials in the eighteenth century but only referred to human experience.19 Indeed, not one style but music more broadly was privileged in the culture of sensibility for its power, as Heinrich Christoph Koch put it, to “awaken noble feelings” and foster “noble resolutions”— the latter formulation hinting at the social work of feeling: Music is a fine art which has the intention of awakening noble feelings [Empfindungen] in us. Feelings lie dormant in man’s nature and are properly aroused only by certain natural causes. . . . Feelings bring about resolutions: pleasure prompts us to seek certain possession of the good which produced it, and fear causes us to take measures to prevent the dreaded misfortune from befalling us. . . . Thus if the fine arts make use of their special power to have the feelings they arouse inspire noble resolutions, to affect the education and ennoblement of the heart, then they serve their highest purpose and show themselves in their proper worth.20

Koch’s confidence about music as a force for good probably reflected its widespread charitable use. Charles Burney, embarking on his European tours in June 1770, validated the art through “the humane and important purposes to which it has been applied . . . in order to open the purses of the affluent for the support of the distressed.” In Burney’s witty formulation, the fabled power of music over the passions, and the body, is mediated in modern Britain through charitable donation: “Many an orphan is cherished by its [music’s] influence. The pangs of child-birth are softened and rendered less dangerous and dreadful by the effects of its power. It helps, perhaps, to stop the ravages of a disease which attacks the very source of life.”21 Tugging on heartstrings and purse strings, music found validation

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under the sign of charity. Morally controversial in themselves, music and money were rendered unassailable as (curiously equivalent) currencies of benevolence. In the annals of the Viennese Tonkünstler-Societät (Society for Composers), founded by Florian Gassmann in 1771, the history of the then-emerging “imaginary museum of musical works” was linked to the “sovereign” value of charity, exemplified in fund-raising concerts at Easter and Christmas (for the families of deceased musicians) including massed performances of Haydn’s oratorios.22 In Hamburg, C. P. E. Bach directed charity concerts in 1776 and 1777, organized by the Society of Musical Amateurs and the city’s Masonic lodges respectively. Looking ahead to the now-celebrated concerts of 1785–86 for the Medizinische Armeninstitute (Medical Society for the Poor)— celebrated in part because they included the Credo of J. S. Bach’s B-minor Mass— these earlier benevolent occasions included Handel’s Messiah (in Klopstock’s translation) and Bach’s oratorio Die Israeliten in der Wüste.23 As Koch’s locution suggests, however, music was directed in the first instance not to practical benevolence so much as to enhancing social and ethical passions. This ethical theory of music can seem insubstantial but proceeds systematically; it is based on the premise that virtue is regulated by the heart and arises not from “cold reason” (so styled) but from character as a dominant arrangement of feelings and sensations. The article “Sentiment” (Empfindung) from Sulzer’s General Theory of the Fine Arts (1771–74)— a standard encyclopedia of the period to which Koch refers— gives a more detailed account. Sulzer distinguishes sentiment from pleasing or displeasing sensations: “Taken in a moral sense, sentiment is a feeling that through constant repetition and reinforcement, becomes the cause of certain inner and external actions.” Sentiments (and here the term evades translation) are feelings for or toward others that motivate behavior: Sulzer’s examples are “honor, integrity, humanity, patriotism, etc.” (Later in the same article he adds “justice and uprighteousness” and “freedom” to the list.)24 When not a matter of sensation alone, “feeling” was invested with what can seem exorbitant moral significance because behavior was seen to flow from it. These overarching beliefs are writ small in a favoured topos of the culture of sensibility: opening one’s heart to others. No doubt, there was a religious backdrop to this ideal. In his article on sentiment, Sulzer referred approvingly to the poet Bodmer’s representation of “Noah’s overwhelming fear of God and his consequent guiltlessness and divine soul.” In offering this praise, Sulzer was not (only) affirming the primacy of feeling for God, as a component of faith, but figures Noah’s “overwhelming fear” as itself “divine.” Thus feeling becomes the basis not only of a relationship

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with God but of merging and exchange with another. Indeed, Sulzer listed a series of such exchanges through feeling: “Every sensible person could identify with” Noah’s “overwhelming fear of God”; Bodmer, too, “opens his own heart,” and, in his doing so, “we can see for ourselves the most vivid effects of these feelings, and we can open our own heart to his so that it may be moved by the same feelings and inflamed by the same fire.”25 Today, this ideal of a subjective merging with others through the common currency of feeling is discussed primarily in relation to the iconic figure of (female) virtue in distress— popularized in literary and theatrical contexts by Samuel Richardson’s novels Pamela and Clarissa— an emphasis not without basis in the period. Referring to Alceste, probably in the five-act German-language version by Anton Schweitzer and Christoph Wieland for the Weimar court (1771), Koch confessed, not without pride, to feeling love and shedding tears for the suffering, virtuous heroine: We see Alceste between anguish and hope; we see her form her noble resolution having heard the utterance of the oracle. She becomes dear to us, we love her. In brief, after the most tender parting from her husband and her children, we see her finally die. We shed many tears over her.26

Koch’s tears suggest not only his intimacy and sympathy with Alceste, the opening of his heart, but his endorsement of her character and conduct. The moral beauty of her sentiments was rewarded with identification, and the critic’s weeping approvingly mirrored Alceste’s own— that “tender parting from her husband and her children.” Koch’s tears are evaluative and binding. The earliest German melodramas were born of this context. Indeed, Alceste was a pioneering work in the history of German theater and opera, essentially an opera seria in German with an expanded role for accompanied recitatives, reflecting the local preoccupation with the boundaries between music and speech. This was not Schweitzer’s only theatrical innovation in the early 1770s. In 1772, the Weimar court’s theatrical troupe, directed by Abel Seyler, premiered his Pygmalion, a translation of Rousseau’s founding text. This, the first known German melodrama, is lost, but if Georg Benda’s surviving scores are anything to go by, Schweitzer would have drawn heavily on those accompanied recitatives for his orchestral writing. (A contemporary review of Pygmalion praised the “transitions from the violent to the tender,” a remark suggestive of the metrical and modulatory licences of orchestrated recitative.)27 Benda was Schweitzer’s colleague and rival in Gotha (to which Seyler’s troupe defected following the catastrophic fire of 1774). Rivalry is sug-

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gested by Benda’s setting of Johann Christian Brandes’s libretto Ariadne auf Naxos— a melodrama that Schweitzer was apparently working on when his score was destroyed in the Weimar blaze.28 Even composing a melodrama mediated relationships. The Greek mythological character Ariadne was a venerable subject of theatrical representation within the genre of tragedy, but substantial alteration to her customary characterization as morally flawed demigoddess was needed to render her a subject of sympathetic identification, a character who could resonate with pathetic scenes of female distress emerging in middle-class drama and opera.29 Brandes— writing for his wife, the celebrated actress Charlotte— focused on a single sympathy-rousing “moment” in Ariadne’s story: her realization that Theseus, her mortal lover, has abandoned her. In this way, Brandes condenses the entire myth into a set piece within the culture of sensibility: a scene of farewell. First, as Ariadne lies sleeping, Theseus struggles with his decision to abandon the woman who has saved his life and sacrificed everything (her family, her homeland) to be with him. Then Ariadne wakes into a blushing morning, the beautiful landscape conveying her experience of love. The spotlight falls, forensically, on her thoughts and feelings. With covert didacticism, she models sympathetic concern in her anxious fantasies that absent Theseus has fallen foul of ravening beasts. With dreadful inevitability, it dawns on her that she is alone— a moment of realization given extraordinary emotional emphasis by both playwright and composer. The history of her relationship with Theseus is neatly contained as reminiscence, and here Ariadne discloses (as if, like Pamela, writing an intimate letter), “How this breast thrilled! How it heaved, full of love and sympathy”— a somatization of feeling worthy of a sentimental heroine.30 The anticlassical way in which Ariadne internalizes landscape as a vocabulary of feeling, together with her movement between dreaming sleep, fantasy, regretful recollection, and madness (in which the classical underworld appears through sublime nature), internalizes the theatrical, rendering melodrama an intensive technique for knowing— and, crucially, being empathetically engaged with— the sufferings of another. Performing the limits of language to represent extreme sensibility, Ariadne’s speech dissolves into ungrammatical exclamations as she approaches the edge of the cliff: “My strength— the storm— overwhelming— gods— help!— help!— Theseus!— gods!— Theseus! (She is struck by lightning. She screams, and leaps from the rock into the sea).”31 A few years after the premiere, by which time Ariadne was widely performed and translated, the Berlin Kapellmeister Johann Friedrich Reichardt— a chief exponent of sensibility as a mode of musical criticism and a

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subscriber to the published score of Kauth’s Gemälde— turned his lightly theoretical attention to the vogue of suffering heroines (and heroes) in the pages of his Musikalischer und Künstler-Almanach auf das Jahr 1783. Under the heading of Empfindsamkeit (a “quickness” and “easiness” to be moved that differs from “mawkish sentimentality” [Empfindelei] because it is unfeigned), Reichardt— focusing on suffering heroines in particular— explored the artistic circumstances in which audiences are willing to “set selfishness aside.”32 Indeed, art has advantages (he reassured his readers), because we can suspend any real concern over our own safety and enter more fully into the sufferings of others. In an uncharacteristically dialectical moment, Reichardt discovered that “self- love always mixes with the impulse to pity.”33 Emphasising that “virtue in distress” (leidende Unschuld) pulls most strongly on the heartstrings, he figured imaginative identification with “the unfortunate” not as a vicarious thrill at another’s suffering but as ethically elevated sympathy: Our hearts go out most to the unfortunate, the harassed, and particularly the virtuous in distress. Among all human feelings none is stronger— by virtue of [our innate] selfishness [Eigenliebe]— than the feeling of sympathy [des Mitleids]. No sooner do we see someone suffering than our attention is roused, our imagination puts us with them in the same situation, it is us, [and] as if we took their place; we feel their pains, we tremble for the danger they face, our heart beats with their hopes, we feel happy at their rescue.34

Insofar as Reichardt explains the point in this essay, the ethical value of imaginative identification arises from the psychological origins of that identification not (as Classical poetics might predict) from an intensification of theatrical catharsis: we enter into the suffering of others through “the drives of benevolence, love and friendship” (Treiben des Wohlwollens, der Liebe und Freundschaft).35 Reichardt advises, though, that there are limits to our sympathy. The representation of physical agony always disgusts, and the fledgling artist should seek to portray “the sensitive soul, according to a certain ideal of greatness or virtue.” Sympathy is not freely given, then, but is extended conditionally to the spiritual (in this context meaning “mental”) suffering of virtuous characters— particularly women. In other words, benevolence is part of an ethical economy: it can be withheld as well as granted, and it constitutes a gift (of validation) in which not all suffering is equal. Notwithstanding her mythic and antique grandeur, the “new” Ariadne of Brandes’s libretto fulfils the conditions required by eighteenth-century

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sympathy through her recognizably bourgeois femininity— beautiful and constant, she suffers for love alone. Benda’s score, which punctuates the spoken text, also mediates Ariadne’s elevated social standing with effects of “artless” immediacy and realism associated at this time with bourgeois characters. Many musical conventions endemic to the utterance of the highborn or mythological characters of opera seria are abandoned— conventions concerned with unity, closed form, ceremonial framing, and rhetorical repetition, which signified elevated status and authority. While basing his technique on the harmonically advanced medium of orchestrated recitative, associated with the mental turmoil of heroes and heroines, Benda shifts the focus of representation onto Ariadne’s subjectivity, the music a soundtrack of her “sensitive soul,” unfolding in something like real time.36 Conceptualizations of the “soul” (often a synonym for mind) and of how to represent it changed rapidly in this period; Benda’s technique is specific to his German context and the 1770s. Arguably, the basic premise is that neither words nor music is adequate to represent sensibility, mind, or soul. The privileged third term— belonging to both but also to neither— is the human voice: the sole authentic medium of human presence and subjectivity. (Music historians, who have long dwelt on the aesthetic “problem” of instrumental music in the later eighteenth century— that is, the complaint that music alone aroused feelings but could not tell the audience what the feelings concerned— may take comfort in contemporary complaints about writing as an incomplete, because silent, record of the “soul.”) Melodrama is a technique that seeks the third term. Benda’s music is first and foremost tailored around the grammar and rhetorical tone of Ariadne’s speech— acting as a sonorous grammar, marking the breaks, continuities, and inflections of prose clauses and sentences, commas, questions, and exclamations. The implication is that Ariadne’s utterance is the stuff of her “soul,” her passionate declamation a truth unto itself (not a wordy linguistic code offering, within the limits of written language, a glimpse of invisible interiority). In more extended melodic passages accompanying not declamation but gesture and acting, Benda employs music to make sensibility audible, to make feeling sound forth. To do so, he employs recognizable “types” of material with affective, bodily, but also narrative connotations— materials associated with (for example) love, farewell, heroism, tears, indignation, anguish, and sleep. These signs, though as conventional as words, were experienced through their vocally inspired instrumental performance as natural and transparent, seeming to convey knowledge of Ariadne’s sensibility without mediation. This beautiful illusion of the immediacy of voice— speaking, singing, or simulated

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instrumentally— is a defining feature of music as a trope and aesthetic ideal in the culture of sensibility; without it, melodrama in this early phase makes little sense. Though employing a somewhat different music-theatrical technique, one that seeks to paint images in the mind’s eye, Kauth’s Gemälde resonates with the birth of melodrama in the culture of sensibility. The story of the piece begins soon after midday on 28 January 1789 with the sudden (if anticipated) breaking of ice on the thickly frozen Danube, which ran through Linz. Not just the harsh winter but the sudden warming made the ice floes particularly damaging. The resulting floods hit the pages of the next issue of the Wiener Zeitung: From Linz, it is reported that the ice of the Danube broke between 1pm and 2pm on 28 January, and the bridge was instantly washed away. So little ice remained by evening that the river could be crossed by boat. But next day, the ice floes increased again, and the river was so swollen that it overflowed the banks, and on the 30th already penetrated the town’s upper water gates. Similar reports come from all river areas. In sum, the sudden breaking of the thickly frozen rivers caused considerable damage to pasture, bridges, mills, and ships.37

As the journalist implies, floods were all too common, and Linz was not uniquely affected. (Indeed, 1789 was not the worst year of the decade, with widespread flooding in 1784 and 1786.) But flood commemoration, as Kauth may have known, was part of the city’s identity: Linz is distinguished as the site of the first permanent high- water record, from 1501, a marble plaque recording the floodwater’s peak.38 That still-surviving plaque, in which “Linz” and “the past” are constituted through the memory of natural disaster, chimes with Rousseau’s hypothesis that “man becomes social because of needs arising from shortages and natural disasters.”39 Unfortunately, Kauth’s own identity is barely known beyond her few publications, and I relegate my reflections on her biography to the netherworld of the extended note.40 Gemälde, although appearing to offer a version of the events it commemorates, ultimately offers a generic storm narrative, one musically familiar today from Haydn’s Die Jahrzeiten, Beethoven’s Symphony no. 6, and numerous operatic recreations, and in literature from Klopstock’s ode Frühlingsfeier. Beautiful nature is disturbed by a thunderstorm that terrifies formerly contented peasants. (Kauth offers additional detail: a father is rescued from the surging river and revived by the tearful embraces of his loving wife and children, in a proof of the power of sensibility even

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over life and death.) After the sublime thrills of the storm, the earlier state of calm is restored, in Beethoven’s telling with a hymn of thanksgiving, and in Kauth’s case with injunctions to alleviate the suffering of the afflicted. That injunction exemplifies the inflated, tautological language of sensibility: “The sorrowful fate of the unlucky victims fills compassionate hearts with pity. / They collect in a great circle to comfort the misery of their fellows. / And every kind tear the compassionate wipe from the cheeks of the wretched, pours a balsam into their hearts.” This scene of sympathy links community, feeling, virtue, faith, and benevolence in a “great circle,” acknowledging little space for resistance. Kauth’s narrator is initially omniscient but increasingly involved, a narrative technique that models sympathetic identification. She begins (like the waking Ariadne) by admiring nature, although Kauth’s speaker is emphatic in her praise of landscape as a divine construct: With what marvelous beauty is the golden Sun resplendent in majestic radiance in the immense expanse. / Nature is everywhere in solemn silence. / Only the magical song of the nightingale lulls the soul with sweet feelings. / Who does not recognize in this the all-powerful architect of Nature?41

The rhetorical question affirms shared belief in the manner of a liturgy. To this end, the narrator attempts to colonize perception, insinuating ways of seeing and hearing so that community- forming conviction about nature as a divine construct is linked to the apparent immediacy of visual and auditory experience— the sun’s “majestic radiance,” the nightingale’s sweet, lulling melody. The rewards of this colonization of the subject are not just those of belonging in the abstract (“who does not recognize”) but of sharing intoxicating sensations of the “immense,” “solemn,” and “magical.” That said, Kauth’s text is not uniquely sanctimonious. Sensibility, often described today as a “cult” or “religion,” drew manifestly on Christian beliefs, patterns of feeling, and techniques of persuasion.42 Benevolence was, in other words, never purely secular. Kauth highlights the intersections of faith and sensibility on her title page. Her dedication to “Princess Frederica of Prussia, Prioress of Quedlinburg” summons female, royal, and ecclesiastical authority: Quedlinburg was an order of female nobility whose abbess sat directly on the council of the Holy Roman Empire and did not answer to any local religious authority.43 Having affirmed nature as a divine artifice, and music (the nightingale’s song) as a natural part of it, Kauth (perhaps with her charitable

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mission in mind) avoids theological difficulties, describing the gathering and breaking storm in the morally neutral, emotion-based terms of the sublime of nature (as influentially theorized by Edmund Burke): But why does the dear, artless singer of the skies fall silent? / What dark clouds arise on the horizon? / Whirlwinds whip through the sky, / distant rolls of thunder in fearful drumming, / cloudbursts never seen before flood the land and spread terror in nature all about! / The floods fall down in great rivers, / the dark clouds draw dreadfully near to the earth, / and Just Heaven bursts them on the peak of the mountains.

The reference to “Just Heaven” is admittedly ambiguous but could be read as warding off (rather than invoking) the idea of retribution (the mountains, after all, were already there, not introduced to wreak havoc on lowlying land). Here Kauth appears to follow a common line of thinking about natural disasters, one that regarded them as local misfortunes arising from natural processes that are necessary (if not fully understood) and even salutary. This intricate intellectual territory was addressed by contemporary theologians under the rubric of Hydrotheologie— the theology of water (specifically of floods caused by raging seas and surging rivers).44 It seems that then, as now, natural disasters were subject to multiple interpretations, invested with fluctuating levels of belief: as mechanistic “facts” of nature, simply misfortunes, events of sublime grandeur, God’s punishment or warning, subjects of research, reminders of the biblical flood, management challenges for town and agricultural planning, and occasions for authorship, representation, sympathy, and doing good. That seems like an impossible collection of responses, but the scientific, theological, and aesthetic reactions to natural disasters were often harmoniously combined. As Richard Will observes of the extremely influential Reflections on the Works of God and His Providence (1772) by Christoph Christian Sturm, “storms provide the means for God not only to water the earth and rid the air of vapors but also to frighten sinners.”45 At the heart of Gemälde is a prayer for deliverance: for God’s benevolence and thus sympathy on a divine scale. This mise en abyme links the divine and the human, analogizing God’s mercy to human charity and, in thematizing the imploring tone of the piece as a whole, lending the entire performance the quality of religious supplication. As the storm sweeps peasants away, as mothers and children cry out, the narrator— crossing over into the fiction— implores God for assistance and becomes one of the afflicted:

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The sun appears pale through the waterlogged veil of the sky, to the frightened victims who flee the storm. / Ah! A woman’s anguished cry? / How her children whimper. / the flood snatches wife from husband, children from their father, / their sole aid, their sole happiness, is taken by the wild waves. / Oh God! Righteous God— Oh save them, the dear ones, and us. / Look down on your creation, merciful God on High, they grovel at your feet. / Oh hurry, hear our pleas, send us a deliverer.

The prayer is answered: a “brave-hearted” rescuer appears. Abandoning himself to the water, he rescues not only a husband but sympathy itself from possible charges of feminine weakness. The focus narrows to the favored sentimental tableau of a family, as the husband’s lifeless body is miraculously revived by love. Benevolence echoes recursively through the text and its context. “Blissful feelings” repay the hero for his deed, while God signs his canvas with a rainbow: There, a mighty soul appears from lowly huts, / braves foaming waves to save fellow men. / Here such a deliverer brings the stiff body of the husband, and lays it in the arms of his inconsolable wife, who helplessly stretches out her wounded hands after him, / presses [her husband to] her bosom / to bring him back to life through the joyful babble of the children. / The brave-hearted rescuer beholds this scene tenderly; a thousand times repaid with blissful feelings, he flings himself anew into the wild hurricane / and God’s blessing escorts him, and holds the nobleman above the waves. / Thanks be to You, Almighty! / Now the end of the devastation is in sight. / The brightly colored rainbow appears in quiet grandeur as a flourish in the shimmering radiance of the sun.

The technique of this passage is insinuating: the crucial phase of action is located within the mind’s eye of the spectator/auditor. This device potentially enhances the realism of answered prayers and miracles, which, rather than being acted out onstage, appear like visions within the subjectivity of the audience. The gestural language— the wife’s outstretched hands— is internalized. This mode of representation-through-suggestion also characterizes the music of Gemälde. Without making a categorical distinction, one notices a shift away from the “utterance” model of earlier melodramas— in which the score resembles an extended orchestrated recitative— to composing with topics in a series of extended thematic passages. In part this reflects

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the date of composition— Kauth seems to have known some Haydn and Mozart. But the omniscient narrator throws the emphasis away from the representation of a character’s subjectivity— his or her voice— and onto the task of pulling on the heartstrings and purse strings of the audience. Ariadne auf Naxos is different: not because it is a melodrama (rather than a monodrama)— Theseus leaves early in the piece, after his monologue, and, some spirit voices and stage trumpets aside, Ariadne is the sole character— but because there is no voice other than that of the fiction. Gemälde, on the other hand, as Kauth’s locution hints, is a “portrait of nature, in the form of a monodrama”; the speaker possesses the authority of a preacher, and the subjective intensity that Benda and Brandes attribute to Ariadne is redirected toward (in the first instance) the visual imagination of the audience. From an analytical point of view, the score deploys music in a few different ways. It conveys the sensibility, the affect and sensation, of what the narrator describes; it imitates the sounds of the natural world (the nightingale and the storm); and occasionally it punctuates the narrator’s exclamations in the manner of orchestral recitative. For example, the opening worship of the bright sun in its infinite realm is conveyed musically through a symphonic style, in a majestic E-flat major, forte, and in doubled octaves, with the emphatic dotted rhythms of the march, and a melody that outlines the tonic chord (see figure 9.2a). The nightingale’s song is imitated through a lulling melody, in the soprano range, softly slurred, quiet, and supported by a gentle rocking accompaniment (figure 9.2b). The storm, conventionally enough, abandons the vocal model and proceeds in agitated scales and arpeggios, in a purely instrumental idiom threatening human annihilation (figure 9.2c). Only the moment of prayer, as a moment of speech within the fiction, calls forth the gestures of recitative (figure 9.2d). It seems unlikely, however, that these apparently different functions of music were meant to be recognized as such. Rather, music is a trigger and affective tint for the internal, visual mode of “seeing” that Kauth suggests with her paradoxical title of “portraits.”46 That title relates to a theory of musical painting that was close to hand. A Berlin subscriber to Gemälde was Johann Jakob Engel, a writer and professor of philosophy who nine years earlier in 1780 had published a treatise—Über die musikalische Malerey (On Painting in Music)— dedicated to Reichardt, the Berlin Kapellmeister. With this title Engel alluded to the musical representation of things through synecdoche (some part of them, such as the sounds of a storm), resemblance (a lion’s roar, he suggests, citing Benda’s Ariadne auf Naxos), and analogy (a quick physical movement depicted in rapid notes).47 But these conceits—

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F igur e 9.2 a . Worship of the bright sun in Kauth’s Gemälde der Natur (1789): “With majestic splendour, the sun shines gloriously in immeasurable space.” Thanks to the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin for use of these images.

F i gur e 9.2 b. Imitation of the nightingale’s song: “Only the magical song of nightingales cradles the soul in sweet feelings.”

recalling an earlier poetics of music— concede pride of place to a different device: the representation not of things but of the effect they have on us; as Engel has it, “The composer still paints when he imitates not a part or a property of the object itself, but the impression that this object tends to make on the soul. Imitation in music obtains its broadest range by this means. . . . For the impression of a delicate color bears some resemblance to the impression of a gentle tone on the soul.”48 The concept of musical painting, in other words, was a metaphor for arousing sensibility (subjective responsiveness) and, more abstractly, for the sensations awakened by perception. In this scheme, music (like its ideal listener) is always “absorbed” in and absorbing something else, as if it too were trans-

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F igur e 9.2 c. The storm: “Whirlwinds twist through the air . . . distant rolls of thunder in fearful claps.”

F igur e 9.2 d. A moment of prayer: “Oh God! Righteous God! Oh save, save us and our loved ones!”

ported sympathetically beyond itself. Engel’s theory, one of the fullest accounts of musical meaning, and listening, in the period, is far removed from today’s semiotic theory, which invites listeners to hear musical topics, primarily, as signifying nothing but the musical category to which they belong.49 Kauth’s Gemälde, a sort of theater for the blind, was probably not listened to so much as experienced holistically as a melding of words, voice, instrumental music, and mental imagery.50 For some the music may have proved powerfully moving. Reichardt (a subscriber) modeled the empfindsam experience of music for readers of his travel journal of 1774. Writing of a performance of Handel’s Judas Maccabaeus, he mar-

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veled (somewhat didactically) at the somatic effects of “magical sounds” and “mighty harmonies” that “fill souls . . . with the fear of approaching thunder . . . cause bones to tremble . . . blood to freeze in terror”— only for “celestial harmonies [to] return to soothe souls, and sweet, melodious songs pour peace and rapture into their hearts and fill their eyes with tears of the sweetest and noblest joy.”51 For less empfindsam listeners, Kauth’s orchestral interludes may just have measured time for reflection on the narrator’s maxims and exhortations, in the manner of (say) Haydn’s Die sieben letzten Worte unseres Erlösers am Kreuze (1785/86), a series of seven adagio orchestral meditations on the last utterances of Christ (gleaned from the Gospels) with an introduction and concluding earthquake, commissioned for the Good Friday service of Cádiz Cathedral. Arguably, Kauth’s technique is similarly liturgical, linking the use of music in early melodrama to that in church for purposes of meditation on doctrine. Of course, what listeners were thinking in these solemn moments can only be guessed at. Inevitably music failed to control listeners’ feelings and ideas to the extent and with the uniformity that Engel’s sentimental but also mechanical theory predicted.52 There were complexities in the discourse of benevolence that seem self-evident today but that were conspicuously absent in the intellectual discourse of the time and place. An apologetic literature on the pleasure taken in the suffering of others reveals little awareness of the power of guilt to motivate benevolence. Good deeds, in period theorizations, arise from (Christian) duty, from sympathy, or even from self- interest, while the pleasures of terror afford a salutary excitation of the nervous system and a thrilling awareness of one’s own good fortune.53 These differences in the moral order render the benevolent intentions of the melodramatic technique historically specific, equivocal, even strange. Similarly, the royal and ecclesiastical backing for Kauth’s authorship, and the sledgehammer blows of the spoken text of Gemälde, caution us, amid the flurry of historical recovery, and all the talk of feeling, that the danger of a technique like melodrama, which seeks total knowledge of and control over subjectivity, is that it may achieve its goal. But music like that of Kauth or Benda cannot impose: it can only invite and influence subjectivity. It is less music than charity itself: sustaining the social order, articulating social difference, establishing relationships of dependence and obligation, promising redemption, and offering a moral insurance policy in a world in which inequality was divinely ordained and righteously defended. In such a context, music was neither the problem nor the solution, even as it offered a fleeting sense of sympathetic community, rousing, as Engel put it, “instinctive sympathy” between “beasts of the same species.”54

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Ch a p t er 10

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Vienna, 18 October 1814

Urban Space and Public Memory in the Napoleonic “Occasional Melodrama” Nichol a s Mathe w

The immense hymn of gratitude and adoration rose to the sky along with the smoking incense, the noise of thundering cannon, the sound of bells from all the churches; the princes surrounded by their resplendent senior advisors, the multifarious uniforms, the arms, the breastplates, the bronze of the artillery sparkling in the sunlight; the white-haired priest blessing the prostrate crowd from the high altar. This mingling of war and religion constituted a unique tableau that will perhaps never be repeated, which no painter’s brush could render— a poetic and sublime scene, beyond all description.1

Thus did the avid socialite comte Auguste de la Garde-Chambonas describe the high point of the public celebration staged in the Prater on 18 October 1814 during the Congress of Vienna to mark the anniversary of the Battle of Leipzig— the decisive allied victory that had assured Napoleon’s comprehensive defeat. One of the grandest tableaux of all those promised in his Congress memoir, de la Garde’s description characteristically retraced the hierarchies on display from the excitable but highly structured perspective of the lower-tier aristocrat: the princes, their retinues, their armies, their military hardware, the churchmen, and lastly the prostrate masses— each stratum adding up to the painterly (if, rhetorically, indescribable) scene of a resurgent and stable Old Order (one of the plainest messages intended by the celebration’s architects). Yet the description also contains a trace of something not typically documented in earlier accounts of court spectacle: a quality of immersed spectatorship— a multisensory, though markedly sonic, experience not so amenable to the formal, synoptic structure of the tableau. Song mingles with incense, cannon shots with distant church bells. De la Garde’s Congress reminiscences serially describe, almost as a matter of tiresome routine, his awestruck response to the ritualized visual distribution of the elevated

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ranks he aspired to join, but here his text also records a charged and untidy sonic encounter in Viennese public space. Amid the elaborate courtly ceremonies of the Congress, the role of the spectator was changing. In many respects, the Prater festival was a Napoleonic hybrid, blending ancient dynastic spectacle with the more modern genre of public commemoration.2 Indeed, the moment that prompted de la Garde’s rapturous description saw Revolutionary-style public participation elide with carefully choreographed ritual: having fallen to their knees during the celebration of the mass by the elderly archbishop of Vienna, the crowd reportedly rose to their feet to join in spontaneously with a German “Hymn of Peace” performed by a chorus with wind accompaniment.3 It is not clear from contemporary reports whether this was a version of the Angelic Hymn of Peace or a well- known song of the period— perhaps the 1814 Friedenshymne by the Hungarian-born lyric poet György von Gaal.4 Not since the government’s concerted stoking of patriotic fervor during the tumultuous spring of 1809 had Vienna hosted such scenes of mass participation and emotional display.5 “No, never has the human ear heard anything more imposing than these thousands of voices, which were as one in celebrating the grace of peace and the glory of the almighty,” gushed de la Garde.6 The Austrian chancellor, Clemens von Metternich, had planned the Prater commemoration as an exclusively civic-focused celebration rather than yet another martial parade. But it seems that he was overruled by the emperor, who prevailed on the aging Field Marshal Carl von Schwarzenberg to drill the Viennese garrison— some sixteen thousand men— for the occasion (growing tensions with Russia were probably among the motivations for this show of undiminished Austrian strength).7 And so, on the morning of 18 October, when the throng crossed the arm of the Danube that separated the Prater gardens from the city, they did so over a newly constructed bridge whose railings on either side were made entirely from French guns captured at Leipzig. The bridge led to an imposing wooden structure housing the altar— the so-called Peace Tent— adorned on all sides with yet more trophies, standards, and other military plunder. Once the mass was concluded, the army staged a march-past, and each soldier received a bronze medal struck from melted- down cannons of the Grand Armée. The event wound down with less formality. Seated at long tables arranged in a gigantic star formation, the Viennese garrison was served soup and rolls, pork, roast beef, jam doughnuts, beer, and wine. Kaiser Franz and Tsar Alexander descended from their seats to toast the common soldiery.8 Even though the Austrian army had co-opted the primarily civilian

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focus of the Prater festival, the battle that it celebrated was nonetheless— especially a year on, and especially in German lands— a potent popular symbol, the climax of a great “national” war. Fought between 16 and 19 October 1813, Leipzig had been by some distance the bloodiest engagement of the Napoleonic Wars— a catastrophe that would remain unequaled in its dreadful scale until the twentieth century. The allies lost over fifty thousand troops, more than fifteen thousand of them Austrian; the French, substantially outnumbered, around sixty thousand.9 Such annihilation was exceptional and had never been among the aims of the Austrian high command, who, with only minor changes of emphasis, had stuck to eighteenth- century principles of orderly maneuvering and strategic position for the duration of the wars with France. This tactical conservatism was broadly consistent with the stated Habsburg war aims of preventing French domination only beyond its “natural frontiers” and restoring the pre-Revolutionary dynastic order— but it was also prudent. Early on in the wars with Napoleonic France, the Austrian generals had come to understand their tactical predicament: French military innovations, so devastatingly successful, had been prompted in large part by those radical changes in government and society that Habsburg rulers fought to resist; Austria could not emulate them. A limited form of compulsory conscription on the model of the French levée en masse had been introduced in Austrian and Bohemian lands in 1808, but the Austrian leaders continued to believe, even in the years following the outpouring of popular resistance to the French in 1809, that their multiethnic troops could not be enthused with the popular patriotism that supposedly fired Napoleon’s armies— the nationally infused esprit de corps that might have motivated staunch and vigorous open-order combat.10 And yet— partly because of its unprecedented human cost, partly because of the distinctive ethnic groups that ultimately converged to crush Napoleon’s forces (the “mighty nations” that Schwarzenberg reportedly addressed in his speech to his troops on 16 October 1813)— the Battle of Leipzig was soon portrayed in German song and poetry as the “battle of nations,” the Völker-Schlacht. Certainly, given how many had perished there, the majority of Viennese would have had a personal connection with its horrors. Songs mourning lovers and sons lost in the Battle of Leipzig were a feature of the publishing market in 1814, many of them adopting a personal, sentimental tone nowadays more usually associated with the songs of the Great War: “Mein lieber Hanns war auch dabei” (my darling Hanns was also there) ended each stanza of a Leipzig poem by the Viennese court poet Ignaz Castelli (set to guitar accompaniment by Friedrich Starke)—“Soliloquy of a Peasant Girl after the Battle of Leipzig.”11

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If the ritual practices of the Prater festival linked established forms of court spectacle to a more dispersed and intimate kind of public experience produced in part by print circulation, the festival was also one of the earliest such events in Vienna (along with the victorious return of Emperor Franz and his retinue to the imperial capital the previous June) to have been so widely recalled and celebrated in print itself.12 The details of an occasion whose purpose was to mediate collective memory was itself compulsively remediated— not only in travelogues, of which de la Garde’s was only one of several examples, but also in topical poetry and occasional musical compositions. The latter included several “characteristic” or descriptive pieces for piano and voice— a genre that periodically dominated the Viennese publishing market during the Napoleonic era.13 Thus an advertisement in the Wiener Zeitung on 7 December 1814 announced the publication of Adalbert Gyrowetz’s “charakteristische Fantasie” describing the Victory and Peace Festival of the Allied Monarchs.14 Nine days later, an advertisement in the same newspaper promoted a rival Prater “tone painting” (Tongemählde) by Anton Diabelli, which accompanied a poetic narrative by Friedrich August Kanne: The 18th October; or, The Great Military Prater Festival in Vienna.15 The Bohemian composer Gyrowetz, an ardent disciple of Joseph Haydn, was among the leading musicians in Vienna, having recently scored a popular hit with his comic opera Der Augenarzt (The eye doctor). Kanne and Diabelli were prominent figures within the Viennese music industry: Diabelli was primarily a music publisher, yet he was himself a regular producer of dance music and songs; Kanne, who turned his hand to composition on occasion, was foremost a literary man— a music critic and historian, editor of the Wiener allgemeine musikalische Zeitung, and the author of a substantial catalogue of poems, plays, songs, and theatrical pieces. The basic constructive principle of these Prater festival pieces is the arresting combination of musical gesture and poetic declamation, and both might thus be described as melodramas— though perhaps most categorically the collaboration between Kanne and Diabelli, in which music and poetry are overtly accorded equal status. Granted, these compositions, with their syntactically disjointed, blow-by-blow musical descriptions, also shared in the collage aesthetic of contemporary battle pieces and, to the extent that they incorporated well-known musical quotations, the patchwork principle of the Viennese quodlibet. Like contemporary battle pieces, the Prater festival compositions adopted a fractured language of sonic fragments to describe a detailed spatial distribution of people and things— a sense of space famously literalized in orchestral performances of Beethoven’s Wellington’s Victory in 1813 and 1814 in the Großer Red-

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outensaal, where the French and British troops approached each other down long corridors on either side of the main performance space.16 But the Prater festival compositions applied this hyperrealist spatial sense to well-known, quotidian public spaces, creating sonic reconstructions of things that the Viennese already knew, rather than presenting musical reportage about distant theaters of war. Moreover, they combined this with a melodramatic interiority rarely on show in battle pieces. The Viennese publishing market had long been awash with generically hybrid descriptive pieces of this kind: the volunteer drives of 1797 had prompted a “characteristic sonata” by Pavel Mašek, and the triumphal comings and goings of the ensuing years were marked by an increasing supply of such compositions by veterans of the popular Viennese publishing scene such as Johann Baptist Vanhal, Friedrich Starke, and Ignaz Moscheles.17 The carefully stage-managed return of the emperor to Vienna on 16 June 1814 had produced a particular glut of descriptive piano pieces— by Diabelli, Tobias Haslinger, Max Josef Leidesdorf, Moscheles, and Starke, among others.18 Some of them— and this obviously applies to the Prater festival pieces— were distinguished by the prominence of poetic declamation. It was thus not unusual, therefore, for these pieces to describe themselves as melodramas. To be sure, the generic boundaries of melodrama were imprecise, to say the least— especially in the domain of popular publishing— yet, as we will see, this seemed to signal, in part, the ubiquity of a melodramatic mode. The term Melodram, perhaps because of its association with a handful of venerable stage works still performed in Vienna from time to time, may have connoted something especially elevated or mythic in tone. In the months after Waterloo, for example, Kanne struck out alone with a Melodram dedicated “to the immortal heroes and victors” Wellington and Blücher (the victorious leaders of the allied forces)— a combination of breathless war reportage and Teutonic legend: The Battle of Belle-Alliance; or, Hermann’s Descent from Valhalla.19 By contrast, the focus of the Prater melodramas of 1814 was decidedly the facts on the ground. The poem by Kanne that Diabelli furnished with music was an instance of the “occasional poem” (Gelegenheitsgedicht) in which he specialized, a genre that thrived during the Napoleonic Wars, as the list of historic events and heroes worthy of poetic memorial became ever longer. Though the guiding principle of such verse had long since been disdained by authorities such as Friedrich Schiller, who had dismissed a form whose aesthetic viability was so plainly bound up with immediate historical circumstance, the occasional poem nonetheless had an august lineage that extended back to the Pindaric ode, and it had attracted a certain amount of high-minded commentary from respectable

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F igur e 10.1. The urban sublime? Frontispiece of Anton Diabelli and Friedrich August Kanne, Der 18te October, oder das große militärische Prater-Fest in Wien (Vienna: Steiner, 1814). Thanks to the Österreichische Nationalbibliothek for use of this image.

Kantians such as the Wittenberg philosopher Johann Adolf Grohmann.20 One might conceive of these Prater festival compositions, then, as “occasional melodramas,” which turned the constructive principles of melodrama to historically local account. In these commemorative publications, the combination of imitative musical gestures, stock thematic characters, scraps of melodic quotation, and rapturous poetic declamation not only served to displace the symbolism of a great public event into the domestic sphere— just as poetry, song, and reportage did— but, crucially, sought to retain, via this jumbled and hybrid form, something of the acoustic and spatial experience of public spectatorship. The elaborate frontispieces of these Prater festival compositions capture to some degree their intricate mediation of public and private realms. Both pictures sought to represent a spectator’s immersed viewpoint, though in combination with a synoptic perspective that reproduced, in miniaturized form, the imposing visual rhetoric of the ceremony and its monumentally axial layout. The engraving that prefaces Diabelli and

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F igur e 10.2 . A bucolic Prater. Frontispiece of Adalbert Gyrowetz, Sieges- und Friedens-Fest der verbündeten Monarchen (Vienna: Thadé Weigl, 1814). Thanks to the Österreichische Nationalbibliothek for use of this image.

Kanne’s tone painting (figure 10.1) is divided schematically into an individualized foreground, featuring cavalrymen and assorted generations of bourgeois, and a middleground that respects the grand visual language of the festival, with an impressive view of the Peace Tent, festooned with standards and war trophies, and the dubious gun- sided bridge before it. The arresting thing here, though— and clearly the main preoccupation of the picture— is the spectacle of mass spectatorship itself that forms the oceanic background: the Viennese public, gathered together on an unprecedented scale. This is evidently a species of “metropolitan sublime,” as theorized in connection with the Romantic poetics of London by Anne Janowitz— an uneasy substitution of the tropes of natural immensity that typically characterized the eighteenth-century sublime with the teeming masses and imposing man-made structures of the urban scene.21 This picture thus documented the urban public’s awareness of its own theatrical presence, while also repackaging and dispersing this presence within the more notional public spaces mapped out by print circulation. By contrast, the frontispiece of Gyrowetz’s fantasy (figure 10.2) cleaves more closely to a traditional visual language; much as Raymond Williams observed of late

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eighteenth-century urban poetics, the city is here representable largely as a kind of rhetorical force, transforming the inherited vocabularies of pastoralism.22 Richard Bright, the English scientist who visited Vienna during the Congress, described the Prater in terms that may strike us as distinctively urban— as a place of competing attractions and multisensory stimulations, and as a place where the public could gaze upon itself. A few officers out of uniform sit in groups, and, as they smoke, quietly enjoy the passing scene. Advancing into the wood, and leaving the grand drive, numbers of the common people are seen sitting at the tables smoking and drinking beer, or thronging about the buildings of the carrousels, to which a trumpeter from time to time calls their attention; while in an adjoining room, music invites the soldier and his sweetheart to mingle in the rapid waltz.

Despite the urban motifs in this description, however, Bright concluded with a turn to pastoral cliché: the Prater provided “sweet retirement” from the city.23 In the same spirit, the Prater of Gyrowetz’s frontispiece emphasizes the bucolic and convivial: couples mill around beneath the trees and servants bring out soup, while seated members of the Viennese garrison have already started on the beer and wine. Even so, the engraving also makes sure to register the vastness of the assembled urban throng— with a swarm of onlookers extending to a vanishing point between the trees on one side. These pictures might remind us that topical musical publications such as these were primarily souvenirs, serving to channel intimate memories through physical commodities— and, in this instance, to allow public commemoration to be reenacted on a scale commensurate with sentimental contemplation at home. Indeed, Gyrowetz’s composition even recalls moments of recollection themselves: an F-major Andantino announces the “recollection of the many perils, luckily survived,” which includes a rolling series of D-minor arpeggios responding to the “vivid recollection of the tumult of terrifying battle.”24 Likewise, the end of Kanne’s poem describes, over a series of majestic chords, the brave soldiers of Vienna returning home from the festival “with sweet memories of this holy day.” As they disperse, each one calls out the concluding couplet, as a cadential progression rises ever higher: “The sun of peace shall rise before us now; I have witnessed the greatest day of joy!” 25 The concluding image of a harmonious collective bound together by a kind of sympathetic resonance is a far cry from the irrational mob sentiment that Viennese Burkeans such as Friedrich von Gentz had long associated with Revolution-era crowds.26

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Moreover, the precarious layering of memory over memory at the end of this composition subtly recasts sympathy in modern, urban terms— as a form of mediation: the print object is now the conduit of shared feelings, which reverberate primarily between media forms, rebounding from state commemoration to popular publication, traversing urban space, the theatrical stage, the printed page, and the music desk. Modern public memory is constituted by these new patterns of mediation.27 Thus did the Prater festival compositions appropriate and repurpose one of the central preoccupations of sentimental theater: recollection and remembrance. These were especially prominent themes in the sections of melodrama that were scattered across contemporary Viennese opera. The most-performed opera of the period, by some distance, was Joseph Weigl’s Die Schweizer Familie (The Swiss family), a drama precisely about recollection— of a homeland and a loved one, and, indeed, about music’s capacity to arouse and sustain memory (the opera, premiered in 1809, was presented four times in the Kärntnertortheater in the month of the Prater festival).28 The climatic scene of reunion between the separated lovers Emmeline and Jacob was prefaced with a melodrama in which the Swiss peasant girl first sets eyes on her cottage and its picturesque mountain environment, now bizarrely reconstructed in every detail on the country estate of her family’s noble benefactor— an extreme measure to assuage Emmeline’s lovelorn homesickness: “This is all your work, Count! To make my stay here bearable, he seeks to awaken memories in my soul.”29 The musical interjections throughout the melodrama amount to tiny vignettes of sentimental interiority, which, appropriately, also recall earlier scraps of musical material: a volkstümlich tune laden with sighs; a minor-mode gesture with a descending tritone when Emmeline’s sorrowful memories surface; palpitating sixteenth-note passages that indicate a more bodily kind of agitation.30 Yet the melodrama also culminates in what was once a celebrated use of source music: the sound of a “shepherd’s pipe,” which announces that Emmeline’s lover, Jacob, has returned. The tune was an exotic minor-mode version of the Swiss Kuhreigen or ranz des vaches— a melody long associated, by Rousseau and others, with the remembrance of one’s homeland.31 Thus does the voice’s transformation from song into speech prompt a parallel transformation of nondiegetic music into source music: the verisimilitude of the speaking voice phenomenalizes the accompanying music.32 The register of melodrama thus seemed to lend itself to a paradoxical mix of extreme interiority and naturalistic exteriority— a mix that also characterizes the pair of Prater festival compositions, whose music perpetually oscillates between the privacy of intimate expression and the

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imitation of ambient sound. Indeed, these apparently mismatched registers frequently blend into one another: noise, music overheard on the way to the Prater and during the ceremonies themselves, and a varied gestural language of affective response. Thus a 6/8 Allegro molto section of the composition by Diabelli and Kanne begins with a strident motto descending in whole steps as “ditties of triumph and war songs resound through the streets”; this fetches up in a propulsive, swooping ascent to a cadence in broken octaves when “the cheering throng of people stream in joyful haste down to the banks of the green Danube.”33 A rippling turn gesture is introduced along with the Danube, which subsequently embellishes another joyous ascent— the old man feeling young again amid the city’s youth (“Der Greis verjüngt sich mit dem Knaben”)— only for the cadence to be interrupted by cannon volleys consisting of a fortissimo swerve onto the flat submediant, roaring broken chords in the bass, and raucous syncopations in the right hand: “Der Donnerschlünde Krachen ruft” (the blasts [from] the thunderous throats [of the cannons] call out). The subsequent phase of the piece, an Allegro maestoso, similarly switches between march-topic songs of the approaching Viennese garrison—“The songs that they performed in battle loudly resound”— and still more cannon fire (see figure 10.3).34 Eventually, the arrival of the monarchs prompts a broad D-major tune of appreciation, treated to a succession of truncated variations. In the context of this remarkable collage, even the reported speech of the emperor himself becomes merely one more voice amid the general din: his toast to the troops is reproduced in full, during which declamation and musical recitative in the piano proceed in curious lockstep—“Health to my exalted guests and friends! Thanks to my valiant troops and brave leaders!”35 Gyrowetz also interpolates a good deal of source music and noise into his otherwise more syntactically continuous composition. Its climactic Presto of jubilation, which begins a succession of musical and poetic culminations, includes “a rural hurdy- gurdy man” who “mingles with the happy rows [of people]” as the music segues into a Musette, complete with drone (figure 10.4).36 This cityscape implies bustle and variety— yet the music, like the frontispiece, is adapted to a largely pastoral vocabulary. Not much later, a surprise Andante that precedes the concluding part of the Presto quotes a snippet of Haydn’s “Gott erhalte Franz, den Kaiser”: “extraordinary cry of joy with a glimpse of His Majesty Kaiser Franz,” runs the text, as the music dissolves into a crescendo of rising tremolos on a C-major chord (figure 10.5).37 This short passage, banal as it is, achieved several things at once: it turned Haydn’s song of Habsburg loyalty into a metonym for the Kaiser’s person, it recalled performances of

Figur e 10.3. Pedestrian congregating and sonic space in Diabelli and Kanne’s “occasional melodrama.” Thanks to the Österreichische Nationalbibliothek for use of this image.

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F igur e 10.4. The hurdy-gurdy man amid Gyrowetz’s crowd. Thanks to the Österreichische Nationalbibliothek for use of this image.

“Gott erhalte” during these public events, and it allowed Haydn’s song to be revisited in the domestic spaces in which Gyrowetz’s fantasy was to be consumed. During the Napoleonic Wars, Haydn’s song traveled between public and private spaces probably more than any other. As Joseph Richter’s comic Eipeldauer Briefe had predicted, following the 1797 Viennese premiere of “Gott erhalte” in the Burgtheater, the song would be sung in “all societies and in public places, and especially by Fräuleins at the piano.”38 The multivalence of the short quotation in Gyrowetz’s fantasy thus tersely summarizes a dynamic of social relations: the perpetual oscillation between exterior and interior worlds that was set in motion by print circulation. Even the simple tremolos that follow the quotation of “Gott erhalte” articulate a more complex relationship between public and private forms of expression than one might assume, serving as a commonplace musical symbol of splendor (a symbol whose Viennese lineage included, perhaps most famously, the moments of bedazzlement from Haydn’s Creation)— as well as an imitation of the crowd’s “cries of joy” and its tremulous feelings of rapture. Something as basic, and as native to the stock language of melodrama, as a tremolo can thus simultaneously depict a sublime scene and its awed reception— from jubilant shouts to internal tremors of delight. One sees a comparable mix in earlier, near- identical tremolo passages— one in which “a thousand-voiced cheer [ein tausendstimmiges Lebehoch] sounds with a glimpse of the allied monarchs,” and another that accompanies a pious political slogan: “The health of Europe’s liberators will be distributed by the lofty allied monarchs.”39 Again, the tremolo adds all- purpose luster, musical shorthand for the sublime spectacle of power and people’s reactions to it— at once demonstratively public and intimately private. Just as melodrama in the Viennese theater typically made a spectacle of sentimental interiority, so publications such as the pair of Prater festival compositions shrank Viennese urban space down to a size appropriate

F igur e 10.5. A fragment of Haydn’s “Gott erhalte Franz, den Kaiser” from Gyrowetz’s fantasy, dissolving into a tremolo. Thanks to the Österreichische Nationalbibliothek for use of this image.

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to the chamber. “Requesting young ladies to recite verses” was, according to Bright, one of the commonest forms of domestic entertainment in Congress- era Vienna, alongside music: “dances and refreshments, the rehearsal of poetry, or other exercises of mind or body.”40 But the commonplace domestic practice of combining music-making and poetic declamation frequently made its way back to grander public domains. Toward the end of the Napoleonic Wars the court theater began to host declamatorisch-musikalische Abendunterhaltungen (declamatory-musical evening entertainments)— a blend of readings and musical performances that made a public display out of entertainments that were by and large associated with the respectable Viennese parlor. For example, the evening of 15 November 1815 interpolated readings of poetry by the court dramatist Franz Weidmann and others between a potpourri of musical items— a violin concerto, various operatic scenes, a cello solo— all bookended by the first and last movements of Beethoven’s Fourth Symphony (the Adagio cropped up in the middle of the program; the Minuet did not feature).41 The readings evidently sought to air poetry recently published in Vienna (a collection of Weidmann’s verse had appeared that year)— though the poetic choices were also topically relevant (the opening reading was Weidmann’s “Die Macht des Liedes” [The power of song], a poem about a sultan prompted to clemency by music, evidently composed with Dryden’s “Alexander’s Feast” in mind).42 By 1814, the melodrama intended for the chamber thus represented only one dimension of a Viennese social world replete with the collocation of music and heightened speech. Given that the melodrama— as a register, genre, and social practice— traversed public and private domains so busily, the ideological function of occasional publications such as the pair of Prater festival pieces might seem plain. Especially since the government-promoted outpourings of popular patriotism in the spring of 1809, many residents of Vienna had hastily been learning how to behave as a cohesive public via a carefully regulated series of institutions and rituals— the conscription army, the theater, the public festival, and above all printed media.43 Supplementing official ritual with something more like personal experience, the Prater festival compositions thus seem to extend the reach of the state onto the music desk and thus into the home— the melodramatic mix of charged declamation and music providing an analogue for the sound of modern Viennese public space, its new textures and modes of organization miniaturized and explained. From this point of view, the Prater festival compositions simply harnessed the convulsively emotional world of the melodrama on behalf of the state. Indeed, if the aesthetic of melodrama reproduces the structure of conversion hysteria, as Peter Brooks has

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claimed, then these pieces amounted to a sort of ideological talking cure, more intimate than any public ritual: the trauma of Leipzig and its recrudescent memory prompted the usual kinds of musical-melodramatic excess, which could nonetheless be redirected into the ostensibly healthy channels of dynastic loyalty and other highly managed varieties of corporate feeling.44 After all, the very idea of a Viennese “public mind” (condemned as “dull and torpid” by one English visitor in 1805) had been produced by the state in the course of the Napoleonic Wars as a matter of policy— largely in the form of proliferating print materials.45 New realms of privacy thus appeared alongside a new public life. And the theatricality of these Prater melodramas— their tremolos, kaleidoscopic variety, and constant expressions of awe— might thus be regarded as echoing and articulating new forms of political participation, which had to be entrained and performed. Yet the relationship between formal projections of state power via civic ritual and the dynamics of an individualized urban experience was knottier and less tractable than such a straightforwardly Foucauldian story implies. One could even say that the organizational jumble of melodrama served to emphasize and even thematize this complexity— in a way that the avalanche of contemporary political songs, which by and large also sought to extend the reach of state ideologies into the domestic sphere, could not. The occasional melodrama was not a mere intermediary, then, transcribing politics into the home, and neither was it only a personal souvenir, parasitic on the grandiose memory-making of Napoleonic state ritual. Rather, with their ample borrowings from the aesthetic of melodrama, compositions such as the Prater festival pieces responded to and helped to generate a new experience of urban public space— an experience that inevitably stood in an oblique relation to traditional projections of state power, which had now acquired a visible and active audience.46 “Gawkers,” Friedrich Anton von Schönholz had called them, in his satirical commentary on the habits of perpetual spectatorship encouraged by the Congress of Vienna: There a new saddlecloth was seen: hundreds pleaded for a view of only a corner. In the royal stables; in the Prater; in front of the palace of princes, envoys, and magnates; before governmental offices and in the courtyards of the Imperial Palace: wherever a scaffold went up, equipment was carried in and out, a glass carriage washed, a rug beaten, the pushing crowd was sure to gather. Every tailor or paperhanger carrying a green roll under his arm swept a veritable avalanche of sightseers along with him.47

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One might look again at the frontispiece of Diabelli and Kanne’s Prater melodrama with this in mind: for all that it reproduces the imposing visual codes of the Prater festival, such courtly spectacle was now being observed, and from a newly immersive urban perspective. It is tempting to invoke Michel de Certeau’s distinction between the lived experience of quotidian, improvisatory urban pedestrianism and the totalizing impulses and synoptic views of urban planning— a spatial language of control that the metaphorical speech acts of walking supposedly elude and undo.48 Certeau proposes that the primary rhetorical tropes of urban pedestrianism are synecdoche (part standing for whole) and asyndeton (the omission of usual syntactical connections between parts). Given that the Prater festival compositions depict urban space from a broadly pedestrian perspective, it should come as no surprise that these are by far the most noticeable rhetorical strategies at work in them. Both pieces deploy the collage techniques of melodrama to reassemble the urban landscape as a string of musical topoi or part- quotations— frequently juxtaposed without syntactically functional links— each one symbolizing a totality that is never fully presented or grasped. As Certeau puts it: Synecdoche replaces totalities by fragments (a less in the space of more); asyndeton disconnects them by eliminating the conjunctive or the consecutive (nothing in place of something). Synecdoche makes more dense: it amplifies the detail and miniaturizes the whole. Asyndeton cuts out: it undoes continuity and undercuts its plausibility.49

He could well have been describing the constructive habits of melodrama. In the Prater festival compositions, the prevalence of these rhetorical strategies crucially changes how the traditional languages of state ceremony can be communicated and understood. In the Diabelli-Kanne collaboration, for example, the rituals of the festival itself are prefaced by a long process of pedestrian congregating. The sun rises, and the people wend their way to the Prater from the mountains and woods, a Siciliano rhythm providing gestural continuity (again, this urban genre having recourse to pastoral tropes). Then the war songs take over, with their strident fanfares. From this point, festive cannon shots serve to interrupt each section and announce another. With a sweeping introduction, the monarchs appear, with their march tune. After this, D major turns to E flat, a sudden dominant seventh standing in for a more syntactically complete transition to a pious chorale-like Andante religioso— a synecdoche for the entire liturgical portion of the ceremony: “Suppress your

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cries of joy; keep the cannons’ mouths silent; for they kneel down before the altar in humility to give thanks to the Highest.”50 Cannon fire interrupts even this moment— this compressed, partially apprehended fragment of a more formal spectacle. One might expect that this narrative juncture would supply the curious scholar with the German “Hymn of Peace” that the crowd reportedly sang along with. But it is nowhere to be found— and neither does it feature in Gryowetz’s fantasy. There is something about the individualized, pedestrian perspective of these compositions, perhaps, that does not allow for such moments of collective expression to bind together the succession of fragments as they unfold: the city has become an open-ended lexicon of musical topoi. Gyrowetz’s piece, consistent with the usual trajectories of sentimental theater, displaces collective celebration until the very end. First of all comes a long C-major “Allgemeine Volksfreude,” which manages to incorporate a range of voices along the way (including the hurdy-gurdy man).51 But this turns out to be the preface to a more literal communal sing-along: the conclusion is a marchlike setting of a five-stanza “Allgemeines Volkslied von Göthe”— a Gelegenheitsgedicht about the Battle of Leipzig. Was strahlt auf der Berge nächtlichen Höhn wie heilige Opferflammen? Was umschwebt uns ahnend wie Geisterwehn, und sagt: uns sei heute was Großes geschehn; und führt uns feiernd zusammen? Wir feiern die herrliche Siegesnacht des Kampfes für Freiheit, die Leipziger Schlacht. What radiates on the nighttime peaks of the mountains Like holy sacrificial flames? What floats around us, foreboding like the ether of spirits And says: would that something great happen to us today, And bring us together in celebration? We celebrate the wondrous night of victory in the fight for freedom— the Battle of Leipzig!

Gyrowetz had met and corresponded with Goethe, and it is possible that the attribution of the verse here is accurate. This seems to be the earliest extant source of a poem that eventually found its way into books of German popular songs in the early nineteenth century, mostly unattributed.52 In any case, as with the crowd’s supposedly spontaneous rendition of the

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“Hymn of Peace” during the Prater festival, Gyrowetz’s composition ultimately turns from declamation to communal singing. It thus avoids complete fragmentation via the generic imperatives of theater. The metaphor of theater was one of the commonest ways in which contemporaries understood the opulent public displays of the Congress of Vienna— one that de la Garde evidently had in mind as he described the elaborate tableau of the Leipzig commemoration. The situation in Europe had changed “comme une décoration de théâtre,” wrote the plenipotentiary Dominique de Pradt in his Congress memoirs: “Vienne va devenir le noble théâtre du patriotisme.”53 And yet, while both Prater festival compositions drew attention to the theatricality of the event they describe, as well as the absorptive forms of spectatorship that it promoted, the more fractured organization of these pieces— and the immersive experience of urban space that this mode of organization sought to replicate— attenuated the centralized structure and unidirectional address of the Leipzig commemoration’s carefully choreographed political theater. The business of displaying authority and legitimacy via court spectacle was hardly new, after all; indeed, it was among the primary ceremonial modes of the ancien régime. The Prater festival compositions thus implied that, by the end of the Napoleonic Wars, this mode was being transformed by and dispersed among a new set of actors— an active group of “pedestrian” spectators, no longer only standing awestruck but also involved in producing a more personalized kind of theatrical excess. Indeed, to the extent that the Congress ceremonies elided court spectacle with the compelling civic theater of the French Revolutionary festival, their remediation in the form of the occasional melodrama seemed to make good on Rousseau’s politically charged conception of theater itself— as a genre in which “spectators are simultaneously the actors,” as Allan Bloom has put it.54 Certeau’s distinction between the “rhetoric” of the urban pedestrian and the top-down schemas of urban planning— a distinction he applied to a much later historical moment, of course— might thus help us to grasp an earlier historical process, in which the modern urban pedestrian appeared, complicating ancient traditions of court spectacle. Modern Viennese public space, conceived on this model, was becoming less the grand stage of dynastic politics and more the melodramatic hubbub of street-level experience. If the Battle of Leipzig and its Viennese anniversary witnessed the charged encounter of dynastic and “popular” politics— something that de la Garde’s description seems to register, with its multisensory dissolution of the Prater’s well-ordered and spectacular tableau— then the techniques of melodrama, as well as the routes by which melodrama-like genres cir-

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culated, occasioned a still more radical dispersal. While the Prater festival was an early instance of modern “official memory”— mediated primarily by formal and centralizing genres of commemoration such as the monument— the compositions that subsequently dispersed its message leave a trace of the dynamic and more widely distributed process through which a modern collective memory was produced and maintained. The back- and- forth between internal and external worlds characteristic of melodrama, both in its gestural language and its multiple modes of social existence— its journeys from sentimental inner life to outer sonic space, from the private home to the public stage— map out a new psycho-spatial territory. The melodrama as a stand-alone genre was slowly disappearing from the Viennese stage, but Vienna and her citizens were fast becoming melodramatic in themselves; melodrama receded as its aesthetic mode became ubiquitous. The Prater compositions by Gyrowetz and DiabelliKanne were not only descriptive of the Viennese cityscape, they were also to some extent continuous with it. The borderless genre of the occasional melodrama blended into the city itself.

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A f t erwo r d

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Looking Back at Rousseau’s Pygmalion Jacquel ine Wa eber

If we’ve moved past the need to reevaluate melodrama, we still need to reevaluate Rousseau’s melodramatic legacy. Since Peter Brooks’s The Melodramatic Imagination, melodrama studies have predominantly blossomed in theater, cinema, and media studies. Yet these studies often reveal a reified understanding of melodrama that takes the Brooksian conception for granted, as if the “structures of the Manichaean” he identifies were the alpha and omega of the melodramatic stuff. This approach neglects melodrama’s historical origins and raison d’être in pre-Revolutionary aesthetic discourses (with the exception of Diderot, the object of Brooks’s only in-depth foray into the Enlightenment period). However, the blame for neglect needs also to be shared by musicologists: so far, we too have failed to communicate to other disciplines the defining role of music in the shaping of the melodramatic mode, and the mystique of the score invoked by Richard Taruskin has probably also done much to scare nonmusic scholars discouraged by the technical requirements of musical analysis. Perhaps more fundamentally, our discipline has been slow to engage with a repertoire in which music appeared to be a means rather than a goal, thus falling short of the sacrosanct values of canonicity, individual genius, and all those other tropes of invention. In this afterword, I want to offer a final pause on Rousseau’s Pygmalion as the original “melodramatic model” and identify specific registers that trigger the melodramatic technique at a structural level. These registers, I argue, remain an identifiable invariant in melodramas of different genres, styles, and periods: they are not features solely idiosyncratic to Rousseau’s scène lyrique. Granted, the score of Pygmalion, written by the amateur musician Horace Coignet, who worked under Rousseau’s close supervision, is mediocre at best. When Pygmalion approaches the statue of Galatea, four bars of music painstakingly illustrate his pantomime: hesitantly, he starts to remove the veil, here rendered by an ascending chordal

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motive in quavers; then seized by fear, he moves away, coordinating his gestures with a frenzied descent of demisemiquavers. But what then to say of this proto mickey- mousing effect in Liszt’s melodramatic ballad “Lenore” (G. A. Bürger), with the quick arpeggio in the lower register of the piano as Death breaks the door lock of the cemetery gate? We could go on forever, describing the many clichés and commonplaces populating melodramatic scores: here, a tremolo! (depicting Lenore-as-Fidelio’s shivering in Fidelio); there, a religioso chorale-like melody for a moment of prayer, or anything related to a moment of deep absorption; and so forth. But what’s the point of perpetuating such musicological approaches that end too often as descriptive catalogues of musical effects? Some scholars have tried to bypass this by finding ways to redeem the melodramatic score: searching for recurrent motives, for instance, which has even led to the excessive claim that Benda was the precursor of leitmotiv.1 I do not aim to reenact here the orthodox musicologist condescending to consider scores such as Coignet’s (or even Liszt’s). What may help is to address these musical scores differently. We’ve learned such lessons from Emilio Sala, and from other authors in this volume. The melodramatic scores of La citerne, or those Viennese occasional and biblical melodramas, need to be valued for what they are: scores made of music that is “already composed,” that is to say, a network of musical topoi, in which quotations from preexisting scores can also be integrated. It often seems that the melodramatic score fetishizes the topos, and while its strength is its intelligibility, it can also too easily be reduced to the degré zéro of musical invention— hence the musicological contempt. The melodramatic score presupposes from the (informed) audience a strategy of decoding through listening in order to enjoy the play of references, to appreciate the quotations from other works or from generic idioms and tropes— what Jens Hesselager calls, in this volume, the “aural tags” at work in melodrama. This mechanism was already a defining feature of the Rousseauian melodrama, in which text, music, and image— the visual dimension acted out by pantomimic action— mutually reinforce each other in a highly pleonastic exchange. Rousseau’s Pygmalion evinces this pleasure of recognition (and pleonasm is a form of overrecognition) that originates in the theatrical reform sketched out by Diderot in his Discours sur la poésie dramatique (Discourse on Dramatic Poetry, 1758), where he promoted a paradigmatic model of the audience’s omniscience. “If the fate of the characters is unknown [to the audience], the spectator will not be able to take more interest in the action than the characters: but the interest will redouble for the spectator if he’s sufficiently informed.”2 Here as well we

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find a theoretical justification for these “techniques of sympathy” identified in early German melodrama. Diderot still resonates in Brooks’s theorization of melodrama’s urgent drive to display: “The desire to express all seems a fundamental characteristic of the melodramatic mode. Nothing is spared because nothing is left unsaid; the characters stand on stage and utter the unspeakable, give voice to their deepest feelings, dramatize through their heightened and polarized words and gestures the whole lesson of their relationship.”3 In La citerne, the audience, being overinformed, is able to identify the fake emotional posture of Picaros and Séraphine, who both pretend to be someone else and let each other believe in the supposed sincerity of their feelings. The reliance on convention can also be diverted for a comic outcome when melodrama decides to make fun of itself— something that the Brooksian perspective ignores. The same work, for example, mocks the supposedly “universal” intelligibility of pantomime, a claim that had already found its theorization in Rousseau’s Essay on the Origin of Languages (written from 1753 and mostly drafted by 1762) and its eloquent exposition in Pygmalion, with the careful description of attitudes that the sculptor must mimic during the instrumental ritournelles. Contrary to speech, gestural language does not depend as much on arbitrary conventions. Rousseau’s belief was that gestural language could literally nullify the distance between signifier and signified. Gesture could tell the object while being the object itself: “But the most energetic language is the one in which the sign has said everything before one speaks. . . . Thus one speaks to the eyes much more effectively than to the ears.”4 In La citerne, Picaros is unable to understand the mute pantomime of the slave: his words “I understand nothing” unveil the inscrutable agency of pantomime and erode this mythical conception of gesture as unmediated and universally legible. Yet at the same time, pantomime remained a favored discursive medium for melodrama, and the ironic display of an illegible pantomime in one melodrama could become a marker for the most authentic form of expression in another, as in Holcroft’s English translation of Pixerécourt’s Cœlina. And we could also refer to the most famous mimodramatic example of an operatic character relying on the melodramatic technique of silent eloquence: Fenella in Auber’s La muette de Portici. While Brooks has written at length on the importance of the trope of muteness in melodrama as a marker for victims of usurpation, one can go back to the melodramatic Ur-model of Pygmalion, a work that recontextualized at the theatrical level the observations from Condillac’s Traité des sensations on the origins of our senses, and of our selves (see Ellen

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Lockhart’s chapter in this volume). Rousseau’s Pygmalion promotes the inscription of gesture within declamation, and even the birth of language through gesture, as portrayed by Galatea’s animation and her first gestures through which she communicates by differentiating herself from the other statues, and then accomplishing the realization of herself through speech: “C’est moi, ce n’est plus moi.” Melodramatic muteness— or at least momentary muteness, when the actor is entirely taken by the realization of his silent pantomime— brings the body back into acting as an attempt to move away from logocentric classical French theater in which declamation was paramount. It also suggests a reembodiment of the operatic voice by stripping it from song but, in so doing, reestablishing all the more forcefully the nexus between body and voice.

• Rousseau’s Pygmalion is a work defined by its hybridity. It appears unwilling to decide upon its primary medium, and as such it could have offered a provocative answer to Lessing’s Laokoon; or, The Limitations of Poetry (1766). By the 1790s, following two decades in which Pygmalion had been unleashed through several imitations and variations all over Europe, there emerged the claim of its double origin: French through Rousseau, German through the “Benda model” itself adapted from Rousseau and followed by Benda’s contemporaries and successors. However, this holistic view has obfuscated the fact that the German model of melodrama was also rooted in a purely literary tradition, die Vortragskunst— the art of poetry read out loud— that originated in the eighteenth century in the circles of Klopstock and Gerstenberg.5 While I do read Rousseau’s Pygmalion as being primarily an antioperatic project that nevertheless reappropriated the structural frame of the operatic accompanied recitative, I now view the early German tradition of the Benda model as a product of the literary-poetic tradition of the Vortragskunst. I’m not arguing here that the early German melodrama had nothing to do with opera or with the import of Rousseau’s melodrama. In a nutshell, this French import added another layer to the German melodramatic tradition: after all, Benda too inaugurated his melodramatic period in 1775 as a manner to explore new paths in dramatic music outside opera, at a time when opera seria had been called into question— as in Italy— and the possibility of a German opera was also becoming increasingly debated. Benda was not estranged from those debates, having himself contributed to them by exposing his own views on recitative in his 1783 essay “Ueber das einfache Recitativ.” But the issue of melodrama’s generic hybridity became further

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complicated by such geographical dissemination. By the 1800s, the notion that melodrama originated from a French strand and a German one had already taken root, as shown by the debates on melodrama in England or, indeed, discussions focusing on French biblical melodrama in Vienna. Thus, the maintenance of a binary origin (French vs. German) has not been totally able to provide satisfactory answers to the developments of melodrama during the nineteenth century. These critiques of melodrama’s alien affiliations could be read as a projection of the discomfort caused by melodrama’s intrinsic hybridity. Indeed, hybridity is central to the current vocabulary invoked to describe the composite allure of melodrama: “multimedia” and “multimediated,” for instance, have become privileged terms in melodrama studies. In that respect, Lenardo und Blandine is an exceptional source, not so much because it is a multimediated work but because of the amount of documents and evidence we possess to explain its “multimediality” along eighteenth- century lines. Here, the historiography of early melodrama informs the conventional understanding that media plurality is a sine qua non condition of postmodern melodrama. It may also help to explain why— as the editors of this volume remind us, with reference to Rohan McWilliam— everything today is amenable to a “melodramatic dimension,” a statement that echoes Linda Williams’s view that melodrama has now become “the larger cultural mode driving the articulation of specific genres.”6 Indeed, melodrama is never fully centered but always located in interstices and intersections, within the extreme limits of one art about to overlap with another. Pygmalion was all about encouraging those confrontations between different artistic media. Confrontation, however, creates rupture; it breaks the narrative flow, which is reflected by the aposiopetic syntax that the melodramatic mode privileges. Rousseau’s libretto not only favors prose over versified declamation but also relies heavily on the novelty of the style entrecoupé (broken style, or style haletant, breathless style) that literally reduces to shreds the declamation through a heavy use of ellipsis, interjections and so forth. Style entrecoupé was intended to recreate the disorganized prosody of spoken delivery under emotional excess. In parallel to its use in Pygmalion, this stylistic idiom had become a hallmark of the drame larmoyant epitomized by Diderot, after having invaded the novel around the 1760s, its prime example being Rousseau’s Julie; ou, La nouvelle Héloïse. The style entrecoupé, adapted into other languages, remains highly identifiable in Bursay’s L’Orfeo, scena lirica (Venice, 1774), in the librettos for Benda’s Ariadne auf Naxos (Brandes) and Medea (Gotter), and of course in Blandine’s “mad scene” from Lenardo und Blandine: in this last example, Goez’s “bourgeois frenzy” is clearly indebted to the drame bourgeois that

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had reached Germany through Lessing’s theater and his own translations of Diderot. By decentering declamation, the style entrecoupé transforms speech into a physical act, following another one of Diderot’s principles: “We speak too much in our theater; and, consequently, our actors don’t act enough.”7 This style of performance is an eighteenth- century version of the melodramatic invariant that privileges the ellipsis, creating ruptures and stasis, the latter magnified by the theatrical tableau that freezes momentarily the continuous flow of action, or by the monologue as an exploration of the inner conflict of a psyche. The narrative of a monologue is never linear: a more fitting figure would be that of the circle, as the monologue is all about introspection, about recollection, about pausing the action for flashbacks. The “occasional melodramas” discussed by Nicholas Mathew and Matthew Head in this volume emphasize such a mnemonic dimension, in which the linearity of the narration in present time— the action “right now”— is constantly threatened by the eruption of recollection and other introspective moments. Early melodrama’s fascination with the exteriorization of the passions— witnessed in Blandine’s mad scene or Medea’s murderous furor— found fresh purpose after the Revolution: most famously it went through a process of moralization, as evinced in the legibility of virtue promoted in the Pixerécourtian model; elsewhere the characteristic drive to display became a marker for the intrusion of extreme pathos and the uncanny, from mad scenes to supernatural events. If the elliptical treatment of the melodramatic monologue, through declamation and acting, aims to put the soul outside the body, crystallized and reified in the tableau, ellipsis also affects the melodramatic structure at a higher level. As a reaction against the Aristotelian norms of theater— especially the unity of time and space— melodrama encourages the multiplication, and thus the opposition, of diegetic spaces and temporalities. The trope resurfaces in Weigl’s opera Die Schweizer Familie, in which this melodramatic register is associated with “extreme interiority and naturalistic exteriority” (to quote Mathew’s essay in this volume): the use of a diegetic “source music,” a shepherd’s pipe, creates an ambiguous oscillation between the external reality and another diegetic dimension marked by introspection. This source music, with its capacity to delineate conflicting diegetic spaces, strikingly announces another shepherd’s pipe, the one resonating in the Alps in Schumann’s dramatic ballad Manfred on Byron’s poem. The pipe functions as an aural marker of Manfred’s external reality quickly dissolving into his own inner monologic world, itself colliding with Arimanes’s enchanted realm.8 Nineteenth-century melodramas offer a long list of such examples where a source music is summoned within the

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external, objective reality of the fiction in order to trigger, or to dissipate, a moment of subjectivity corresponding to a crisis, an inner monologic turmoil, or an irrational, supernatural event, as in the final melodrama from Beethoven’s stage music for Goethe’s Egmont. Klärchen’s phantasmagorical appearance in Egmont’s cell is musically accompanied by strings and winds in the high register— a topos of a dreamlike music— while in the outside space, remaining unseen onstage since the whole scene takes place in Egmont’s cell, the source music of the Spanish soldiers’ drumrolls resonates, as a sinister aural marker of his approaching execution. Egmont’s cell is exemplary of those dark and contained “spaces of incarceration” (as discussed by Hesselager) that nevertheless make us aware of their juxtaposition with an outside space, left unseen, except for its aural trace. In early melodrama, a quick glance at the score reveals its elliptic construction— not dissimilar to a comic strip. Rarely are declamation and music superimposed, except in the most extreme moments of pathos. The melodramatic score of Pygmalion is already emblematic of this sequential alternation between declamation, pantomimic indications, and instrumental sequences: such a rigid principle of alternation acts as a metaphor of music’s expressive agency, which is always on the brink of becoming overtly dominant— and which needs to be restrained in brief ritournelles that only become intelligible in relation to other sequences, be they spoken or gestural. The sequential alternation channels these different modes of expression through discrete units organized along a paratactic mode in a mise-en-scène of textual, musical, and gestural signifiers. The fractured rhetorics of melodrama thrive in such “profound disjointedness,” as Lockhart expresses it, often in the form of what Mathew calls “collage techniques.” Thus the importance of the notion of frame that Thomas Betzwieser discusses in this volume in the case of Lenardo und Blandine, in which music assumes a “framing function” for “passionate expressions and emotional gestures in order to make the horror bearable.” The rise of melodrama, in the end, may just have been about this: a fear of the sign, which we can once more relate to Rousseau’s Pygmalion in which the melodramatic excess of melos is contained within the framing structure imposed by sequential alternation that itself regulates the production of logos.9 Early melodrama is the outcome of a period that saw the most intense production of signs, which led to various attempts at systematic codifications able to control the semiotic overabundance: hence the many dictionaries, encyclopedias, and other taxonomic catalogues published during the Enlightenment, to which must be added the renewed interest in historical linguistics, the search for the origin of

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languages and other attempts to reconstruct archaeologies of gestures. The carefully delineated framing through brief units for the music, declamation, and pantomime keeps at bay music’s threatening power and prevents the intermingling of melos and logos— the curse of opera. Seen in this light, melodrama is a response to that fear of semiotic overabundance that obsessed Rousseau— a conception that sits at odds with Brooks, for whom melodrama “tends toward total theatre, its signs projected, sequentially or simultaneously, on several planes.”10 Moreover, in Brooks’s understanding of post-Revolutionary melodrama, the sign’s threatening versatility has been replaced by its supposed moral valence. In the end, the stigma of hybridity (or heterogeneity, or impurity) so often applied to melodrama is not its flaw but its very essence, and this flaw is nothing else than a coded word for the overwhelming presence of signs that characterizes the melodramatic mode.

Acknowledgments

Like many an early melodrama, this volume is the result of exchanges, journeys, and adaptations. Two groups of colleagues helped to guide us along the way: at King’s College London, the “Music in London, 1800– 1851” project led by Roger Parker and funded by the European Research Council; and at the University of Warwick, the “French Theatre of the Napoleonic Era” project led by Katherine Astbury and funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. So, to Roger and Kate— and to the generous EU and UK taxpayers— we extend a heartfelt “Thanks!” Likewise, to the members of these projects who suffered and celebrated with us in equal measure— James Grande, Oskar Cox Jensen, Angela Waplington, Clare Siviter, and Devon Cox— we are, for a good while yet, in your debt. The clearest point of origin for this book was a conference held at King’s College London in March 2014, which involved the input, whether as chair or presenter, of several people whose contributions helped to shape the subsequent volume: Jacky Bratton, Matthew Buckley, David Charlton, David Meyer, Kate Newey, Michael Pisani, Thomas Radecke, Lucio Tufano, and Carolyn Williams all deserve a mention, and we look forward to hearing their views on the finished book. (Thanks also to Michael Gamer, who joined us for a reading group further down the line.) One of the highlights of the 2014 conference was a one- day performance workshop centred on Pixerécourt’s La forteresse de Danube and its English translation. This event drew on considerable directorial talents (and no less considerable patience) of Gilli Bush-Bailey as well as the enthusiasm of our bemused actors from the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, who attempted to unlearn naturalism with good humor. We all benefited immensely from the musical skill and cool head of Mark Austin, who conducted the orchestra, played the piano, and edited the recently reconstructed archival score as he went along. This workshop

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informed our understanding of the melodramatic technique, and of music-movement relationships, in ways that became central to our thinking about expressive culture in this period more broadly. Special thanks must go to our editorial team at Chicago, Marta Tonegutti and Evan White, who have been a constant source of sage advice and polite reminders. And to our contributors— whose persistence and flair has made the long gestation of the volume more bearable, and the end result so much more rewarding.

Notes

Chapter 1 1. Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, rev. ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), 109. 2. Elaine Hadley’s Melodramatic Tactics, which addresses “theatricalized dissent” in nineteenth- century England, is only one of the best- known examples of this phenomenon: identifying a list of characteristic features, based on the stage plays and printed stories of the period in question, Hadley concludes that “a version of the ‘melodramatic’ seems to have served as a behavioural and expressive model for several generations of English people.” The tendency is not restricted to writing about England. Analyzing Robespierre’s writings, David Andress concludes that “the lived revolutionary experience of Robespierre and his fellows . . . is best described as ‘melodramatic’ in its intensity.” See Elaine Hadley, Melodramatic Tactics: Theatricalized Dissent in the English Marketplace, 1800–1885 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), 3; David Andress, “Living the Revolutionary Melodrama: Robespierre’s Sensibility and the Construction of Political Commitment in the French Revolution,” Representations 114, no. 1 (2011): 103–28, here 122. 3. Rohan McWilliam, “Melodrama and the Historians,” Radical History Review 78 (2000): 57–84, here 58. 4. Emilio Sala used the verb sonoriser in “Mélodrame: Définitions et metamorphoses d’un genre quasi-opératique,” Revue de musicologie 84, no. 2 (1998): 235–46, here 243. Jens Hesselager later echoed Sala’s phrase in “Sonorizing Melodramatic Stage Directions: ‘Reflexive Performance’ as a Way of Approaching NineteenthCentury French Melodrama,” Nordic Theater Studies 23 (2011): 20–30. 5. Two of the most cogent attempts to disentangle the threads are Sala’s “Mélodrame: Définitions et metamorphoses d’un genre quasi-opératique” and the introduction to Jacqueline Waeber’s En musique dans le texte: Le mélodrame, de Rousseau à Schoenberg (Paris: Van Dieren, 2005). 6. Ellen Lockhart has discussed the pan-European reception of Pygmalion in “Pimmalione: Rousseau and the Melodramatisation of Italian Opera,” Cambridge Opera Journal 26, no. 1 (2014): 1–39. 7. For more on this unique score, see Jacqueline Waeber, “ ‘J’ai imaginé un genre de drame’: Une réflexion sur la partition musicale du mélodrame de Pygmalion,” Schweizer Jahrbuch für Musikwissenschaft 18 (1998): 147–79. 8. For more on the German tradition, see chap. 2, “Lieux terribles et femmes

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perdues,” in Waeber, En musique dans le texte, 51–104, and chap. 2, “Monodrama,” in Kirsten Gramm Holmström, Monodrama, Attitudes, Tableaux Vivants: Studies on Some Trends of Theatrical Fashion, 1770–1815 (Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell, 1967), 40–109. 9. See Katherine Astbury, “Music in Pixérécourt’s Early Melodramas,” in Melodramatic Voices: Understanding Music Drama, ed. Sarah Hibberd (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011), 15–26; and Sarah Hibberd and Nanette Nielsen, “Music in Melodrama: ‘The Burden of Ineffable Expression’?” Nineteenth Century Theater and Film 29, no. 2 (2002): 30–39. 10. Peter Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama, and the Mode of Excess, rev. ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), esp. xiii, 36, 54. 11. This is not to say that his study has not also been supplemented by others paying closer attention to the details of artistic practice and practitioners. Exploring a legal dispute of 1786 concerning a French nobleman and former army officer, the comte de Sanois, Sarah Maza has described a narrative of the count’s life as “a pure example of the genre Peter Brooks has called the ‘mode of excess.’ ” However, she is quick to trace the origins of melodramatic writing, “with its hyperbolic language, strong emotions, and moral polarities,” to dramatic forms in the mid-eighteenth century. This sense of historical specificity in making links between art forms, and making space for the political concerns of those writing in one mode, style, or genre as opposed to any other, makes a strong case for the cross-fertilization of historical and cultural inquiry, music included. See Maza, “Domestic Melodrama as Political Ideology: The Case of the Comte de Sanois,” American Historical Review 94 (1989): 1249–64. 12. The term comes from Kofi Agawu’s rehabilitation of “sameness” in Representing African Music: Postcolonial Notes, Queries, Positions (London: Routledge, 2003), 171: “What I am arguing for . . . is not sameness, but the presumption of sameness. . . . Indeed, such presumption guarantees an ethical motivation. . . . Strategic sameness declares an interest in political and ethical actions by reserving judgement for the end of a proceeding, not its beginning.” Although the political and ethical contexts may be different, the analytical implications remain valid, not least because melodramatic historiography bears the scars of aesthetic hierarchies. 13. See Jeffrey Cox, “Melodrama, Monodrama and the Forms of Romantic Tragic Drama,” in Within the Dramatic Spectrum, ed. Kalerisa V. Hartigan (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1986), 20–29; and A. Dwight Culler, “Monodrama and the Dramatic Monologue,” PMLA 90, no. 3 (1975): 366–85. 14. Among the most significant publications are Emilio Sala, L’opera senza canto: Il mélo romantico e l’invenzione della colonna sonora (Venice: Marsilio, 1995); Waeber, En musique dans le texte; Sarah Hibberd, ed., Melodramatic Voices: Understanding Music Drama (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011); and Michael Pisani, Music for the Melodramatic Theatre in Nineteenth-Century London and New York (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2014). 15. One of the earliest examples is Edgar Istel, Die Entstehung des deutschen Melodramas (Berlin and Leipzig: Schuster & Loeffler, 1906). One of the more influential texts is Jan van der Veen, Le mélodrame musical de Rousseau au romantisme, ses aspects historiques et stylistiques (The Hague: M. Nijhoff, 1955). One exception, in

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the form of an early French study of boulevard melodrama is Paul Ginisty, Le mélodrame (Paris: Louis-Michaud, 1910). 16. See, for example, Gabrielle Hyslop, “Deviant and Dangerous Behavior: Women in Melodrama,” Journal of Popular Culture 19 (1985): 65– 77; James Redmond, ed., Melodrama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); Barbara T. Cooper, “Up in Arms: Defending the Patriarchy in Pixérécourt’s Charles le Téméraire,” Symposium 47 (1993): 171– 87; Michael Hays and Anastasia Nikolopoulou, eds., Melodrama: The Cultural Emergence of a Genre (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996); and David Worrall, “Artisan Melodrama and the Plebeian Public Sphere: The Political Culture of Drury Lane and Its Environs, 1797–1830,” Studies in Romanticism 39, no. 2 (2000): 213–27. 17. Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination, xii. 18. It has, of course, been a long-standing criticism of Brooks’s book that despite emphasizing the overlapping of multiple media as fundamental to the genre of boulevard melodrama, he almost entirely neglected musical material. Brooks implicitly responded to this omission in his later essay “Body and Voice in Melodrama and Opera,” in Siren Songs: Representations of Gender and Sexuality in Opera, ed. Mary Ann Smart (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 118–34. 19. Sala’s L’opera senza canto and and Pisani’s Music for the Melodramatic Theater are important in this regard. The new editions of Pixerécourt’s melodramas published by Classiques Garnier under the direction of Roxane Martin include the extant musical scores from Parisian premieres. 20. See Sala, L’opera senza canto; Hibberd and Nielsen, “Music in Melodrama”; Hesselager, “Sonorizing Melodramatic Stage Directions”; Astbury, “Music in Pixerécourt’s Early Melodramas”; and Pisani, Music for the Melodramatic Theatre. 21. For an account of the relationship between stage and screen melodrama, see Ben Singer, Melodrama and Modernity: Early Sensational Cinema and Its Contexts (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001). 22. The most important example here is Wolfgang Schimpf, Lyrisches Theater: Das Melodrama des 18. Jahrhunderts (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1988). Also important are two dissertations from the University of Vienna— L. Pointner, “Das Drei-, Zwei- und Einpersonenstück” (1929) and I. Raffelsberger, “Das Monodrama in der deutschen Literatur des 18. Jahrhunderts” (1955)— as well as Sybille Demmer, Untersuchungen zu Form und Geschichte des Monodramas (Cologne and Vienna: Böhlau, 1982). 23. Christine Heyter-Rauland, “Das ‘andere’ Melodrama: Notizen über eine nahezu unbekannte Gattung,” in Untersuchungen zu Musikbeziehungen zwischen Mannheim, Böhmen und Mähren im späten 18. und frühen 19. Jahrhundert, ed. Christine Heyter-Rauland and Christoph-Hellmut Mahling (Mainz: B. Schott’s Söhne, 1993). 24. One isolated example of Anglophone interest in the German melodramatic tradition is Culler’s “Monodrama and the Dramatic Monologue,” which uncovers English translations and imitations of German monodramas in the early nineteenth century. Culler considers these a possible influence on the later dramatic monologues of Browning and Tennyson but goes on to damn his own topic with the faintest of praise, referring to “a minor but rather interesting phase of nineteenthcentury literary history” (369). 25. “On peut dire que vers 1800 le mélodrame a presque cessé d’intéresser l’his-

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toire musicale; dès lors le genre appartient plutôt à l’histoire littéraire.” Veen’s statement rests on the tailing off of the composition of new German melodramas and the lateness of French Rousseau derivations such as Franz Beck’s Pandora of 1789 (Le mélodrame musical de Rousseau, 42–45). 26. Pisani has pointed out, for example, that the British Library holds no melodrama scores published after 1826. See his Music for the Melodrama Theater, 62–63. 27. Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination, 217n14 (from p. 87). 28. Schimpf, Lyrisches Theater, 47n142. 29. Schimpf gives an appendix of texts and their settings. See ibid., 200–243. 30. Thomas Busby, A Complete Dictionary of Music, 2nd ed. (London: Gillet, 1806), no page numbers. Quoted in Pisani, Music for the Melodramatic Theatre, 42. 31. A!A!A! [Abel Hugo, Armand Malitourne, and Jean-Joseph Ader], Traité du mélodrame (Paris: Delaunay, Pélicier & Plancher, 1817), esp. chap. 14, “de la Musique.” 32. “. . . so wär’ es eine komplette Parodie des Melodrama’s gewesen, wie sie zur Zeit, da Benda bei uns mit seiner Meisterhaften Ariadne Epoche machte, auf einem kleinen Winkeltheater in Berlin zu sehen war.” Johann Friedrich Reichardt, Vertraute Briefe aus Paris geschrieben in den Jahren 1802 und 1803, vol. 2 (Hamburg: B. G. Hoffmann, 1804), 135. 33. “Das sogenannte Melodrame der Franzosen ist von dem der Teutschen himmelweit verschieden.” [Anon.], “Ueber das Melodrame der Franzosen, und das Théâtre de l’Ambigu Comique in Paris.— Das große Ballet,” London und Paris 23 (1810): 115–24 , here 115. 34. “Unter Melodrama versteht man nicht, wie bei uns, ein Schauspiel, worin Monologe mit Instrumental-musik in den Pausen abwechseln, sondern wo in emphatischer Prosa irgend etwas Wunderbares, Abenteuerliches, oder auch sinnliche Handlungen nebst den dazu gehörigen Decorationen und Aufzügen zur Schau gebracht bauen; den leider sind die meisten Melodramen bis zur Abgeschmacktheit roh, und gleichsam Fehlgeburten des Romantischen.” August Wilhelm von Schlegel, “Lecture 24,” in Ueber dramatische Kunst und Literatur, vol. 2 (Leipzig: Weidmann’sche Buchhandlung, 1846), 147. 35. Armand Charlemagne, Le mélodrame aux boulevards (Paris: Imprimerie de la rue Beaurepaire, 1809), 14. The terms old and new were also used by the self-styled arbiter of worthy musical culture Adolph Bernhard Marx, who in 1828 repeated the exercise of delineating all the musico-theatrical genres for his own newspaper, the Berliner allgemeine musikalische Zeitung. This time old melodrama and new melodrama were separate categories, with the latter presented in particularly scathing terms: its “diverse whole is straddled by music in all its modes of meaning,” and for Marx “Schlegel’s severe statement about today’s melodrama as an absurdity and miscarriage of Romanticism . . . featuring no body, only repugnantly scattered limbs— appears rather too mild.” A. B. Marx, “Uebersicht der verschiednen wesentlichen Gattungen des musikalischen Drama,” Berliner allgemeine musikalische Zeitung 25 (18 June 1828): 195–97. 36. Christopher Smith, for instance, draws a line between the two traditions: “Though Melodrama was another contemporary name for the form, it will be best to avoid it here because the term is associated with sensational popular theater, the

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character of which was influenced, but by no means entirely determined, by late eighteenth-century developments in music.” Smith, “The Monodramatic Experiment,” Comparative Critical Studies 5, no. 1 (2008): 21–33, here 25. 37. Sarah Hibberd, “ ‘Si l’orchestre seul chantait’: Melodramatic Voices in Chelard’s Macbeth (1827),” in Melodramatic Voices, ed. Sarah Hibberd (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011), 85–102. 38. Albert Gier, for example, has argued that Schiller’s historical dramas were received as akin to melodramas in Paris. Gier, “Zwischen Tragödie und Melodram: Schillers Theater im Frankreich des frühen 19. Jahrhunderts am Beispiel der Wilhelm Tell-Bearbeitungen,” in Musik und Theater um 1800: Konzeptionen— Aufführungspraxis— Rezeption, ed. Detlef Altenburg and Beate Agnes Schmidt (Sinzig: Studiopunkt-Verlag, 2012), 255–69. 39. Waeber, En musique dans le texte, 112. 40. Vossische Zeitung, 19 March 1808. Voltaire’s quip comes from the preface to his 1736 comedy L’enfant prodigue. 41. “Ueber das Melodrame der Franzosen, und das Théâtre de l’Ambigu Comique in Paris,” London und Paris 23 (1810): 117–19. “Begebenheiten müssen sich auf Begebenheiten häufen, Wunder über Wunder geschehen, Waffen müssen klingen, Palläste einstürzen oder der Wuth der Flammen Preis gegeben warden . . . wenn man sie einladet zu dem, was ewig schön bleiben wird, zurück zu kehren, und die Gattung des Melodrama’s von der Bühne vertilgen zu helfen, so sagen sie zu ihrer Vertheidiung mit Voltaire: Tous les genres sont bons hors le genre ennuyeux.” (Incidents upon incidents must accumulate, wonder upon wonder, weapons must sound, palaces must collapse or be overwhelmed by the fury of the flames, . . . if one invites them [the audience] to return to what remains eternally beautiful, and to help to exterminate the genre of Melodrama from the stage, they say to their defence together with Voltaire: All the genres are good except the boring ones.) After attending La citerne, Meyerbeer noted on 6 July 1815 in his diary: “Ein Gewebe von Unwahrscheinlichkeiten u. Trivialitäten; demohnerachtet wird das Interesse bis zum letzten Augenblick erhalten.” (“A fabric of improbabilities and trivialities; that aside, one’s interest is preserved until the last moment.”) Quoted in HeyterRauland, “Das ‘andere’ Melodrama,” 307. 42. In 1807, for example, Benda’s score to a translation of Rousseau’s Pygmalion had been performed in the city; two years before that, his Ariadne auf Naxos. 43. See Goethe’s 1778 satirical play Der Triumph der Empfindsamkeit. For Johann Martin Miller, too, a “conversation with oneself” couldn’t be more boring than Rousseau’s Pygmalion, which he saw in Weimar in 1774 with Schweitzer’s music (letter dated 2 November 1774 to Johann Heinrich Voß, cited in Laurenz Lütteken, Das Monologische als Denkform in der Musik zwischen 1760 und 1785 [Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1998], 310. See also a review of “Sapho, ein Melodrama, nebst andern Gedichten von J. F. H-b-r” in the Allgemeine deutsche Bibliothek 108, no. 1 (1792): 138: “Nach Brandes Ariadne und Gotters Medea hat mancher unglücklicher Nachahmer einige Seiten voll leerer Deklamationen und langweiliger Klagen ein Melodrama genannt.” (After Brandes’s Ariadne und Gotter’s Medea, many an unfortunate imitator has called a few pages full of empty declamations and boring laments a “melodrama.”)

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44. Haude- und Spenersche Zeitung, 19 March 1808. 45. Annegret Fauser and Mark Everist, eds., Music, Theater, and Cultural Transfer: Paris, 1830–1914 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 3. 46. Christina Fuhrmann, Foreign Opera at the London Playhouses: From Mozart to Bellini (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015). 47. Michael Werner and Bénédicte Zimmermann, “Penser l’histoire croisée: Entre empirie et réflexivité,” Annales: Histoire, Sciences Sociales 58, no. 1 (2003): 7–36. An English-language summary of the same ideas is given in Werner and Zimmermann, “Beyond Comparison: Histoire Croisée and the Challenge of Reflexivity,” History and Theory 45 (February 2006): 30–50. We might also note another book edited by Werner, on the concert life of the long nineteenth century: Hans Erich Bödeker, Patrice Veit, and Michael Werner, eds., Le concert et son public: Mutations de la vie musicale en Europe de 1780 à 1914 (France, Allemagne, Angleterre) (Paris: Éditions de la Maison des sciences de l’homme, 2002). 48. Robin Cohen, “Migration in Europe, 1800–1950,” in The Cambridge Survey of World Migration, ed. Robin Cohen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 123–41, here 123. 49. See Theodore Fenner, Opera in London: Views of the Press, 1785–1830 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1994), 248. 50. Devon Cox, “Stages of Captivity: Napoleonic Prisoners- of-War and their Theatricals, 1808–1814” (PhD diss., University of Warwick, in progress). 51. See F. Anne M. R. Jarvis, “German Musicians in London, c. 1750–c. 1850,” in Migration and Transfer from Germany to Britain, 1660–1914, eds. Stefan Manz, Margrit Schulte Beerbühl, and John R. Davis (Munich: K. G. Saur, 2007), 37–48. 52. Margrit Schulte Beerbühl, The Forgotten Majority: German Merchants in London, Naturalization, and Global Trade, 1660–1815, trans. Cynthia Klohr (New York: Berghahn, 2015), 22. See also Panikos Panayi, German Immigrants in Britain during the 19th Century, 1815–1914 (Oxford: Berg, 1995). 53. Eumelistes, “On the Origin of the Melodrama, with Biographical Notices and Anecdotes Relating to the Composer Benda, Its Inventor,” Repository of Arts, Literature, Fashion, Politics 8, no. 43 ( July 1812): 6–11, here 6–7. 54. See Jane Moody, Illegitimate Theatre in London, 1770–1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). 55. Frederick Burwick, British Drama of the Industrial Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 7. 56. For accounts of Parisian theatrical expansion in this period, see John McCormick, Popular Theatres of Nineteenth-Century France (London: Routledge, 1993); and F. W. J. Hemmings, Theatre and State in France, 1760–1905 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). 57. See, for example, Shearer West, “Manufacturing Spectacle” in The Oxford Handbook of the Georgian Theater, 1737–1832, ed. Julia Swindells and David Francis Taylor (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 286–303. 58. Moody, Illegitimate Theatre, 63–68. 59. Johann August Eberhard, “An den Verfasser des Aufsatzes Pygmalion,” Jahrbücher der preußischen Monarchie 2 (1798): 151–52. 60. Daniel Eschkötter, Bettine Menke, and Armin Schäfer, eds., Das Melodram: Ein Medienbastard (Berlin: Theater der Zeit, 2013).

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61. Pisani actually compares Thomas Busby’s score for A Tale of Mystery with Benda’s scores on account of its through-composed melodramatic writing. See Music for the Melodramatic Theater, 59. 62. “Theatre Royal, Covent Garden,” Monthly Mirror 2 (December 1807): 441. 63. Walter Scott, “Remarks on English Opera and Farce,” in The Modern British Drama in Five Volumes (London: William Miller, 1811), 5:iv. 64. Emanuele Senici, “Genre,” in The Oxford Handbook to Opera, ed. Helen Greenwald (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 33–52, here 41–43. 65. Nicholas Mathew, Political Beethoven (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), esp. chap. 1, “Music between Myth and History,” 17–58. 66. The author and stage manager Richard LeGalliene, in his memoirs from 1900, looked back on melodrama as “a play which combines the intensity of tragedy with the construction of farce and the dénouement of a fairy-tale.” Quoted in Pisani, Music for the Melodramatic Theatre, 43. Thus in literary terms, too, the hybridity of melodrama is identified by the generic markers of other genres. 67. A!A!A!, Traité du mélodrame, 54–55. 68. The score for Robinson Crusoé is held in Lille but marked as being by Piccinni (that is, a Parisian rather than a local version); the presence of Gérardin-Lacour’s music from the Paris premiere of La femme à deux maris in the Lille score for Crusoé would support the idea that this score did originate in Paris. 69. At the performance of Ariadne in 1805, for example, the tone paintings of lions and heartbeats, which originally “delighted” audiences, were now considered to be “petty games.” See Haude- und Spenersche Zeitung, 24 December 1805: “Die Tongemälde, welche Löwengebrüll, Herzklopfen u. dergl. figürlich nachzuahmen streben, die bei ihrer ersten Erscheinung entzückten, sieht ein philosophisches berichtigtes Urtheil als kleinliche Spielereien an.” 70. Haude- und Spenersche Zeitung, 3 March 1808,. 71. Haude- und Spenersche Zeitung, 27 February 1808. 72. Haude- und Spenersche Zeitung, 17 March 1808. 73. [Anon], “[‘M’], ‘Pygmalion von Rousseau, Benda und Iffland,” Jahrbücher der preußischen Monarchie 1 (1798): 76. 74. Johann August Eberhard, “An den Verfasser des Aufsatzes Pygmalion,” Jahrbücher der preußischen Monarchie 2 (1798): 150. 75. For a musicological treatment of this phenomenon in nineteenth-century Italian opera, see Mary Ann Smart’s Mimomania: Music and Gesture in NineteenthCentury Opera (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004).

Chapter 2 1. Peter Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama, and the Mode of Excess, rev. ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), 16; Richard Taruskin, The Oxford History of Western Music, vol. 2, Music in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 641. 2. On Rousseau’s Pygmalion, in addition to the sources cited below, see Horace Coignet, “Particularités sur J. J. Rousseau pendant le séjour qu’il fit à Lyon en 1770,” in Oeuvres inédites de Rousseau, vol. 1, ed. V.D. de Musset-Pathay (Paris, 1825), 461–

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72; Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Dichtung und Warheit, ed. K. D. Mutter (Frankfurt am Main: Deutsche Klassiker, 1986), 533–34, 942; Castil-Blaze, Molière musicien (Paris, 1852), 423– 26; Albert Jansen, Jean- Jacques Rousseau als Musiker (Berlin: Reimer, 1884); Jan van der Veen, Le mélodrame de Rousseau au Romantisme (The Hague: M. Nijhoff, 1955); J. L. Carr, “Pygmalion and the Philosophes: The Animated Statue in Eighteenth-Century France,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 23, no. 3/4 (1960): 239–55; S. M. Weber, “The Aesthetics of Rousseau’s Pygmalion,” MLN 83 (1968): 900–918; Henriette Beese, “Galathée à l’origine des langues: Comments on Rousseau’s Pygmalion as a Lyric Drama,” MLN 93 (1978): 839– 51; and Ivana Rentsch, “Musik als leidenschaftlicher Augenblick: Jean-Jacques Rousseau, das ‘Ballet en action’ und die Ästhetik des frühen Melodramas,” Archiv für Musikwissenschaft 66, no. 2 (2009): 93–109. 3. Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination, 21. 4. Ibid., 201, 21. 5. See, for instance, the Traité du melodrama (Paris: Delauney, Pélicier & Plancher, 1817), attributed to A!A!A! 6. See Katherine Astbury, “Music in Pixerécourt’s Early Melodramas,” in Melodramatic Voices: Understanding Music Drama, ed. Sarah Hibberd (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011), 15–26; and esp. Emilio Sala, “Mélodrame: Définitions et métamorphoses d’un genre quasi-opératique,” Revue de musicologie 84, no. 2 (1998): 235–46. 7. The syncretic ambitions of the present history would be impossible without musicology published during the last two decades in German, French, and Italian: in particular Ulrike Küster, Das Melodram: Zum ästhetikgeschichtlichen Zusammenhang von Dichtung und Musik im 18. Jahrhundert (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1994); Christiane Plank, Die melodramatische Szene in der Oper des 19. Jahrhunderts: Eine musikdramatische Ausdrucksform (Munich: Herbert Utz, 2005); Emilio Sala, “La carriera di Pigmalione; ovvero, Nascita e prime metamorfosi del mélodrame,” in Drammaturgia musicale veneta, vol. 22, Rousseau- Coignet ‘Pygmalion’; Sografi-Cimador ‘Pimmalione’ (Milan: Ricordi, 1996), ix–lxxvii; Jacqueline Waeber, En musique dans le texte: Le mélodrame, de Rousseau a Schoenberg (Paris: Van Dieren, 2005); Lucio Tufano, “La ricezione italiana del melologo à la Rousseau e la Pandora di Alessandro Pepoli,” in D’une scène à l’autre: L’opéra italien en Europe, vol. 2, La musique à l’épreuve du théâtre, ed. Damien Colas and Alessandro di Profio (Wavre: Mardaga, 2009), 125–40; and Lucio Tufano, “Teatro musicale e massoneria: Appunti sulla diffusione del melologo a Napoli (1773–1792),” in Napoli 1799 fra storia e storiografia: Atti del convegno internazionale, Napoli, 21–24 gennaio 1999, ed. Anna Maria Rao (Naples: Vivarium, 2002), 597–631. A valuable new English-language source is Michael Pisani, Music for the Melodramatic Theatre in Nineteenth-Century London and New York (Iowa: University of Iowa Press, 2014). On the early reception of Pygmalion on the Italian peninsula, see also my Animation, Plasticity, and Music in Italy, 1770–1830 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2017), esp. chap. 2. 8. The work merits a brief mention in Tufano, “La ricezione italiana del melologo,” 130–31, 139. The only surviving copy of the libretto is held at the Biblioteca Nazionale Braidense in Milan; it binds the Italian and French texts together in a single edition. 9. “You recently admired a masterpiece; you deigned to enjoy the efforts I made to preserve its beauties. You desired another scene of this genre; I present to you this one, of Orpheus. . . . There can be found no resemblance between the immor-

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tal work of the celebrated Rousseau of Geneva and this poor sketch, other than of genre.” (Voi avete testè ammirato un capo d’opera; vi degnaste di aggradire i sforzi da me fatti per non alterarne le bellezze. Voi desideraste un’altra Scena di simil genere; io vi presento quella di Orfeo. . . . Trà l’immortale Opera del celebre Rousseau di Ginevra, e questo debole abbozzo altra rassomiglianza non può infatti trovarsi che quella del genere.) Preface by “L’autore, ed attore,” L. B., Orphée/Orfeo, scena lirica (Venice, 1774). 10. A handwritten note on the front page is illegible on this point, but it does note that Orfeo was done “a guisa d’intermezzo.” 11. Jean-Baptiste Dubois [as J. B. D. B.], “Du mélodrame en général, & de celui d’Ariane en particulier,” preface to Ariane, abandonnée: Mélodrame, imité de l’allemand (Paris: Brunet, 1781). 12. Emilio Sala, L’opera senza canto: Il mélo romantico e l’invenzione della colonna sonora (Venice: Marsilio, 1995), xx. 13. Take, for instance, the account of Ferdinando Galiani, who witnessed the Neapolitan premiere: “This novelty divided the public. Some were very much struck by the statue, because in reality it was a certain mademoiselle Tessier, who, though not beautiful, has a very interesting body. The rest were bored.” Galiani, Correspondances, vol. 2 (Paris: Calmann Lévy, 1889), 179. 14. Horace Coignet, “Lettre sur le Pygmalion de M. J. J. Rousseau,” Mercure de France 2 ( January 1771): 198–200, reprinted in Waeber, Pygmalion, 81–82. 15. Francesco Milizia, Del teatro (Venice: Pasquali, 1773), 48; Pietro NapoliSignorelli, Storia critica de’ teatri antichi e moderni, vol. 8 (Naples: Orsino, 1813), 199–200. 16. Martineau distinguished between Rousseau’s scène lyrique and “melodrama,” an inferior offshoot in the model of Benda, on the grounds that the latter contained bits of dialogue. His own Ariane, scène lyrique (Amsterdam and Paris, 1782) was published after Benda’s but written before it, or so he insisted. See Sala, “Mélodrame: Définitions et métamorphoses,” 239. 17. Dubois, “Du mélodrame.” 18. Napoli-Signorelli, Storia critica de’ teatri antichi e moderni 8:200. 19. See most recently Sarah Hibberd, “Good Vibrations: Frankenstein on the London Stage,” in Sound Knowledge: Music and Science in London, 1789–1851, ed. Ellen Lockhart and James Davies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016), 175–202. 20. The model formulation can be found in the opening lines of Theodor W. Adorno, “On Some Relationships between Music and Painting,” trans. Susan Gillespie, Musical Quarterly 79 (1995): 66–79. 21. Dubois, “Du mélodrame.” See also the oft-cited passage on act-ending tableaux from the Traité du mélodrame (1817), quoted in Anselm Gerhard, The Urbanization of Opera: Music Theater in Paris in the Nineteenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 153. 22. See the Traité du mélodrame and the lengthy discussion in Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination, 48–68; and Carrie J. Preston’s discussion of posing in Goethe’s Proserpina in Modernism’s Mythic Pose: Gender, Genre, Solo Performance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 40–44. 23. On Lenardo und Blandine, see esp. Kirsten Gram Holmström, Monodrama,

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Attitudes, Tableaux Vivants: Studies on Some Trends of Theatrical Fashion, 1770–1815 (Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell, 1967), 56–88; and Thomas Betzwieser in this volume. See also the aquatints and engravings for Pygmalion and Ariadne auf Naxos reproduced in Waeber, En musique dans le texte, 64–65, 200–201, 203. 24. Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination, 47. 25. Ibid., 61, 63. 26. “De la musique de mélodrame,” Le ménéstrel, 19 January 1834. 27. Thomas Luis de Iriarte, Guzmán al bueno (Madrid: Don Benito Cano, 1791), 12. 28. See Sala, “Le mélodrame,” 239. 29. “Comment admettre à la fois deux langages qui s’excluent mutuellement, & joindre L’Art Pantomime à la parole qui le rend superflu? Le langage du geste étant la ressource des muets ou des gens qui ne peuvent s’entendre, devient ridicule entre ceux qui parlent.” So Rousseau wrote under “Opéra” in the Dictionnaire de musique (Paris, 1768). See Waeber, En musique dans le texte, 43–44. 30. L’Abbé F. Galiani: Correspondances, vol. 2 (Paris: Calman Lévy, 1889), 179. 31. The Viennese production of Pygmalion and Aspelmayr’s score are discussed in detail in Sala, “La carriera di Pigmalione,” ix–lxxvii. 32. The passage is reproduced in reduction in Waeber, En musique dans le texte, 105–9. 33. See, for instance, the first anonymous English translation (London, 1779) and the Italian translations by Francesco Saverio de’ Rogati (1774), the Abate Perini (1777), and Antonio Sografi (1790). 34. The scene, its music, and the etymology of Le Sueur’s label are discussed in Waeber, En musique dans le texte, 107–8. 35. Hector Berlioz, “De l’imitation musicale,” Revue et Gazette musicale de Paris, 1 and 8 January 1837. 36. See Thomas Betzweiser’s essay in the present volume. 37. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, ed. and trans. Eric A. Blackall, vol. 9 of Goethe: The Collected Works (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), 72–74. The passage is considered in Mary Ann Smart, Mimomania: Music and Gesture in Nineteenth- Century Opera (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 1–6. 38. The comparison has some basis in Rousseau’s account of the different types of recitative in the Dictionnaire de musique; see Waeber, En musique dans le texte, 31–36. 39. One of the most common complaints about Italian opera— which, it bears adding, was preeminent in all the major cities in Europe during the entire period under consideration here— concerned the way that the music failed to respect the words it ought to serve, distorting the poetic meter, drawing syllables out until they were unrecognizable in the name of vocal display, and casting emphases willy-nilly without regard to dramatic situation. 40. “Homogenous and empty time” is Walter Benjamin’s phrase, from “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1969), 261; for a summary of theories of cultural time relating to this period, see Stuart Sherman, Telling Time: Clocks, Diaries, and English Diurnal Form, 1660–1785 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), esp. 1–28. 41. Sala, L’opera senza canto, xx.

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42. See Sala, “Le mélodrame,” 239–40, 244. 43. This work is considered briefly in Sophia Rosenfeld, “A Revolution in Language: Words, Gestures, and the Politics of Signs in France, 1745–1804” (PhD diss., Harvard University, 1995), 112. 44. The most influential texts in this tradition were Condillac’s Traité des sensations (1754), and Diderot’s Lettre sur les sourds et muets (1751) and Lettre sur les aveugles (1749) and its later additions (1782). On the intellectual tradition, see Jessica Riskin, Science in the Age of Sensibility: The Sentimental Empiricists of the French Enlightenment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 19–68; for its practical implications, see Sophia Rosenfeld, A Revolution in Language: The Problem of Signs in Late Eighteenth-Century France (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), in particular 13–56 and 123–80. On the Italian reception of these ideas, and their broader implications for aesthetic thought around 1800, see also Lockhart, Animation, Plasticity, and Music in Italy, chap. 4.

Chapter 3 1. Thomas Holcroft, A Tale of Mystery, a Melo-Drame (London: Richard Phillips, 1802), n.p. 2. John Genest, Some Account of the English Stage, 10 vols. (Bath: H. E. Carrington, 1832), 7:578. 3. Genest, Some Account 7:579. 4. Jacky Bratton, “Romantic Melodrama,” in The Cambridge Companion to British Theatre, 1730–1830, ed. Jane Moody and Daniel O’Quinn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 118. 5. Matthew S. Buckley, “The Formation of Melodrama,” in The Oxford Handbook of the Georgian Theatre, 1737–1832, ed. Julia Swindells and David Francis Taylor (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 463. 6. On melodrama as both imported and indigenous, see Jeffrey N. Cox, “The Death of Tragedy; or, The Birth of Melodrama,” in The Performing Century: Nineteenth-Century Theatre’s History, ed. Tracy C. Davis and Peter Holland (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 164. 7. Roger Parker, “Introduction: On Reading Critics Reading,” in Reading Critics Reading: Opera and Ballet Criticism in France from the Revolution to 1848, ed. Roger Parker and Mary Ann Smart (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 3. 8. Frederick Burwick, Romantic Drama: Acting and Reacting (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 151. 9. Allardyce Nicoll, A History of English Drama, 1660–1900, vol. 3, Late Eighteenth Century Drama, 1750–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), 56. 10. In the eighth of his Lectures on the Dramatic Literature of the Age of Elizabeth, Hazlitt lists R. L. Sheil, John Tobin, and Charles Lamb as among those contemporary dramatists who “have imbibed the spirit and imitated the language of our elder dramatists.” See Lectures on the English Comic Writers; Lectures on the Dramatic Literature of the Age of Elizabeth; A Letter to William Gifford, Esq., vol. 5 of The Selected Writings of William Hazlitt, ed. Duncan Wu (London: Pickering & Chatto, 1998), 323.

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11. Nicoll, History 3:59–73, 117–24. 12. Allardyce Nicoll, A History of English Drama, 1660– 1900, vol. 4, Early Nineteenth Century Drama, 1800–1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966), 79. 13. See Julie Carlson, “Unsettled Territory: The Drama of English and German Romanticisms,” Modern Philology 88 (1990): 43–56. 14. Katherine Newey, “The 1832 Select Committee,” in The Oxford Handbook of the Georgian Theatre, 1737–1832, ed. Julia Swindells and David Francis Taylor (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 142. 15. “Dramatic Criticism. Lyceum, English Opera,” Theatrical Inquisitor 1 (September 1812): 51. 16. See Michael Burden, “Opera in the London Theatres,” in The Cambridge Companion to British Theatre, 1730– 1830, ed. Jane Moody and Daniel O’Quinn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 205–17. 17. Theatrical Observer 847 (17 August 1824): 1. 18. Joanna Baillie, A Series of Plays: In which it is attempted to delineate the stronger passions of the mind (London: Cadell & Davies, 1798), 26. 19. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, ed. James Engell and W. Jackson Bate, 2 vols. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), 2:208. 20. See Barbara Bell, “The National Drama, Joanna Baillie and the National Theatre,” in The Edinburgh History of Scottish Literature, vol. 2, Enlightenment, Britain and Empire (1707– 1918), ed. Susan Manning (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007), 228–35. 21. Quoted in Jane Moody, Illegitimate Theatre in London, 1770– 1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 65. 22. “Covent Garden Theatre,” Drama 1 (May 1821): 42. 23. See Marvin Carlson, “Nationalism and the Romantic Drama in Europe,” in Romantic Drama, ed. Gerald Gillespie (Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 1994), 139–52. 24. See George W. Brandt, ed., German and Dutch Theatre, 1600–1848, comp. George W. Brandt and Wiebe Hogendoorn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 197–98. 25. “View of the State of the Stage in Germany: By a Correspondent at Weimar,” Monthly Magazine 9 (February 1800): 34. 26. See Rosemary Ashton, The German Idea: Four English Writers and the Reception of German Thought, 1800–1860 (London: Libris, 1994), 14–16. 27. “Description of the Theatres of Paris,” Lady’s Monthly Museum 9 ( July 1802): 9. See also Donald Roy, ed., Romantic and Revolutionary Theatre, 1789–1860 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 207. 28. William Hazlitt, Notes on a Journey through France and Italy (London: Hunt & Clarke, 1826), 57, 123–24. 29. Jane Moody, “The Theatrical Revolution, 1776–1843,” in The Cambridge History of British Theatre, vol. 2, 1660 to 1895, ed. Joseph Donohue (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 212, 213. 30. “The Drama,” Monthly Visitor 2 (November 1802): 274; “Thomas Holcroft’s A Tale of Mystery,” Poetical Register 2 ( January 1803): 455; “Drama: A Tale of Mystery,” Monthly Register 2 ( January 1803): 249.

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31. “The Drama,” New Universal Magazine 3 ( June 1805): 546. 32. For an analysis of the print, see the editors’ introduction to The Broadview Anthology of Romantic Drama, ed. Jeffrey N. Cox and Michael Gamer (Peterborough: Broadview, 2003), x–xi. 33. “The Monster Melo- Drame,” Satirist, or Monthly Meteor 1 ( January 1808): 340–41. 34. On German drama in 1790s Britain, see Michael Gamer, Romanticism and the Gothic: Genre, Reception, and Canon Formation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 144–50. 35. “To the Editors of Le Beau Monde. Managers and Melodramas,” Le Beau Monde 3 ( January 1808): 18, 21. 36. Gamer, Romanticism and the Gothic, 148. 37. See Graeme Stones, ed., Parodies of the Romantic Age, vol. 1, The Anti-Jacobin (London: Pickering & Chatto, 1999), 214–15. 38. Edinburgh Magazine, or Literary Miscellany (November 1802), 353–55. 39. Peter Mortensen, British Romanticism and Continental Influences: Writing in an Age of Europhobia (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 33. 40. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria 2:221. 41. Detector, “Dramatic Strictures,” Le Beau Monde 4 (November 1808): 219. 42. “Lyceum— English Opera,” Theatrical Inquisitor 7 (August 1815): 154; 8 (September 1815): 205. 43. On melodrama’s growing centrality in the 1820s, see Buckley, “Formation,” 472–73. 44. E.H., “On Melo-Drama,” Theatrical Inquisitor 12 (March 1818): 158, 161–62. 45. “On the Decline of the British Drama,” Monthly Magazine 60 ( January 1826): 43–44. 46. “Surrey Theatre,” Drama 3 (August 1822): 140–41, 143. 47. See Jacky Bratton, New Readings in Theatre History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 133–70. More generally, see Hugh Cunningham, Leisure in the Industrial Revolution, c. 1780–c. 1880 (London: Croom Helm, 1980). 48. “Surrey Theatre,” 143. 49. On contemporary images of, and prejudices about, French and German culture and character, see David Simpson, Romanticism, Nationalism, and the Revolt against Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 64–103. 50. Nicoll, History 4:85. 51. E.H., “On Melo-Drama,” 161. 52. Ibid. 53. “Monthly Theatrical Review— Drury Lane,” Monthly Magazine 1 (March 1826): 306. The references are to the numerous melodramatic versions of Carl Maria von Weber’s Der Freischütz circulating in London from 1824 and the adaptations of Goethe’s Faust staged at the Coburg in 1824 and Drury Lane in 1825. 54. “On Music. No 5.— With reference to the principles of the Beautiful in that Art,” New Monthly Magazine 8 (August 1823): 131. 55. Matthew Buckley notes that “the legitimate stage by the 1830s had not rejected melodrama so much as incorporated it” (“Formation,” 473). 56. George Rowell, The Victorian Theatre, 1792–1914: A Survey, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), 50.

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57. Jeffrey N. Cox, “The Ideological Tack of Nautical Melodrama,” in Melodrama: The Cultural Emergence of a Genre, ed. Michael Hays and Anastasia Nikolopoulou (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996), 170, 178. On melodrama as a reactionary form, see also Cox’s Romanticism in the Shadow of War: Literary Culture in the Napoleonic War Years (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 60, 82. 58. Edward Lytton Bulwer, England and the English, 2 vols. (London: Richard Bentley, 1833), 2:150, 2:156. 59. On the connections between political and theatrical reform, see Newey, “1832 Select Committee,” and Bratton, New Readings, 67–70. 60. Report from the Select Committee on Dramatic Literature: With the Minutes of Evidence (London: House of Commons, 2 August 1832), 210.

Chapter 4 1. An early example is the “spectacle pieux” La création du monde, a three- act pantomime performed at the Hôtel de Soissons in 1743. For an overview of biblical theater, see Martine de Rougemont, “Bible et théâtre,” in Le siècle des lumières et la Bible, ed. Yvon Belaval and Dominique Bourel (Paris: Beauchesne, 1986), 269–87. 2. See discussion in Anna Louise Catharina Kromsigt, Le théâtre biblique à la veille du romantisme, 1789–1830 (Zutphen: Nauta, 1931), 19. 3. Sewrin is the pseudonym of Charles-Augustin Bassompierre. 4. Examples are the comédie-vaudeville La chaste Suzanne by Radet, Desfontaines, and Barré (1793); Martainville’s vaudeville “tiré de l’ancien testament” Noé; ou, Le monde repeuplé (Noah; or, The world repopulated, 1797); and La Bible à ma tante (The Bible according to my aunt, 1798), a “folie en un acte, mêlée de vaudevilles” by Testard. 5. See Alexander Nebrig, Die Rhetorizität des hohen Stils: Der deutsche Racine in französischer Tradition und romantischer Modernisierung (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2007), 41. 6. See the performance records of the Napoleonic calendar in Louis-Henry Lecomte, Napoléon et le monde dramatique: Étude nouvelle d’après des documents inédits (Paris: Daragon, 1912), 223–70. 7. “Sublimes tableaux de la religion nous frapperoient bien davantage que les fades peintures d’un amour romanesque.” Journal des débats et lois du pouvoir législatif, et des actes du gouvernement, 7 December 1801, 4. 8. “On finira par y essayer, un jour, la bible mise en ballets, et les joies du Paradis mises en musique.” Journal des arts, de littérature et de commerce, 5 January 1801, 46. These reflections emerge in a discussion about two of the most famous Haydn parodies of 1801: the folie-vaudeville Le premier homme du monde; ou, La création du sommeil by Vieillard and La Récréation du monde, suite de la Création, “mélodrame en six scènes, musique d’Hayden, mélée de vaudevilles” by Barré, Radet, and Desfontaines. 9. “On a imaginé pour réveiller la curiosité de mettre en action un oratorio; c’està-dire, qu’on a pris un sujet de l’histoire sacrée. . . . La pompe du spectacle et des décorations complètent ce spectacle superbe.” Nouvelles littéraires, in Aubin Louis Millin, Magasin encyclopédique, ou Journal de sciences, des lettres et des arts 8, no. 6 (Paris: Fuchs, 1803), 125–27.

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10. “Sie sehen, dass unsre Frömmigkeit jetzt überall zudringt.” Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung 33 (15 May 1805): col. 532. 11. For performance records, see David Charlton, Théâtre de l’Opéra- Comique Paris: Répertoire, 1762–1972 (Sprimont: Mardaga, 2005). 12. This was in turn based on Paul-Jérémie Bitaubé’s poem of the same title of 1767, which contains an idyllic representation of the virtues and a love story: perfect for the emerging concept of mélodrame. 13. Le jugement de Salomon enjoyed close to three hundred performances on the Parisian boulevard stages, according to Paul Ginisty in Le mélodrame (Paris: LouisMichaud, 1923), 127. 14. See Lecomte, Napoléon et le monde dramatique, 193–204. 15. “En remettant au Théâtre la Chaste Suzanne, les auteurs ont voulu lui donner une couleur nouvelle, et la rapprocher des circonstances présentes. . . . Les couplets qu’il chante á cette occasion sont une allégorie des victoires récentes de notre Grande Armée.” Courrier des spectacles 3223 (23 November 1805): 3. On the case of La chaste Suzanne, see Laura Mason, Singing the French Revolution: Popular Culture and Politics, 1787–1799 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996), 85–88. 16. “Défenseurs de la religion et du goût, secondez-moi: le monstre politique est abattu; il faut terrasser le monstre littéraire.” Jean-Baptiste-Augustin Hapdé, Plus de mélodrames! Leurs dangers, considérés sous le rapport de la religion, des mœurs, de l’instruction publique et de l’art dramatique (Paris: J. G. Denut, 1814), 35. 17. “Si le peuple le matin voit le prêtre à l’autel et le soir au théâtre, il verra du même œil le prélat et l’histrion.” Jean-Baptiste-Augustin Hapdé, De grands et des petits théâtres de la capitale (Paris: Le Normant, 1816), 87. 18. “Nous pensons qu’on ne peut toucher au dépôt de la Religion, parce qu’avec le sujets sacrés, sont incompatibles les nobles écarts du génie, qui veut être indépendant.” A!A!A! [=Abel Hugo, Armand Malitourne, and Jean- Joseph Ader], Traité du mélodrame (Paris: Delaunay, Pélicier & Plancher, 1817), 68–69. 19. For a comprehensive analysis of the libretti of French biblical melodramas, see “Le mélo et la Bible,” in Jean- Marie Thomasseau, Mélodramatiques (Paris: Presses Universitaires de Vincennes, 2009), 103–15. 20. “Voilà ce que nous avons recueilli dans l’histoire: pour rendre ce fait plus dramatique.” “Notice historique,” in Les Machabées ou La prise de Jérusalem, drame sacré en quatre actes à grand spectacle par Cuvelier et Léopold (Paris: Fages, 1817), in Chefs-d’œuvre du répertoire des mélodrames joués à différens théâtres, vol. 14 (Paris: Veuve Dabo, 1824), 200. One can find similar statements in the preface of Caigniez’s Le triomphe de David or Hapdé’s note about his invention of the “fatal urn” in Le passage de la Mer Rouge; ou, La délivrances des Hébreux (Théâtre de la Gaîté, 1817). 21. “Mais en réclamant l’indulgence du public, nous le prions de se rappeler que c’est une pièce de théâtre dans un genre très-secondaire, et non pas un fragment d’histoire que nous avons voulu tracer.” “Notice historique.” 22. One of the staunchest defenders of dramatic propriety was Hapdé, who wrote a pamphlet about the case of his spectacular drame lyrique on a biblical topic, Le déluge universel; ou, L’arche de Noé (Théâtre de Versailles, 1821), which had been performed at the Théâtre de Versailles with a mise-en-scène by Robillon and without Hapdé’s permission. See his Procès du Déluge (Paris: Pillet aîné, 1822). 23. “Le mélodrame tire son origine de ce besoin d’émotions théâtrales qu’a saisi

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les dernières classes du peuple au sortir de notre long drame révolutionnaire.” De l’homme du monde et, par occasion, du mélodrame, in Le globe: Recueil philosophique et littéraire 90 (30 October 1827): 478–79. 24. “C’est qu’à cette époque difficile, où le peuple ne pouvait recommencer son éducation religieuse et sociale qu’au théâtre, il y avait dans l’application du mélodrame au développement des principes fondamentaux de toute espèce de civilisation, une vue providentielle.” Charles Nodier, editor’s introduction to Théâtre choisi de G. de Pixerécourt, 4 vols. (Paris: Tresse, 1841–43), 1:iii. 25. See Alice Marie Hanson, Musical Life in Biedermeier Vienna (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 61– 81; Anton Bauer, 150 Jahre Theater an der Wien (Vienna: Amalthea-Verlag, 1952), 53–114. 26. See William Edgar Yates, Theatre in Vienna: A Critical History, 1776– 1995 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 86–137. 27. Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung 2 (6 October 1802), col. 32. 28. Apparently, the first melodrama staged at the Theater an der Wien was an adaptation of Pixerécourt’s Cœlina; ou, L’enfant du mystère (Théâtre de l’AmbiguComique, 1800) under the title Die Mühle am Arpennerfelsen (1802). The drama— actually called “Schauspiel mit Gesang”— had been given in the translation by Ignaz Franz Castelli with new music by Ignaz Ritter von Seyfried. It enjoyed only five performances between 14 October and 13 November 1802. Bauer, 150 Jahre Theater an der Wien, 271. 29. Bauer reports that Salomons Urtheil was staged seventy-six times between 27 October 1804 and 23 March 1849. For further information and detailed analysis of Salomons Urtheil, see Emilio Sala, L’opera senza canto (Venice: Marsilio, 1995), 75–93; and Juliane Hirschmann, “Gerichtsverhandlungen in dramatischer Musik: Untersuchungen zu Überzeugungsstrategien in Oratorium, Oper und Schauspiel mit Musik am Beispiel von Vertonungen der Erzählung vom Salomonischen Urteil und vom Kreidekreis” (PhD diss., Heidelberg University, 2007), 205–42. 30. “Ein Melodram aus dem Französischen: Salomo’s Urteil [sic], mit Musik von Guaisin [sic] ist ohne musikalischen Werth; es gefällt nur durch das treffliche Spiel der Dem[oiselle] Eigensatz. Überhaupt dürfte ein Melodram von drey Akten wol zu lang seyn. Nur eine leidenschaftliche Empfindung, welche sich ihrer Natur nach in lyrischen Sprüngen äußert, kann so von Musik unterbrochen werden, welche diese Uebergänge dem Gemüthe des Zuhörers bemerkbar macht. Aber in einem so langen Stücke muss zu viel Dramatisches geschehen, es kommt zu viel bloßer Ideentausch vor, welcher mir diese lyrische Behandlung nicht wol zu vertragen scheint. Es wird dann ein Schauspiel daraus, welches nur unwesentlich an willkürlichen Stellen mit Musik unterbrochen ist”. Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung 7 (14 November 1804): col. 115. Similar considerations about the interplay of music and text can be found in E. T. A. Hoffmann, Über Salomons Urtheil (Musik von Quaisin) nebst einigen Bemerkungen über das Melodrama überhaupt, und über die Chöre in der Tragödie, published in Allgemeine deutsche Theaterzeitung 41 (17 May 1808) and 42 (20 May 1808). 31. Ariadne auf Naxos was first given at the Burgtheater on 4 January 1780, followed by thirty-two performances during subsequent years. Medea was staged fiftyeight times between 5 January 1778 and 28 August 1837 at the court theaters. The monodrama Pygmalion (libretto by Friedrich Wilhelm Gotter after Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s of 1762) was performed only once in 1772 at the Burgtheater (translated

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by Laudes) and twice at the Kärtnertortheater, in June 1801. Despite Benda’s prominence, however, his melodramas were not particularly popular on the suburban stages of early nineteenth-century Vienna. At the Theater an der Wien, for example, Pygmalion (in a German translation by Leon) was given three times between 1802 and 1808, while Medea only had a single performance in 1806. For performance records, see Minna von Alth and Gertrude Obzyna, Burgtheater 1776– 1976: Aufführungen und Besetzungen von zweihundert Jahren, vol. 1 (Vienna: Ueberreuter, 1992). On Benda’s melodramas in Vienna, see Peter Branscombe, “Schubert and the Melodrama,” in Schubert Studies: Problems of Style and Chronology, ed. Eva BaduraSkoda and Peter Branscombe (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 107. 32. See Johann Friedrich Reichardt, Vertraute Briefe aus Paris geschrieben in den Jahren 1802 und 1803, vol. 2 (Hamburg: B. G. Hoffmann, 1804), 133–34; and August von Kotzebue, Erinnerungen aus Paris im Jahre 1804, vol. 1 (Berlin: H. Frölich, 1804), 519 . 33. “Das Melodrama wirkt daher mehr auf den Zuhörer, als auf den Zuschauer.” Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung 11 (11 December 1799): col. 198. 34. “ Es ist arg, welcher Unfug jetzt mit dieser wunderlichen Gattung von Theatermusik getrieben wird.” Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung 47 (21 August 1805): col. 752. 35. For a list of French biblical melodramas, see Kromsigt, Le théâtre biblique, 92–103. For Viennese biblical melodramas, see the chronology of performances at the Theater an der Wien in Bauer, 150 Jahre, 267–309. 36. For Seyfried’s biography, see August Schmidt, Denksteine: Biographien von Ignaz Ritter von Seyfried (Vienna: Mechitharisten-Congregation, 1848), 1–39. Seyfried’s autobiography, Skizze meines Lebens: Theilnehmenden Freunden zum Andenken gereicht [1824–41], has never been published (Vienna, Universität für Musik und darstellende Kunst, I–36561). Several excerpts are quoted in Bettina von Seyfried, Ignaz Ritter von Seyfried: Thematisch-bibliographisches Verzeichnis: Aspekte der Biographie und des Werkes (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1990). 37. Seyfried, Ignaz Ritter von Seyfried, 341 38. “Diese nie gesehene, denkwürdige Versammlung macht Epoche in der Geschichte der Zeit und des Theaterwesens.” Der Sammler (15 October 1814): 660n165, cited in Seyfried, Ignaz Ritter von Seyfried, 340–41. 39. For more on censorship in Vienna, see Norbert Bachleitner, “The Habsburg Monarchy,” in The Frightful Stage: Political Censorship of the Theater in NineteenthCentury Europe, ed. R. J. Goldstein (New York: Berghan, 2009), 228–64. 40. That it was allowed in the first place was already a shift in policy from the mid-1790s: in 1795, the Theaterzensor Franz Karl Hägelin stated in his memorandum Leitfaden für Theaterzensoren in Österreich (Guide for theater censors in Austria) that “religion and religious subjects can never become material for theatrical performance.” Quoted and translated in William Edgar Yates, Theatre in Vienna: A Critical History, 1776–1995 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 25. For the entire text, see Karl Glossy, Zur Geschichte der Wiener Theatercensur, Sonderabdruck aus dem Jahrbuch der Grillparzer–Gesellschaft 8 (Vienna: Konegen, 1896), 69. 41. “Eines dieser Stücke, Salomons Urteil, sei 1805 aus besonderen Rücksichten zugelassen worden.” Karl Glossy, Zur Geschichte der Theater Wiens, Sonderabdruck aus dem Jahrbuch der Grillparzer– Gesellschaft 25 (Vienna: Konegen, 1915), 84.

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Glossy was able to draw on police archival material (Akten der Polizeihofstelle) that was later burned in the Justizpalast fire (1927). 42. “Dass kein Theater einen Stoff aus der Bibel bearbeiten, in Musik setzen, oder sonst für dasselbe die nöthigen Voranstalten zur Aufführung machen soll, ohne den Plan des Stückes zur Prüfung vorgelegt und die Erlaubnis zur Aufführung erhalten zu haben.” Ibid., 85. 43. “Dass manche dieser Stücke von geschickte Männer geschrieben und aufgeführt worden, die schönsten Folgen für Moralität und Erweckung guter Gesinnungen gehabt hatten.” Ibid. 44. Ibid., 89–90. 45. “Die Grundsätze, welche ihnen zur Richtschnur vorgeschrieben sind, beschränken sich im Allgemeinen dahin, alles zu entfernen, was in sittlicher, religiöser und politischer Rücksicht anstößig sein kann. . . . Eine große Veränderung brachte die feindliche Invasion. Die Franzosen stellten während ihrer langen Besitznahme von Wien den Grundsatz auf, dass alle Theaterstücke, die in Frankreich und in den Bundesstaaten aufzuführen erlaubt seien, auch hier aufgeführt werden könnten. Unter den hiesigen Theatern benützte das Theater an der Wien diese Erlaubnis mit heißer Begierde, es gab die Kreuzfahrer, das Trauerspiel Marianne, wo Nonnen und Geistliche in ihrem ganzen Ornat, Kirchen und religiöse Zeremonien im größten Detail vorkommen. Das Neue und Unerhörte dieser Vorstellungen füllte lange Zeit die Theater und erregte den Wunsch der Theaterdirektion, auch nach Abzug der Franzosen teils mit dergleichen Stücken fortzufahren, teils ähnliche aufs Theater zu bringen.” Ibid., 123–24. 46. “Indem das Schauspiel Die Kreuzfahrer gegen eine der ersten Pflichten der christkatholischen Religion stößt, dünkt es mich, zur Darstellung nicht geeignet zu sein.” Ibid., 153. 47. Christine Blanken, Franz Schuberts “Lazarus” und das Wiener Oratorium zu Beginn des 19. Jahrhunderts (Stuttgart: Steiner, 2002), 65– 97. The censorship decrees are conserved in the Wiener Allgemeines Verwaltungsarchiv and in the Wiener Diözesanarchiv. 48. “Heiligkeit und Verehrung der Bibel durch theatralisches Besinnlichen, Maschinen, Aufzüge, Kleidung usw. . . . und Ausdrücke (die im Theater aber der heiligen Schrift unwichtig sind) durch Weglassung erklärender Umstände usw. immer etwas verliere.” See ibid., 88. 49. See Karl Goedeke, Grundriss zur Geschichte der deutschen Dichtung aus den Quellen, vol. 3 (Dresden: Ehlermann, 1881), 814. 50. “Die Theaterdichter fänden in der Mythologie und in der Profangeschichte noch immer Stoff genug für das Aug und Herz. Das Religiöse, Heilige gehöre einmal nicht auf die Bühne. Möge man sich in andern Ländern, wo die Kirchen leer stehen, dieses Notbehelfes bedienen.” Glossy, Zur Geschichte der Theater Wien, 241. 51. “Wenn diese frommen Authoren durch ihr Zuthun religiösen Gesinnungen aufhelfen wollen, so mögen sie die Oratorien von Metastasio zum Vorbild wählen, und bloß durch rührende Musik, Arien, Recitative, ohne Verkleidung und Maschinerie, welche dem Zwecke mehr schaden als ihn befördern, wirken. Denken aber die Dichter anders, so werden sie leicht in der indischen Mythologie und in der bürgerlichen Geschichte Stoff genug zu ihrer Absicht finden, ohne Gefahr, die hei-

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ligsten Sachen herabzuwürdigen.” Note by Generalvikars Turzan (1817), quoted in Blanken, Franz Schuberts Lazarus, 145. 52. “Bei Racine in der Esther und Athalia und im Manasses, Sedecias oder Saul der Italiener.” Quoted in ibid., 88. 53. “Die Bearbeitung der Ouvertüre zu Joseph und seine Brüder von Méhul habe ihn dazu veranlasst, sich in einem analogen genre zu versuchen.” See Seyfried, Ignaz Ritter von Seyfried, 216, quoting from Seyfried’s autobiography, 21. The opera was staged at the Theater an der Wien twenty-eight times between 1809 and 1822. 54. This libretto was also the source for the biblical melodrama Saul composed by E. T. A. Hoffmann, staged in Bamberg on 29 June 1811. 55. “Die religiöse Stimmung, zu der ich mich bey Ausarbeitung meines Saul’s aufgeschwungen hatte, verleitete mich zu dem Entschluss, eine Missa zu schreiben. . . . Hätte mich das Geschick dazu berufen, ausschließlich für die Kirche zu schreiben, ich wäre der glücklichste Sterbliche. Pia desideria.” Seyfried, Ignaz Ritter von Seyfried, 416. 56. “Die Musik scheint uns aus Herrn von Seyfried’s Werken das Vorzüglichste zu seyn; sie ist überall dem Text angemessen, und unterstützt die Handlung ohne sie zu unterbrechen. Die Chöre sind wohl gelungen, und einige Märsche mit vielem Geschmack componirt.” Der Sammler 46 (17 April 1810): 184. The two main press sources are Der Sammler, an elite Viennese periodical (published three times a week), and the more famous weekly magazine Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung, in particular the editions dedicated to the Austrian Empire starting from 1817. 57. “Ein Chor, als Doppelfuge behandelt— die Geistes- Verwirrung Saul’s ausdrückend— war hier sehr passend, und machte viele Wirkung.” Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung 35 (30 May 1810): col. 555. 58. “Mein zweytes Werk im ernsten Style.” Seyfried, Ignaz Ritter von Seyfried, 340, quoting from Seyfried’s autobiography, 25–26. 59. “Da ein Melodram . . . an sich schon ein dramatisches Unding ist, das auf gebildeten Bühnen gar nicht gelitten werde sollte. Überhaupt ist es in kranker Einfall, dergleichen Historien aus dem jüdischen Alterthum der Sonnabendskasse zuliebe dem ehrlichen Publikum mitaufzudringen.” Wiener Theaterzeitung 69 (26 August 1812): 274. 60. Blanken, Franz Schuberts Lazarus, 142–45. 61. Wiener Theaterzeitung 151 (18 December 1817), 604. 62. Wiener Zeitschrift für Kunst, Literatur, Theater und Mode 97 (3 December 1817): 392. 63. At the pivotal scene of the “fatal urn” (2.20), Salmonäa declaims the words “dein heil’ger Will’ geschehe” (thy will be done). 64. See the announcement of the success of the drama in Preßburg in Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung 17 (24 April 1816): col. 292. 65. “Noah ist eigentlich ein Decorationsstück, welches nur auf dem Theater an der Wien aufgeführt werden kann . . . in dem Augenblicke wird das ganze Paradies in rothes Gewölck verhüllt, und der Seraph steht vor dem Eingang— mit flammendem Schwerdt das zugleich Flammen sprüht und Ambrosiaduft verbreitet, für das Publikum gewiß angenehmer als der in ähnlichen Fällen unleidliche Pechgeruch.” Hesperus: Encyclopädische Zeitschrift für gebildete Leser 25, no. 5 ( January 1820): 40.

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66. “Die Musik nähert sich etwas dem kirchlichen Style, denn sie hat einen Auschein von canonischer Nachahmung. . . . Man betrachte Ariadne auf Naxos (von Benda?), hier ist Geist in jeder Strophe.” Morgenblatt für gebildete Stände 10 (12 January 1820): 39–40 (signed “B.C.D.”). 67. “Die Chöre [sind] mehr im Geschmacke des Oratoriums gearbeitet.” Der Sammler 128 (26 October 1819): 512. 68. “. . . eine feyerliche Ouverture in D-Dur, im Händel’schen Style.” Wiener Zeitschrift für Kunst, Literatur, Theater und Mode 128 (26 October 1819): 1046. 69. See Nicholas Mathew, “Beethoven’s Political Music, the Handelian Sublime, and the Aesthetics of Prostration,” 19th-Century Music 33, no. 2 (2009): 110–50. 70. Josef Sedlnitzky in a letter to Pálffy dated 4 February 1825 about biblical topics onstage: “Biblical objects may be used solely for oratorios and for similar purposes. . . . Thus, all the plays of the surveyed category finally disappeared from the stage in their entirety.” (Sohin die Bestimmung festgesetzt, dass biblische Gegenstände einzig und allein für Oratorien auf zweckmäßige Art benützt werden dürfen. . . . So sind endlich alle Theaterstücke der befragten Kathegorie gänzlich von der Bühne verschwunden.). Blanken, Franz Schuberts Lazarus, 88. 71. The Berlin edition of the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung reports “interesting concerti spirituels” in August 1826, in which the program included choruses by Eybler, Haydn’s Sieben Worte, and Seyfried’s fugue from Moses: “Heilig ist unser Gott.” Berliner Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung 32 (9 August 1826): col. 260. Other performances are found in charity concerts in the Redoutensaal in Prague, where the overture of the drama Moses and the grand chorus of the drama Abraham (with an enlarged orchestra) were performed in the context of a charity concert (Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung 26 [24 June 1824]: col. 414), and in Vienna, where the overture from Seyfried’s Noah was included on 8 April 1832 (Allgemeine Theaterzeitung und Originalblatt für Kunst, Literatur, Mode und geselliges Leben 76 [16 April 1832]: 303). 72. “Nur noch die Fragen: Warum nehmen wir, um neue Opern auf unsern Bühnen zu sehen, noch immer unsere Zuflucht zu Ausländern? Oder vielmehr, warum sind wir gleichsam, dazu gezwungen? Haben wir keine Opern- Dichter, oder mangelt es uns an Componisten?” Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung, 21 (21 February 1810), col. 333–34. 73. . . . weil die Theater-Directionen es seit vielen Jahren für ökonomischer gehalten haben, sich die gestochenen Partituren der französ. Opern für einige Louisd’or aus Paris kommen, und die Texte, nachlässig genug, ins Deutsche übersetzen zu lassen, als deutsche Dichter und Tonsetzer durch anständige Honorarien, und ehrende Auszeichnungen aufzumuntern.” Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung 6 (5 February 1817): col. 113.

Chapter 5 1. Colnet, Gazette de France, 15 January 1809. 2. Geoffroy, cited in the “Notice sur La Citerne,” in Théâtre choisi de G. de Pixerécourt, ed. Charles Nodier, 4 vols. (Paris: Tresse, 1841–43), 4:373–76, here 375. 3. He reflects, “The dramatic author must know how to stage his play. . . . A play can only be well thought-out, well made, with good dialogue, rehearsed properly, well performed under the auspices and with the care of a single man, with the same

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taste, judgment, spirit, heart and opinion. For thirty years I have worked alone.” Pixerécourt, “Dernière reflexions de l’auteur sur le mélodrame,” in Théâtre choisi de G. de Pixerécourt 4:493–99, here 495, 497. 4. See David Charlton, who emphasizes this double meaning of the term in French, “Sight Meets Sound: Fifty Years of Musical Scenography at the Opéra Comique,” in The Opéra-Comique in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries, ed. Lorenzo Frassà (Turnhout: Brepols, 2011), 37–79, here 37–38. 5. See, for example, J. Paul Marcoux, Guilbert de Pixerécourt: French Melodrama in the Early Nineteenth Century (New York: Peter Lang, 1992), 7. 6. See John McCormick, Popular Theatres of Nineteenth-Century France (London: Routledge, 1993), 6; Jean Pierre-Perchellet, “Les spectacles parisiens et leur public,” in L’empire des muses: Napoléon, les arts et les lettres, ed. Jean-Claude Bonnet (Paris: Belin, 2004), 153–71, here 155–56. The terms commercial, popular, and boulevard are used interchangeably in the literature to indicate the theaters that did not receive government subsidy and were not permitted to stage the genres protected by licensing laws at the state theaters (including, for example, through- composed French opera and five-act spoken tragedy). They performed vaudevilles, melodramas, comedies, parodies, pantomimes, farces, etc. For details of the repertory permitted at each these four theaters (the Gaîté, Ambigu-Comique, Variétés, and Porte Saint-Martin), as well as at the other commercial theaters that sprang up during the Restoration, see Nicole Wild, Dictionnaire des théâtres parisiens au XIXe siècle (Paris: Aux amateurs de livres, 1989). 7. For example, some of the defining characteristics of grand opera, which emerged as a new genre in the late 1820s at the Opéra, can clearly be traced to the staging conventions of the commercial theaters. 8. Spectacle d’optique is a term that covers a variety of visual entertainments of the period— including panoramas, phantasmagorias, dioramas, and a whole host of short-lived genres, some of which are discussed below. The term is used, for example, in Aubin Louis Millin, “Panorama,” in Dictionnaire des beaux-arts (Paris: Desray, 1806), 3:38. 9. Roger Savage, “Opera,” 7.4, “Production: Enlightenment Tendencies,” in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 2nd ed., ed. Stanley Sadie, (London: Macmillan, 2001), 18:458–59, cited in Charlton, “Sight Meets Sound,” 37. 10. The classic work on lighting during the period remains Wolfgang Schivelbusch, Disenchanted Night: The Industrialisation of Light in the Nineteenth Century, trans. Angela Davies (Oxford: Berg, 1988); on lighting and stage technology more generally, see Jules Moynet, L’envers du théâtre: Machines et décorations (Paris: Hachette, 1874); and on opera specifically, see Evan Baker, From the Score to the Stage: An Illustrated History of Continental Opera Production and Staging (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013). 11. Per Bjurström, “Servandoni décorateur de théâtre,” Revue d’histoire du théâtre 6, no. 3 (1954): 150–59, here 158, cited and discussed in David Charlton, “Hearing through the Eye in Eighteenth-Century French Opera,” in Art, Theatre, and Opera in Paris 1750–1850: Exchanges and Tensions, ed. Sarah Hibberd and Richard Wrigley (Farnham: Ashgate, 2014), 17–36, here 19. 12. Stephen C. Pinson, Speculating Daguerre: Art and Enterprise in the Work of L. J. M. Daguerre (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 15.

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13. The Opéra was not renowned for its innovative staging during this period, at least in the way that the other houses were. 14. See, for example, Charlton, “Hearing through the Eye in Eighteenth- Century French Opera.” 15. See Mark Ledbury, “Musical Mutualism: David, Degotti and Operatic Painting,” in Art, Theatre, and Opera in Paris, 1750–1850: Exchanges and Tensions, ed. Sarah Hibberd and Richard Wrigley (Farnham: Ashgate, 2014), 53–76, here 59, 62. The brothers came to Paris from Turin, via Rome and Naples, to work in the service of the comte de Provence at the Feydeau in 1790. They clearly had a reputation and were sought after by administrators and writers for other theaters, too; Ignazio— known as Ignace in Paris— was lured to the Opéra from 1796 (59–61). 16. Reviews of these operas have been collected in David Charlton, “Cherubini: A Critical Anthology, 1788–1801,” RMA Research Chronicle 26 (1993): 95–127; the word sublime is frequently employed. 17. The histories of each theater and the genres they were permitted to stage are detailed in Wild, Dictionnaires des théâtres parisiens. 18. Nina L. Dubin, Futures and Ruins: Eighteenth- Century Paris and the Art of Hubert Robert (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2010), 2–3. Dubin points to the attraction of ruins in artworks at the end of the eighteenth century, seeing them less as remnants of a vanishing world than as proof of the precarious nature of modern times. 19. See Katherine Astbury, Narrative Responses to the Trauma of the French Revolution (Oxford: Legenda, 2010). 20. Charles Nodier, “Les Muses,” in Promenade de Dieppe aux montagnes d’Ecosse (Paris: Barba, 1821), 80–89; cited and discussed in Astbury, Narrative Responses, 1–2. This spéculomanie is the starting point for Stephen Pinson’s rich and wideranging study, Speculating Daguerre. 21. Pinson, Speculating Daguerre, 1. For Nodier, this meant that private collectors began to dictate public taste and artistic production. Echoing Nodier’s misgivings, Erkki Huhtamo has viewed the panorama as “intertwined with the onslaught of capitalism,” introduced as a new art form “but conceived to create a market for mediated realities and (seemingly) emancipated gazes”; see his Illusions in Motion: Media Archaeology of the Moving Panorama and Related Spectacles (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013), 5. 22. He had in mind paintings by Philippe-Jacques de Loutherbourg and Joseph Vernet; see Bernard Comment, The Panorama (London: Reaktion, 1999), 78–79. 23. Barker’s first major triumph came with “a view at a glance of the Cities of London and Westminster,” displayed in a rotunda built in Leicester Square (Times, 10 January 1792); see Laurent Mannoni, The Great Art of Light and Shadow: Archaeology of the Cinema, trans. and ed. Richard Crangle (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2000), 177. 24. The American Robert Fulton had seen Barker’s rotunda in London; after he moved to Paris he applied for (and was granted) a patent of importation in 1799. However, unable to raise sufficient funds, he sold his patent to James Thayer, who established a partnership with the painter Pierre Prévost. The first rotunda, in the garden of the convent of the Capucines, opened in September 1799; see Mannoni, The Great Art, 179–81. It was painted by a team consisting of Jean Mouchet,

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Denis Fontaine, and Constant Bourgeois under the leadership of Prévost; see Stephen Oetterman, The Panorama: History of a Mass Medium (London: Zone Books, 1997), 145. 25. This appeared at the second rotunda in September 1800; further rotundas were built across Paris, including in 1808 the Imperial Panorama on the boulevard des Capucines, and a Cosmorama on the first floor of the Palais Royal, which offered views of monuments and sites from around the world; see Mannoni, The Great Art, 182–84. 26. For descriptions of Loutherbourg’s shows, see, for example, Pinson, Speculating Daguerre, 19–21. 27. Antony Béraud and P. Dufey, Dictionnaire historique de Paris (Paris: Barba, 1828), 98; cited in Marie- Antoinette Allévy, La mise en scène en France dans la première moitié du dix-neuvième siècle (1938; Geneva: Slatkine Reprints, 1976), 43. See also Pinson, Speculating Daguerre (who cites from contemporary papers), 21, 80. We know almost nothing about Monsieur Pierre himself, but press reports tell us that in the 1820s his students bought the theater and continued the spectacle, with a guide who narrated the various tableaux. 28. Daguerre and his partner Bouton had both worked with Prévost on panoramas; Mannoni suggests that their aim was to adapt scenic methods of theatrical design to the panorama, adding the special effects of the eighteenth-century peepshow and lighting effects; see Mannoni, The Great Art, 185–86. 29. This report of the London showing of opening scenes of “The Valley of Sarnen” (in Canton Unterwald, Switzerland) appeared in the Times, 4 October 1823; cited in Alison Gernsheim and Helmut Gernsheim, L. J. M. Daguerre: The History of the Diorama and the Daguerreotype (London: Dover, 1968), 17. Daguerre occasionally animated his pictures by sliding an object on rails across the painting, rather in the manner of the eidophusikon; see Mannoni, The Great Art, 189. 30. Literary Panorama and National Register, October 1814, vol. 1, cols. 721–22. It continues: “The audience part is so constructed, that sound pervades the whole without difficulty: it may be refreshed by change of air, little or much, at pleasure; and as gradually as may be desired.” 31. From May 1822 it acquired the right to stage ballets-pantomimes; see Wild, Dictionnaire des théâtres parisiens. However, owing to illness, Alaux had to hand it over to (future panoramist) Charles Langlois in April 1822. 32. This is Olivier Bara’s diagnosis in “Le Théâtre du Panorama-Dramatique, un laboratoire théâtral sous la Restauration,” Lingua romana 11, no. 1 (2012): 35– 48. Contemporaries pointed to the inherent contradiction in framing a panorama, and the poor sightlines for most of the auditorium (39). 33. Oetterman, The Panorama, 158. The Opéra was housed at the Théâtre de la Porte Saint-Martin from 1781 to 1794, then moved to the Théâtre National de la rue de la Loi from 1794 to 1821. Oetterman does not specify when Alaux was there. 34. Gernsheim and Gernsheim, L. J. M. Daguerre, 11; dates are not given, simply the statement that Alaux was “a former panorama painter with whom Daguerre had worked in Prévost’s studio.” 35. Wild, Dictionnaires des théâtres parisiens. These dates are given as periods during which Alaux worked at the theaters; he was not necessarily on the books for the entire time indicated.

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36. See Oetterman, The Panorama, 158. 37. Gernsheim and Gernsheim, L. J. M. Daguerre, 4. No dates are provided for these various engagements. It seems that Degotti was “outside” the official system by this time, maintaining his studio in buildings owned by the Menus- Plaisirs (Pinson, Speculting Daguerre, 17), though engaged by the Opéra on various projects from 1796 (Ledbury, “Musical Mutualism,” 60). Pinson claims that there is no evidence to corroborate that Daguerre worked with Prévost, despite writers making the claim (including Mannoni, The Great Art, 185); Speculating Daguerre, 33 (and 244n94). Dates for his employment in the commercial theaters are given in Wild, Dictionnaire des théâtres parisens. 38. See Barry V. Daniels, “Cicéri and Daguerre: Set Designers for the Paris Opéra, 1820– 1822,” Theatre Survey 22, no. 1 (1981): 69– 90. Other set designers enjoyed similar mobility: Alaux’s successor at the Gaîté, Gué, had worked at the Opéra Comique and was subsequently to work at the Opéra and at the PanoramaDramatique; Ciceri worked at the Porte Saint-Martin during 1814–30, at the Opéra Comique and Opéra— where he shared the role of “peintre en chef” with Degotti (1816–22) and Daguerre (1820–22)— and at the Panorama-Dramatique; Gosse, who succeeded Daguerre at the Ambigu-Comique in 1822, had also worked at the Opéra in 1816–18 and later worked at the Panorama-Dramatique; Mathis and Desroches both worked at the Porte Saint-Martin (1802–7) and the Opéra Comique. See Wild, Dictionnaire des théâtres parisiens. 39. These are among very few surviving designs for melodramas and can be viewed at http://gallica.bnf.fr/html/images/images. 40. According to a contemporary writer, Vieilh De Boisjolin, from this elevation “one could contemplate the imposing aspect of a beautiful night”; see “Daguerre,” Biographie universelle, cited in Allévy, La mise en scène, 43. 41. See Pinson, Speculating Daguerre, 25. 42. La Quotidienne, 16 May 1819, cited in Pinson, Speculating Daguerre, 25. 43. Alaux’s designs for the melodrama Ali-Pacha, by Hyacinthe François Isaac Decomberousse, Alfred (Michel Pichat), Baudouin d’Aubigny, and Baron Taylor, at the Panorama-Dramatique in 1822 are representative of his (surviving) work. 44. See, for example, Stephen Bann, The Clothing of Clio: A Study of the Representation of History in Nineteenth-Century Britain and France (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984); Richard Terdiman, Present Past: Modernity and the Memory Crisis (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993); Reinhart Koselleck, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, trans. Keith Tribe (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004). 45. Pannill Camp, “ ‘Belle horreur’: Hubert Robert’s Scenic Space and the Paris Opéra Fire of 1781,” Performance Research 18, no. 1 (2013): 56–63, here 57–58. 46. Dubin, Futures and Ruins. 47. David Charlton, “Storms, Sacrifices: The ‘Melodrama Model’ in Opera” (1985), rev. and expanded in Charlton, French Opera, 1730–1830: Meaning and Media (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000), X, 1–61, here 1, 5. 48. Charlton, “Sight Meets Sound.” 49. Charlton, “Hearing through the Eye,” 23; the citation is from Schiller’s 1794 review of Friedrich Matthisson’s landscape poetry (which relied on the parallel between landscape painting and modern forms of music), cited and translated in

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Charles Rosen, The Romantic Generation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 130. 50. Pixerécourt retrospectively identified opéra comique as the genre out of which his boulevard melodrama had evolved, in “Le mélodrame,” in Paris; ou, Le livre des cent-et-un, vol. 6. (Paris: Ladvocat, 1832), 319–25, here 325. For more on melodrama’s opéra comique roots, see Astbury, “Music in Pixerécourt’s Early Melodramas”; Nicole Wild, “La musique dans les mélodrames des théâtres parisiens,” in Music in Paris in the Eighteen-Thirties, ed. Peter Bloom (Stuyvesant, NY: Pendragon Press, 1987), 589–609; and Emilio Sala, “Mélodrame: Definitions et metamorphoses d’un genre quasi-opératique,” Revue de musicologie 84, no. 2 (1998): 235–46. 51. Piccinni had been an accompagnateur at the Feydeau and then the Opéra Comique from 1802, became chef d’orchestre at the Porte Saint-Martin, and composed for all three melodrama theaters (and later for the Panorama-Dramatique); see Wild, Dictionnaire des théâtres parisiens. 52. Play text: R. C. Guilbert de Pixerécourt, La citerne, mélodrame en quatre actes, en prose, et à grand spectacle (Paris: Barba, 1809); the storm scenes are on 7–8. Music: Louis Alexandre Piccinni, La citerne, Mat. Th. 8 [orchestral parts] (FPn), strings, flute, clarinets, bassoons, horns, trombone; the storm scene is cue no. 4, pp. 31–38. The play text contains detailed scene descriptions and stage directions, but no indications for music; the score contains some verbal cues, but no references to the staging; it is not always straightforward to establish how music, dialogue, and staging work together. I am very grateful to Jens Hesselager, who transcribed the parts for some of the storm sequence and gave me a copy, and to Fernando Morrison, who sent me an MP3 of the first half of the storm scene and prepublication proofs of excerpts from the critical edition: Roxanne Martin and Fernando Morrison, eds., La citerne, in Réné-Charles Guilbert de Pixerécourt, mélodrames, vol. 4 (Paris: Classiques Garnier, forthcoming). The translations are mine. 53. Examples from the 1790s include Rudolphe Kreutzer’s Paul et Virginie, Etienne- Nicolas Méhul’s Mélidore et Phrosine, and the avalanche in Cherubini’s Eliza; see Charlton, “Storms, Sacrifices.” 54. Michael Fend has written of the avalanche sequence in Cherubini’s Eliza (1794) that such figures barely count as “motifs” but that they “acquire a structural function in individual sections through obsessive sequential treatment”; see his “Literary Motifs, Musical Form and the Quest for the ‘Sublime’: Cherubini’s Eliza ou le Voyage aux glaciers du Mont St Bernard,” Cambridge Opera Journal 5, no. 1 (1993): 17–38, here 33. Something very similar is achieved here. 55. The storm sequences discussed by Charlton (“Storms, Sacrifices”) are around 400 bars long: Kreutzer’s Paul et Virginie lasts 393 bars; Méhul’s Mélidore et Phrosine, 451 bars; and the avalanche scene in Cherubini’s Eliza, 408 bars. 56. Pixerécourt, La citerne, 58. The description of the set is lengthy, also including details about the staircase and gallery inside. 57. Play text: Pixerécourt, La citerne, 76. Music: Piccinni, La citerne, 128–29, bb. 1–45. 58. Contrary to what one might expect, there appears to be no music for the continued fighting in the next scene, which is interrupted by Picaros’s decision to save Raphaël and his daughters. He tells the pirates to drop their weapons, and 42 bars of repeating semiquaver fragments accompany the tableau in which Spanish

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officers of justice rush onto the stage from all directions and take aim at the pirates, who finally drop their weapons. Pixerécourt, La citerne, 77. 59. See Sarah Hibberd, “Cherubini and the Revolutionary Sublime,” Cambridge Opera Journal 24, no. 3 (2012): 293–318. 60. I have borrowed the phrase “sonorous tableau vivant”— and the distinction that follows— from Thomas Grey, in his discussion of Mendelssohn’s programmatic symphonies, in “Tableaux vivants: Landscape, History Painting, and the Visual Imagination in Mendelssohn’s Orchestral Music,” 19th-Century Music 21, no. 1 (1997): 38–76, here 52.

Chapter 6 1. Scholarship echoes this diversity in its concentration on musical composition, or literature, or aesthetics, or media. See Dirk Richerdt, “Studien zum WortTon-Verhältnis im deutschen Bühnenmelodram: Darstellung seiner Geschichte von 1770 bis 1820” (PhD diss., University of Bonn, 1986); Wolfgang Schimpf, Lyrisches Theater: Das Melodram des 18. Jahrhunderts (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1988); Ulrike Küster, Das Melodram: Zum ästhetikgeschichtlichen Zusammenhang von Dichtung und Musik im 18. Jahrhundert (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1994); Jacqueline Waeber, En musique dans le texte: Le mélodrame, de Rousseau à Schoenberg (Paris: Van Dieren, 2005); Maren Butte, Bilder des Gefühls: Zum Melodramatischen im Wechsel der Medien (Munich: Fink, 2014). 2. See, for example, Kirsten Gram Holmström, Monodrama, Attitudes, Tableaux Vivants: Studies on Some Trends of Theatrical Fashion, 1770–1815 (Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell, 1967); Dene Barnett, The Art of Gesture: The Practices and Principles of 18th-Century Acting (Heidelberg: Winter, 1987); Alexander Košenina, Anthropologie und Schauspielkunst: Studien zur “eloquentia corpori” im 18. Jahrhundert (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1995); Erika Fischer-Lichte and Jörg Schönert, eds., Theater im Kulturwandel des 18. Jahrhunderts: Inszenierung und Wahrnehmung von Körper— Musik— Sprache (Göttingen: Wallstein, 1999); and Günther Heeg, Das Phantasma der natürlichen Gestalt: Körper, Sprache und Bild im Theater des 18. Jahrhunderts (Frankfurt am Main and Basel: Stroemfeld, 2000). 3. See Joseph Franz von Goez, Selbstgefühl und Empfindungen bey meinem Abgang von München den 8ten Jener 1791 (Ratisbon: Schöberl, [1791]), 72–73. For Goez’s biography, see August Krämer, Joseph Franz Freyherr von Goez: Ein biographisches Fragment (Ratisbon: Augustin, 1816). 4. The use of ellipses was one of several methods for indicating the placement of music: long dashes and asterisks were also used, depending on publisher’s conventions; see Thomas Betzwieser, “Text, Bild, Musik: Die multimediale Überlieferung des Melodrams Lenardo und Blandine (1779)— eine Herausforderung für die Editionspraxis,” Editio. Internationales Jahrbuch für Editionswissenschaft 25 (2011): 74– 100, here 75–79. 5. Joseph Franz von Goez, Versuch einer zalreichen Folge leidenschaftlicher Entwürfe für empfindsame Kunst- und Schauspiel-Freunde: Erfunden, gezeichnet, geäzt und mit Anmerkungen begleitet von J. F. von Göz (Augsburg: In der akademischen Handlung, [1783]), 94. All further extracts from the libretto come from this source. 6. The illustrations of the Versuch are reprinted in Lenardo und Blandine: Ein

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Melodram nach Bürger: In 160 leidenschaftlichen Entwürfen erfunden und auf Kupfer gezeichnet von J. F. v. Goez, ed. Horst Günther (Frankfurt am Main: Insel, 1980). The Munich (State Library) copy of the Versuch seems to have been the very first print, since it contains misprints in the numbering of the illustrations (between nos. 55 and 85. Easy access to the illustrations (with an English translation of the texts) is via http:// konkykru.com/e.goez.1783.lenardo.und.blandine.1.html. 7. Sabine Ewert, “Die Gebärde im Melodrama Lenardo und Blandine von Joseph Franz von Goetz” (PhD diss., University of Munich, 1978). 8. See note 2; only Heeg (Das Phantasma der natürlichen Gestalt) approaches Goez’s theory in any detail. 9. Apart from discussions in monographs, see Stephan Hörner, “Das Melodram Lenardo und Blandine von Peter von Winter,” in Mozarts “Idomeneo” und die Musik in München zur Zeit Karl Theodors, ed. Theodor Göllner and Stephan Hörner (Munich: Verlag der Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 2001), 209–22; and Arne Stollberg, “Anatomie einer materiellen Seele. Joseph Franz von Goetz’ Kupferstiche und Peter von Winters Musik zum Melodram Lenardo und Blandine,” Imago Musicae 23 (2006–10): 79–99; see also Betzwieser, Text, Bild, Musik. 10. Holmström, for example, is entirely silent on the music, although the chapter on Goez’s Versuch in her 1967 book remains a valuable assessment of eighteenthcentury acting: see Holström, Monodrama, 50–88. Ewert touches on music only at certain points in her dissertation. Stollberg’s article is the most enlightening, since he combines the issue of eloquentia corporis with musical observations, on which more below. 11. However, Schimpf reads topics such as Lenardo and Blandine as a “variation” on the traditional theme of doomed love. Concerning topics in melodrama, see Schimpf (Lyrisches Theater), 152–58: two-thirds of melodramatic productions were based on mythological subjects, and Schimpf further attests to the entire absence of comic topics, as well the preference for female characters. 12. For a more detailed discussion of the sources, see Betzwieser, Text, Bild, Musik, 80–84, 99–100. 13. See Thomas Bauman, ed., German Opera, 1770–1800: A Collection of Facsimiles of Printed and Manuscript Full Scores, vol. 10 (New York and London: Garland, 1986); the literary text and illustrations from the Versuch (1783) are reprinted in the corresponding German Opera, 1770–1800: Librettos, vol. 4 (New York and London: Garland, 1986). 14. I am preparing a critical edition of the melodrama; the critical report will discuss the musical sources in detail. The sources are accessible online via the Bavarian State Library and the Austrian National Library. 15. See note 5. 16. Joseph Franz von Goez, Ankündigung einer zalreichen Folge leidenschaftlicher Entwürfe für empfindsame Kunst- und Schauspiel-Freunde (Augsburg, 1782); also in Johann Georg Meusel, Miscellaneen artistischen Inhalts (Erfurt: Keyser, 1782), 303–15. 17. Goez, Ankündigung, 7. 18. Ibid., 8. Goez’s texts are written in a strange German orthography for which he was chastised by critics; I have thus not used [sic] within the quotations. 19. Goez, Versuch, 6.

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20. Libretto: Augsburg, 1785, 3[v]. 21. Both Stollberg and Hörner assume cooperation between poet and composer. Stollberg speaks of a close cooperation (enge Kooperation, “Anatomie,” 83); Hörner sees a common musical concept as a possible option (auf eine durchgängig einheitliche Konzeption; “Das Melodram Lenardo und Blandine,” 213). Neither, however, considers the 1785 libretto. 22. Winter had composed the melodrama Cora und Alonso in 1778. 23. Libretto: Augsburg, 1785, 4[r]. 24. Libretto: Augsburg, 1785, 4[r]. 25. Theatrical declamation in earlier practice was in general very “musical,” i.e., quite close to singing; see Ulrich Kühn, “Melodram und melodramatisches Sprechen als Modi gattungs- und spartenübergreifender Übergänge,” in Musiktheater als Herausforderung: Interdisziplinäre Facetten von Theater- und Musikwissenschaft, ed. Hans-Peter Bayerdörfer (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1999), 145–59. 26. “Meiner unmasgeblichen Meinung nach solte gerade so viel und nicht mer Musik zwischen den Redeintervallen angenommen und gehört werden, als warscheinliche Zeit die Seele in ihrer einmal angenommenen Lage nötig hat, um Begriffe aus Begriffen zu folgern oder dadurch zu neuen Ideen überzugehen. Der Tonsezer sol sich lebhaft in die Lage der handelnden Person versezen und den sprachlosen Zustand mit sanften Akorden ausfüllen, worinnen das innere Gefül sich sammlet, und ordnet. Er sol die Wirkung iener Momente studiren, worinnen die Leidenschaft entweder noch nicht zu iener Höhe gestiegen ist, das sie den Mund unwilkürlich öffnet, und zu sprechen drängt, oder wenn durch Uebergewicht des Gefüls die Sprache stoket.” Libretto: Augsburg, 1785, preface, 4[v]. 27. Libretto: Augsburg, 1785, 5[r]. 28. See Stollberg, “Anatomie,” 79, referring to Fischer-Lichte, Semiotik des Theaters, vol. 2, Vom “künstlichen” zum “natürlichen” Zeichen: Theater des Barock und der Aufklärung, 2nd ed. (Tübingen: Narr 1989); see also the corresponding chapter (“The Theatrical Gesture as a Norm”) in the English translation, Semiotics of the Theater (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), 143–70. 29. Stollberg, “Anatomie”, 81–82, 84. 30. Heeg dedicates an entire chapter to Goez’s theory; see Heeg, Phantasma der natürlichen Gestalt, 340–58. 31. Engel made a basic distinction between “painting” gestures (as in pantomime, where a gesture expresses “something”) and “expressing” gestures (that is, feelings caused by something, such as a specific situation). The latter are deliberate, not “automatic”; in Engel’s view, reason “controls” them. 32. Heeg, Phantasma der natürlichen Gestalt, 347. 33. Ibid., 353. 34. Ibid., 357. 35. Ibid., 365. 36. Libretto: Augsburg, 1785, 5[r]. 37. Hence we have very few analytical models to tell us how we might handle melodramatic music. I am doubtful whether searching for “Leitmotive,” as Küster does, is an adequate approach to dealing with recurring musical material (Küster, Das Melodram). Similarly, although the categories of affect and mimesis are important features for the musical analysis presented here, they provide little purchase

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on the structure of works. In the absence of analytical “tools,” our melodramatic imaginings are mostly guided by the individual characteristics of a given work. Jacqueline Waeber has done this in an exemplary manner in her discussions of Benda’s melodramas; see Waeber, En musique dans le texte, 57–97. 38. Johann Friedrich Reichardt, “Über das deutsche Singeschauspiel,” Musikalisches Kunstmagazin 1, Stück 4 (1782): 162 (rpt. Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 1969); for Reichardt’s aesthetics, see Thomas Betzwieser, Sprechen und Singen: Ästhetik und Erscheinungsformen der Dialogoper (Stuttgart and Weimar: Metzler, 2002), 73–75. 39. For the relationship of melodrama and tableau vivant exemplified by Rousseau’s Pygmalion, see Waeber, En musique dans le texte, 193– 231. Maren Butte has pointed out that the attitudes sometimes seem “fragmented,” in that one attitude already refers to the next; in this sense, she sees the performance element not as a tableau vivant but as a sort of “blurring” (“ein Verwischen, eine Defiguration”); see Butte, Bilder des Gefühls, 73. 40. For the performances, see Schimpf, Lyrisches Theater, 218–19. Schimpf also gives an account of eighteenth-century reviews of Goez’s Versuch, for example, in the Allgemeine deutsche Bibliothek 60 (1785): 419–25. 41. Ewert took this for granted and concluded that the production was canceled after the fourth performance on 27 April 1780; see Ewert, “Die Gebärde,” 10. 42. As a consequence, Goez wrote a defense, the Selbstgefühl und Empfindungen bey meinem Abgang von München den 8ten Jener 1791 (Regensburg: Schöberl, [1791]); the discussion of the immorality of Lenardo occurs on 63–64. 43. Baierische Beyträge zur schönen und nützlichen Litteratur 1, no. 2 (1779): 689–92. 44. “Die Pantomimen und Stellungen im gegenwärtigen Stück waren von Stelle zu Stelle herrlich erfunden, malerisch und Ausdruck— und Würdevoll in jedem Augenblick, so, daß man eben so viele vortrefliche Gemählde, als verschiedne Stellungen zu sehen bekam. Die Ausführung gehört unter die Meisterstücke unsrer geliebten Heiglinn.” Ibid., 691. 45. “Und nun ende ich diese Anzeige traurig und unbefriedigt, weil ich für das Herrlichste, womit dieß Drama begleitet ward, keine Zeichen finde, keine sinnlichen, ausgleichenden Zeichen für den Ausdruck der Musick. Man muß sich ähnliche Bilder in der Natur denken, um sich zu ähnlichen Empfindungen, welche in dem Geist dieser Töne lebten, anzustimmen.” Ibid., 691–92. 46. Schimpf describes Goez’s melodrama as a “degradation [of theater] to an acting exercise” (Abwertung zur Etüde für Schauspieler); see Schimpf, Lyrisches Theater, 53. 47. Ewert, “Die Gebärde,” 146; Stollberg, “Anatomie,” 81. 48. See, for example, chap. 1 of Mary Ann Smart’s Mimomania: Music and Gesture in Nineteenth-Century Opera (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 1–31.

Chapter 7 1. Peter Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama, and the Mode of Excess, rev. ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), chap. 2, esp. 28–30.

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2. Sarah Hibberd and Nanette Nielsen, “Music in Melodrama: ‘The Burden of Ineffable Expression’?” Nineteenth Century Theatre and Film 29, no. 2 (2002): 33. See also Roger Parker’s critique of Brooks, to which Hibberd and Nielsen refer: Roger Parker, Leonora’s Last Act: Essays in Verdian Discourse (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), 126–48, esp. 131–32. 3. In a discussion of the music for La citerne, Katherine Astbury has noted that Piccinni’s score reveals that “by 1809, there was a much greater awareness of the variety of ways in which music could be used in a melodrama,” at least as compared to the earlier melodrama she examines, La femme à deux maris (1802). My analysis supports this appreciation of the varied musico-dramatic strategies in La citerne and seeks to demonstrate specific aspects of these strategies in closer detail. See Astbury, “Music in Pixerécourt’s Early Melodramas,” in Melodramatic Voices: Understanding Music Drama, ed. Sarah Hibberd (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011), 15–26. 4. This and subsequent musical examples from La citerne show reduced scores based on transcriptions made by the author from the surviving orchestral parts, preserved in the Bibliothèque nationale de France (MAT TH8). 5. Séraphine: “Quelle affreuse demeure! Que deviendrions- nous, grand dieu! s’il fallait l’habiter pendant plusieurs jours?” (4.3). 6. Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757). See, for instance, the chapters “Obscurity” and “Privation,” in pt. 2, and “Why Darkness is Terrible,” in pt. 4. 7. Séraphine: “Où me conduisez-vous, mon père?” / Picaros (à part): “Ma foi! Je ne le sais pas moi même” (4.2). 8. Picaros: “Voilà un joli logement que D. Fernand m’a indiqué . . . je commence à me repentir de m’être mêlé de cette affaire . . . cependant mille ducats! . . . cela mérite consideration” (4.2). 9. Journal de l’empire, 19 January 1809, 4: “C’est un caractère à peu-près pareil à celui de Figaro; mais plus prononcé, plus voisin de celui d’un filou et même d’un brigand.” 10. “Jolie conversation! Je n’y comprends rien” (2.2). 11. “Voilà qui commence à devenir plus clair. Il faut que je reste ici? A la bonne heure” (2.2). 12. See Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination, 62ff. 13. “Allons, Picaros, il y a ici de l’argent à gagner et de la gloire à acquérir: montre-toi digne de ta réputation” (2.5). 14. “Calme-toi, mon enfant” (4.2). 15. See his monologue in 2.13. 16. “Surprise de Séraphine, qui n’ose la témoigner”(2.19). 17. “Que signifient ces mots échappés au jeune Carlo: adieu ma sœur . . . se pourrait-il en effet que ce fût là cette Clara que je n’ai jamais vue? . . . Mais pourquoi ce mystère, ce déguisement? . . . O ciel! Quel horrible soupçon vient troubler mon âme! Se tout ce qui s’est passé depuis quinze heures, n’etait que la suite d’une combinaison perfide . . . d’une trame ourdie par D. Fernand” (4.3). 18. Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination, 41. 19. Mary Hunter et al., “Piccinni,” in Grove Music Online, http://www.oxford musiconline.com. 20. René-Charles Guilbert de Pixerécourt, Guerre au mélodrame!!! (Paris: De

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l’Imprimerie de Hocquet, 1818), 14, rpt. in Théâtre choisi de G. de Pixerécourt, ed. Charles Nodier, vol. 1 (Paris: Tresse, 1841). 21. Acronym for “calendrier électronique des spectacles sous l’ancien régime et sous la revolution.” La caverne is at http://www.cesar.org.uk/cesar2/titles/titles .php?fct=edit&script_UOID=200679 (accessed 2 December 2014). 22. The plot is taken from an episode of Lesage’s Gil Blas but also has many elements reminiscent of Schiller’s Die Räuber (or La Martelière’s Robert, chef de brigands). 23. David Charlton, Opera in the Age of Rousseau: Music, Confrontation, Realism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 182, 196, 291, 356. 24. Pixerécourt, Guerre au mélodrame!!!, 15. 25. Like La caverne, Léonore was performed at the Théâtre Feydeau, and both operas starred Gaveaux as leading tenor. Gaveaux was also well- known for his counterrevolutionary song “Réveil du peuple,” much favored by the jeunesse dorée during the Thermidorean Reaction. See, for instance, Michael E. McClellan, “Counterrevolution in Concert: Music and Political Dissent in Revolutionary France,” Musical Quarterly 80, no. 1 (1996): 31– 57. The césar database lists fortyseven performances of Léonore during the rather short period from 19 February 1798 and 22 October 1799. At this point this database breaks off, but the opera was certainly performed later than that, the last performance taking place in 1806. See David Galliver, “Léonore, ou L’amour conjugal: A Celebrated Offspring of the Revolution,” in Music and the French Revolution, ed. Malcolm Boyd (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 168. See also David Charlton’s informative discussion of Gaveaux’s Léonore and the broader context of French opéras comiques, which include prison scenes and the like, in “The French Theatrical Origins of Fidelio,” in Ludwig van Beethoven: Fidelio (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), ed. Paul Robinson, 51–67 26. Stephen Meyer, “Terror and Transcendence in the Operatic Prison, 1790– 1815,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 55, no. 3 (2002): 489ff. (“empty spaces,” 493). 27. P. Dercy, La caverne; ou, Les voleurs (Paris: Chez la Veuve Duchesne, 1793), 14–15. “Quel antre affreux! . . . Le silence profond qui règne autour de moi . . . de mes esprits glacés redoublant l’épouvante.” 28. Séraphine: Où me conduisez-vous, mon père? / Picaros: (à part) Ma foi! Je ne le sais pas moi-même. (haut) Tu le sauras bientôt, mon enfant; mais tu ne dois rien craindre ; n’es-tu pas avec ton meilleur ami, ton premier défenseur? / Séraphine: Aussi je ne crains rien. / Picaros: Cependant, tu trembles? / Séraphine: Cette émotion est bien naturelle. / Picaros: Il est vrai que tu as éprouvé aujourd’hui bien des sensations différentes ; mais il ne faut qu’une crise heureuse pour nous mettre tout à fait à l’abri des revers ; jusque-là, mon enfant, de la patience, du courage! / Séraphine: J’en aurai. 29. Léonore (à demi-voix): Comme il fait froid dans ce souterrain! / Roc: Ça n’est pas étonnant . . . Il est si profond! 30. Roc: Tu trembles, je crois, as-tu peur? / Léonore (affectant un air ferme et assuré): Oh que non! . . . c’est que j’ai froid. 31. A selection of these reviews was reprinted in Théâtre choisi de G. de Pixerécourt, ed. Charles Nodier, 4 vols. (Paris: Tresse, 1841–43), 2:377–83. For a summary

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of the reviews, see also Katherine Astbury, “Music in Pixerécourt’s Early Melodramas,” 22. 32. Journal de l’empire, 19 January 1809, 3. This review is reprinted (albeit without reference to the original appearance) in Théâtre choisi de G. de Pixerécourt 2:373– 76. 33. Journal des dames et des modes, 20 January 1809, 26: “le cri du ralliement du nos jeunes gens et de nos belles.” 34. Ibid.: “On vous pardonne d’ignorer Athalie et le Cid, de méconnaître Manlius et Zaïre, mais tout homme du jour qui n’a pas vu la Citerne est inexcusable.” 35. Racine’s tragedy Athalie dates from 1691, Corneille’s Le Cid from 1637. Manlius probably refers to the rather more obscure tragedy by Antoine de la Fosse Manlius Capitolinus, first performed in 1698 but restaged in 1806 and reprinted in 1809. Zaïre refers to Voltaire’s 1732 tragedy. 36. Journal de l’empire, 12 February 1809, 4: “L’intérêt n’est point refroidi par des lieux communs; le dialogue est rapide; et dans ce genre quel qu’il soit, que je suis bien loin d’approver, c’est une conception rare.” 37. Examples in Pixerécourt melodramas include, for instance, act 4 of Le château des Apennins; ou, Le fantôme vivant (1798) and act 2 of Les mines de Pologne (1803), and also act 2 of his drame lyrique Raymond de Toulouse; ou, Le retour de la Terre-Sainte (1802). Examples by other authors include acts 2 and 3 of Ch. A. de Bassompierre’s melodrama Julia; ou, Les souterrains du château de Mazzini (1798) and acts 2 and 3 of J. M. Loaisel de Tréogate’s La Forêt Périlleuse; ou, Les Brigands de la Calabre (1800). 38. Jean-Baptiste-Augustin Hapdé, Plus de mélodrames (Paris: Dentu, 1814), 35. “Défenseurs de la religion et du goût, secondez-moi: le monstre politique est abbatu; il faut terrasser le monstre littéraire; il faut le précipiter au fond de ses cavernes, le plonger au fond de ses cachots, jusqu’à ce qu’un arrêt dicté par la sagesse et la prudence, le condamne à un exil éternel.” 39. A!A!A! [Abel Hugo, Armand Malitourne, and Jean-Joseph Ader], Traité du mélodrame (Paris: Delaunay, Pélicier & Plancher, 1817), 35: “Aux boulevards un des grands principes, c’est que pour plaire, il faut épouvanter . . . il faut du sublime, il faut du terrible, il faut de l’effroyable!” 40. Ibid., 36: “D’abord, nous voulons voir une prison.” 41. Ibid., 37: “Une caverne est également indispensable à la perfection de l’ouvrage : place au milieu d’une obscure forêt, elle ne sera fréquentée que par les loups, les sangliers, les ours, et par des hommes cent fois plus féroces encore! C’est là que nous entendrons les plus affreux complots se tramer contre l’innocence; c’est là que les échos répèteront sourdement les cris de mort! mort! et les porteront dans l’âme des spectateurs qui, plus sensibles que les échos, laisseront échapper un douloureux gémissement.”

Chapter 8 1. There were earlier adaptations of French plays, such as Colman’s Blue Beard (1798), taken from Sedaine’s libretto for Grétry’s Barbe-bleu (1789), and similar “music dramas,” which were distinctly “melodramatic,” but they were not described on theater bills, or when published, as “melodramas.” 2. Thomas Holcroft, Travels from Hamburg, through Westphalia, Holland, and

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the Netherlands, to Paris, 2 vols. (London: Richard Phillips, 1804), 2:297ff. It might be argued that he blackened Bonaparte for an English readership, but he had commented in his personal journal of 1798 of Bonaparte’s Italian campaign: “17th July: The French in Turin; their thirst for dominion insatiable. It is a duty to calculate what will be the moral consequences of their vicious actions.” Thomas Holcroft, The Life of Thomas Holcroft, ed. Elbridge Colby, 2 vols. ([1816] London: Constable, 1925), 2:151. He had some authority to comment on Bonaparte’s appearance, having translated J. C. Lavater’s Essays on Physiognomy in 1789. 3. Michael Hays and Anastasia Nikolopoulou, eds., Melodrama: The Cultural Emergence of a Genre (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996), viii. In the same volume, Jeffrey N. Cox, “The Ideological Tack of Nautical Melodrama,” argues that the nautical melodramas of the 1820s and 30s radicalized the form (168ff.); and Hartmut Islemann’s “Radicalism in the Melodramas of the Early Nineteenth Century” considers the politics of plays from after the French wars (191ff). 4. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, ed. James Engell and W. Jackson Bate, 2 vols. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), 2:221. 5. Cox, “The Ideological Tack of Nautical Melodrama,” 167. 6. Rohan McWilliam, “Melodrama and the Historians,” Radical History Review 78 (2000): 72. 7. Elaine Hadley, Melodramatic Tactics: Theatricalized Dissent in the English Marketplace, 1800–1885 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), 3. 8. Thomas Holcroft, The Novels and Selected Plays, ed. Wil Verhoeven, Philip Cox, Rick Incorvati, and Arnold A. Markley, 5 vols. (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2007). 9. Elbridge Colby, A Bibliography of Thomas Holcroft (New York: New York Public Library, 1922), 34–35. 10. Having been refused an original script by the manager, he could not be seen taking notes in the theater, so Holcroft and his friend Nicholas de Bonneville went to each performance and wrote a scene at a time from memory, checking it the following night; see Holcroft, Life of Thomas Holcroft 1:272–73. 11. “Afin que l’image qu’il présentera serve à lier entre eux les hommes par le sentiment victorieux de la compassion et de la pitié . . . il faut que le but moral, sans être caché ni trop offert, vienne saisir le cœur et s’y établisse avec empire.” LouisSebastien Mercier, Du théâtre; ou, Nouvel essai sur l’art dramatique (Amsterdam: van Harrevelt, 1773), 20. 12. Stéphanie Félicité, comtesse de Genlis, Théâtre à l’usage des jeunes personnes (Amsterdam: Changuion, 1779). Holcroft’s translations are Tales of the Castle (London, 1785) and Sacred Dramas (London, 1786). 13. Dom Louis Mayeul Chaudron, Mémoirs pour servir à l’histoire de M. de Voltaire (1785), published as Holcroft, Historical and Critical Memoirs of the Life and Writings of M. de Voltaire (London: Robinson, 1786). See Colby, Bibliography of Thomas Holcroft, 56; Colby also discusses the 1784 translation of Voltaire’s Mémoires as probably not by Holcroft (33). 14. Westminster Magazine 8 (1780): 121. 15. He had written a musical history play, The Noble Peasant (Haymarket Theatre, 2 August 1784) with music by William Shield, but this was before his first visit to Paris; see Holcroft, Life of Thomas Holcroft 1:265–70.

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16. Joseph Rosenblum, Thomas Holcroft: Literature and Politics in England in the Age of the French Revolution (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 1995), 24– 27. Richard Bevis has a useful chapter on the definition and prevalence of “sentimental comedy” during the Garrick era; see his The Laughing Tradition (London: George Prior, 1980), 43–63. 17. See his review of Inchbald’s Every One Has His Fault, in Monthly Review 10 (1793): 302. 18. Theatrical Recorder 1 (1805): 140. 19. See Elbridge Colby’s introduction to Holcroft, Life of Thomas Holcroft 1:xxiv– xxxv. 20. Although Holcroft claimed that his moral attitudes (egalitarian, cosmopolitan, respect for “human rights”) were based solely on Reason, he was less informed by the moral philosophy of Locke, Hume, and Smith, or by Kant and Herder, than by the Dissenting tradition and scientific bent of Priestly, Price, and David Williams. See Michael Frazer, The Enlightenment of Sympathy: Justice and the Moral Sentiments in the Eighteenth Century and Today (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010); and Rodney M. Baine, Thomas Holcroft and the Revolutionary Novel (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1965), 43–49. 21. He acknowledged that his views on religion had been much influenced by Paul Henri d’Holbach, another key figure of the French Enlightenment; see Holcroft, Life of Thomas Holcroft 2:33. 22. “Political Justice was the almost constant topic of conversation between Holcroft and myself.” See C. Kegan Paul, William Godwin: His Friends and Contemporaries, 2 vols. (London: Henry King, 1876), 1:63. 23. Mark Philp has cast doubt on the widely cited involvement of Godwin and Holcroft with The Rights of Man, pointing out that Godwin did not meet Paine until after the book’s publication in 1791; see Philp, “Godwin, Holcroft and the Rights of Man,” Enlightenment and Dissent 1 (1982): 37–42. After part 2 of The Rights of Man was published in 1792, Holcroft wrote: “Hey for the New Jerusalem! The millennium! And peace and eternal beatitude to the soul of Thomas Paine!”; see Holcroft, Life of Thomas Holcroft 1:xli. 24. Evidence of William Sharp, a member of the society; see Holcroft, Life of Thomas Holcroft 2:64–65. 25. The Deserted Daughter (Covent Garden, 2 May 1795) was attributed to Elizabeth Inchbald; He’s Much to Blame (Covent Garden, 13 February 1798) was billed as by Holcroft’s friend Fenwick; Deaf and Dumb (Drury Lane, 24 February 1801) was advertised under the name Herbert Hill. 26. As an active Girondin, Mercier was lucky to escape execution. 27. René- Charles Guilbert de Pixerécourt, “Souvenirs de la Révolution,” in Théâtre choisi de G. de Pixerécourt, ed. Charles Nodier, 4 vols. (Paris: Tresse, 1841– 43), 2:i–xxviii. 28. Marvin Carlson, The Theatre of the French Revolution (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1966), 286. See also E. Kennedy, M.-L. Netter, J. P. McGregor, and M. V. Olsen, Theatre, Opera and Audiences in Revolutionary Paris (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1996), 37, 50ff.; and George Taylor, The French Revolution and the London Stage, 1789–1805 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 76– 79, 200ff.

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29. See K. Carpenter, Refugees of the French Revolution: Émigrés in London, 1789– 1802 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999). 30. Victor; ou, L’enfant de la forêt, drame en trois actes, en prose et à grand spectacle par R. C. Guilbert-Pixerécourt (1799); see also Lynn Hunt, The Family Romance of the French Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 186–88. 31. Cœlina; ou, L’enfant du mystère, drame en trois actes, en prose et à grand spectacle par R. C. Guilbert-Pixerécour; représenté pour la premier fois sur le théâtre de l’Ambigu-Comique, le 15 fructidor, an 8 (1803). 32. “Mes amis, laissez aux lois le soin de vous venger. L’homme vertueux punit, mais il n’assassine pas” (3.11). 33. Dana Van Kooy and Jeffrey N. Cox, “Melodramatic Slaves,” Modern Drama 55, no. 4 (Winter 2012): 459–61. 34. Gabrielle Hyslop, “Pixerécourt and the French Melodrama Debate: Instructing Boulevard Theatre Audiences,” in Themes in Drama: Melodrama, ed. James Redmond (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 81. 35. Bruce McConachie, “Pixerécourt’s Early Melodramas and the Political Inducements of Neoplatonism,” in ibid., 89–99. 36. In Travels from Hamburg, through Westphalia, Holland, and the Netherlands, to Paris, 2 vols. (London: Richard Phillips, 1804), Holcroft reports for some fifty pages on the drama and performers of the Comédie Français and the Odéon (2:350– 407), merely mentioning the boulevard theaters (2:360); in his monthly periodical the Theatrical Recorder (London, 1805), rather than commenting on melodramatic pieces, he wrote articles on acting Shakespeare and anecdotes from the memoirs of Mme Clairon, the French tragedian, and Samuel Foote, the English satirist. 37. Holcroft, Travels 2:360. 38. Colby, Bibliography of Thomas Holcroft, 78. As mentioned in note 15, he had also written a historical piece, The Noble Peasant (Haymarket, 2 August 1784), with music by William Shield; see Holcroft, Life of Thomas Holcroft 1:265–70. 39. Thomas Dibdin, Reminiscences, 2 vols. (London: Henry Colburn, 1827), 1:249. 40. Holcroft, Life of Thomas Holcroft, 2:230ff. Godwin’s criticism contributed to their estrangement, as did Holcroft’s criticism of Godwin’s Antonio. 41. J. Adolphus, Memoirs of John Bannister, Comedian, 2 vols. (London: R. Bentley, 1839), 2:98–99. 42. Jean-Nicolas Bouilly, L’Abbé l’Epée (1799), drame historique en cinq actes. It had immediate political effect in agitation for the release of the current director of the Institution Nationale des Sourds- Muets, who had been imprisoned for disseminating religious tracts. See Jonathan Rée, I See a Voice: Deafness, Language and the Senses— A Philosophical History (New York: Metropolitan Books, 1999); and Kanta Kochhar-Lindgren, Hearing Difference: The Third Ear in Experimental, Deaf, and Multicultural Theatre (Washington, DC: Gallaudet University Press, 2006), chap. 2. 43. Inchbald, Such Things Are (Covent Garden, 10 February 1787), 2.4. 44. Holcroft, Deaf and Dumb (Covent Garden, 24 February 1801), 3.2. 45. Alexander Lacey, Pixerécourt and the French Romantic Drama (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1928), 19.

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46. Charles Nodier, editor’s introduction to Théâtre choisi de G. de Pixerécourt, 4 vols. (Paris: Tresse, 1841–43), 1:vii–viii. 47. See note 14. 48. For instance, in Hear Both Sides, which he had completed while in France and which was presented at Drury Lane (27 January 1803), the apparently villainous lawyer Fairfax concludes: “Restitution, justice, honour, and dear affection, are my avenging deities! These are my daggers; and, as they strike, all my anger vanishes. . . . To mistake is the lot of man: since then errors are not to be avoided, may they be pardoned, and forgotten.” 49. Times, 15 November 1802. 50. Simon Shepherd and Peter Womack, English Drama: A Cultural History (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), 200. 51. John Walker, The Factory Lad (Surrey Theatre, 1832), in Michael Booth, English Plays of the Nineteenth Century, vol. 1 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969), 201. Booth describes the play as “exceptional for a melodrama in having no comic relief and an unhappy ending. Its radical social consciousness is advanced even for socially aware domestic melodrama” (204). 52. The music was by Dr. Thomas Busby, a scholarly composer and church organist who in 1801 had composed the “secular oratorio” Britannia, celebrating English victories. In March 1802 he composed music for Matthew Lewis’s monodrama The Captive, which so upset the Drury Lane audience that it lasted but one night. The Monthly Mirror reported that “Dr Busby’s music was admirably adapted to the action and the character of the subject and displayed great depth of science and knowledge of effect,” cited in Jeffrey N. Cox, Seven Gothic Dramas (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1992), 227. The main function of his music for the Tale of Mystery was to accompany Francisco’s gesturing and the climactic action of the finale, of which he wrote “the powers of instrumental music are employed to elucidate the action and heighten the passion of the piece”; K. G. F. Spence, “The Learned Doctor Busby” Music and Letters 37 (1956): 147. 53. See Peter Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976), 57ff. Pre-Revolutionary scientists had researched aspects of physical expression: J. C. Lavater’s Essays in Phisiognomy (1772), which Holcroft had translated in 1789; J. J. Engels’s Mimick (1785) on rules of gesture; and, to be published in 1806, Charles Bell’s Anatomy and Philosophy of Expression. See Taylor, The French Revolution and the London Stage, 144, and the same author’s Players and Performances in the Victorian Theatre (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1989), 37–50. 54. Theodore was played by Maria-Theresa de Camp, a notable dancer who regularly played breeches roles; Francisco was played by Charles Farley, a deviser of pantomimes who acted with Joseph Grimaldi. 55. Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination, 9. 56. Peter Brooks, “Melodrama, Body, Revolution,” in Melodrama: Stage, Picture, Screen, ed. Jacky Bratton, Jim Cook, and Christine Gledhill (London: British Film Institute, 1994), 19. 57. E. Ann Kaplan, Trauma Culture: The Politics of Terror and Loss in Media and Literature (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2005), 72; Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (London: Methuen, 1981).

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58. Katherine Astbury, Narrative Responses to the Trauma of the French Revolution (Oxford: Legenda, 2012). 59. Marilyn May, “Publish and Perish: William Godwin, Mary Shelley, and the Public Appetite for Scandal,” Papers on Language and Literature 26, no. 4 (1990): 489. 60. On 26 February 1799 Holcroft had written to the Commissioners for Income: “My income has been the produce of my labour; and the produce has been so reduced by the animosity of party spirit that I find myself obliged to sell my effects for the payment of my debts, that I may leave the kingdom till party spirit shall subside.” Holcroft, Life of Thomas Holcroft, 2:248. 61. This is often quoted without proper citation. The earliest version I have traced is in A. de Rochefort, Mémoires d’un vaudevilliste (Paris: Charlieu & Huillery, 1863), 172. He relates that when questioned on the quality of his dialogue, Pixérècourt answered: “You’re right, but there is some language that the people [le peuple] do not understand; remember, I was writing for people [les gens] who can’t read!” In “Le mélodrame,” in Paris; ou, Le livre des cent-et-un, vol. 6 (Paris: Ladvocat, 1832), Pixérècourt had defined le peuple in his audiences as “artisans, shopkeepers, and workers.” 62. J. J. Rousseau, Julie; ou, La Nouvelle Héloïse, cited in Marshall Berman, The Politics of Authenticity (London: Verso, 1971), 115–17.

Chapter 9 1. “The piece I saw was Benda’s ‘Medea.’ He has composed another one, ‘Ariadne auf Naxos,’ and both are really excellent. You know that of all the Lutheran Kapellmeisters Benda has always been my favourite, and I like those two works of his so much that I carry them about with me. . . . I think that most operatic recitatives should be treated in this way— and only sung occasionally, when the words can be perfectly expressed by the music.” Mozart’s letter to his father, Mannheim, 12 November 1778, in Emily Anderson, ed. and trans., The Letters of Mozart and His Family, 3rd ed. (London: Macmillan, 1997), 631. 2. Carolyn Abbate and Roger Parker, A History of Opera: The Last 400 Years (London: Allen Lane, 2012), 163. 3. Das Gemälde der Natur in Form eines Monodram: Musik und Text verfertigt bey Gelegenheit der Wasserüberschwemmung in Linz, und aufgeführt zum Besten der dasigen durchs Wasser unglücklich gewordenen Armen wie auch gegenwärtig im Clavierauszug herausgegeben und Ihrer Koeniglichen Hoheit der Prinzessin Friedericke von Preussen Pröbstin zu Quedlinburg, allerunterthänigst zugeeignet von Maria Magdalena Kauth gebohrne Gräff (Berlin: n.p., 1789). 4. Dorinda Outram, Panorama of the Enlightenment (London: Thames & Hudson, 2006), 19. 5. Amanda Vickery, The Gentleman’s Daughter: Women’s Lives in Georgian England (New Haven: Yale Nota Bene, 2003), 10. 6. Elizabeth Eger, “Luxury, Industry and Charity: Bluestocking Culture Displayed,” in Luxury in the Eighteenth Century: Debates, Desires and Delectable Goods, ed. Maxine Berg and Elizabeth Eger (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 190– 206, here 195.

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7. Cited in Carolyn D. Williams, “ ‘The Luxury of Doing Good’: Benevolence, Sensibility, and the Royal Humane Society,” in Pleasure in the Eighteenth Century, ed. Roy Porter and Marie Mulvey Roberts (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1996), 77–107, here 85. Williams’s essay is also the source of my reference to Hobbes, Shaftesbury, and Mandeville. 8. Michael Rosenthal and Martin Myrone, eds., Gainsborough (London: Tate, 2002), 224. 9. Sophie von La Roche, Die Geschichte des Fräuleins von Sternheim, trans. as The History of Lady Sophia Sternheim, ed. James Lynn (London: Pickering & Chatto, 1991). This edition is based on the contemporary translation by Joseph Collyer (d. 1776). 10. Lynn, introduction to La Roche, Lady Sophia Sternheim, xxii, xxv. 11. Outram, Panorama of the Enlightenment, 18. 12. The classic study of sympathetic identification is Michael Fried, Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980; rpt. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1988). For an application to theater history, see Stefano Castelvecchi, Sentimental Opera: Questions of Genre in the Age of Bourgeois Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 150–57, 178–79. The locution “age of sensibility” was coined by Northrop Frye, “Towards Defining an Age of Sensibility,” ELH 23, no. 2 ( June 1956): 144–52; G. J. Barker-Benfield argues for a “culture” in The Culture of Sensibility: Sex and Society in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). 13. Outram, Panorama of the Enlightenment, 19–20. 14. Barker-Benfield, The Culture of Sensibility, xvii. 15. That earlier habit dies hard. James Webster expounds periodization based on formal features of music as a form of current knowledge; see his “The Eighteenth Century as a Music-Historical Period?” Eighteenth-Century Music 1 (2004): 46–60. Inevitably, sensibility appears as a short-lived phase in that formulation. 16. Distancing himself from such analysis— in which sensibility is more an obstacle than a binding force in the emergence of a bourgeois public sphere— Gerhard Sauder documents the importance of “harmony, sympathy, compassion, and sincerity”; see Sauder, Empfindsamkeit: Voraussetzungen und Elemente (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1974), cited in Jochen Barkhausen, Die Vernunft des Sentimentalismus: Untersuchungen zur Entstehung der Empfindsamkeit und empfindsamen Komödie in England (Tübingen: G. Narr, 1983), 85. 17. Annette Richards, The Free Fantasia and the Musical Picturesque (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), chap. 5, “Sentiment Undone: Solitude and the Clavichord Cult,” 145–82. 18. On songs “An mein Klavier,” see J. W. Smeed, “ ‘Süssertönendes Klavier’: Tributes to the Early Piano in Poetry and Song,” Music and Letters 66, no. 3 ( July 1985): 228–40; Richards, The Free Fantasia, 155–71; and Matthew Head, Sovereign Feminine: Music and Gender in Eighteenth-Century Germany (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013), 52–53. 19. Darrell Berg, “Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach und die ‘empfindsame Weise,’ ” in Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach und die europäische Musikkultur des mittleren 18. Jahrhunderts, ed. Hans Joachim Marx (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1997), 93–105.

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20. Heinrich Christoph Koch, Introductory Essay on Composition, vol. 2, pt. 1 (1787), in Aesthetics and the Art of Musical Composition in the German Enlightenment, trans. and ed. Nancy Kovaleff Baker and Thomas Christensen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 144. On music’s elevated place in the culture of sensibility, see Matthew Head, “Fantasia; Sensibility,” in The Oxford Handbook of Topic Theory, ed. Danuta Mirka (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 259–78. 21. Charles Burney, The Present State of Music in France and Italy: or, The Journal of a Tour through Those Countries (London: T. Becket, 1771), 4–5. Charity is a large and underresearched area of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century musical practice, better known today in English than in German contexts. See Denis Arnold, “Charity Music in Eighteenth-Century Dublin,” Galpin Society Journal 21 (1968): 162–74; and Nicholas Temperley, “Croft and the Charity Hymn,” Musical Times 119, no. 1624 ( June 1978): 539–41. 22. Lydia Goehr, The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works: An Essay in the Philosophy of Music (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992). The notion of charity as the “sovereign” value of the period is from Sarah Lloyd, “Pleasing Spectacles and Elegant Dinners: Conviviality, Benevolence, and Charity Anniversaries in Eighteenth-Century London,” Journal of British Studies 41, no. 1 ( January 2002): 23–57. The intersection of charity and the rise of a musical canon is noted by William Weber, with reference to Handel commemoration concerts, in The Rise of Musical Classics in Eighteenth-Century England: A Study in Canon, Ritual, and Ideology (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992). 23. Barbara Wiermann, ed., Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach: Dokumente zu Leben und Wirken aus der zeitgenössischen Hamburgischen Presse (1767–1790), Leipziger Beiträge zur Bach-Forschung 4 (Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 2000), 449–50, 469–70. The concerts of 1776 and 1777 are noted in Hans-Günter Ottenberg, C. P. E. Bach, trans. Philip J. Whitmore (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 123. 24. Johann Georg Sulzer, “Sentiment [Empfindung],” from Allgemeine Theorie der schönen Künste (1771–74), trans. Thomas Christensen, in Baker and Christensen, Aesthetics and the Art of Musical Composition, 27–32, here 28 and 31. 25. Ibid., 31. 26. Koch, Introductory Essay on Composition, 150. 27. Gustav Friedrich Wilhelm Grossmann in Magazin zur Geschichte des Deutschen Theaters (1773), ed. J. J. A. von Hagen, cited in Thomas Bauman, North German Opera in the Age of Goethe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 102. 28. Thomas Bauman, “Schweitzer, Anton,” Grove Music Online, http://www .oxfordmusiconline.com (accessed 3 June 2014). 29. On Gotter’s reworking of Medea as more mother than witch, see Jason Geary, The Politics of Appropriation: German Romantic Music and the Ancient Greek Legacy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 108. 30. My translation is based on the dual language (French and German) version with music for keyboard published by Leipzig: Schwickert, n.d., at http://imslp.org /wiki/File:PMLP132583-benda-ariadne_ger.pdf. 31. Ibid. 32. [ Johann Friedrich Reichardt], Musikalischer und Künstler- Almanach auf das Jahr 1783 (Alethinopel, c. 1783), 101–34, here 122, 101, respectively; my translation.

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33. Ibid., 102. 34. Ibid., 101. 35. Ibid., 106. 36. For an overview of the function of music in melodrama, see Sarah Hibberd and Nanette Nielsen, “Music in Melodrama: ‘The Burden of Ineffable Expression’?” Nineteenth Century Theatre and Film 29, no. 2 (2002): 30–39. 37. Anon., ‘Inländische Begebenheiten,’ Wiener Zeitung 10 (Wednesday, 4 February 1789): 265–67. 38. Roman Sandgruber, ‘Hochwasser in Oberösterreich,’ in Oberösterreichische Nachrichten, 16 August 2008, http:// www.ooegeschichte.at /themen /wir-oberoesterreicher/wir-oberoesterreicher/hochwasser-in-oberoesterreich (accessed 10 June 2014). Today, research into historical floods affecting conurbations along the Danube is pursued in the names of both local history and global warming. For an example of the local-history angle, see Johann Eggerstorfer, “Hochwasser 2013— ein Jahrhunderthochwasser?” in Gemeindenachrichten: Aschach an der Donau (a local government newsletter), November 2013 (Aschach: Oliver Grünseis, 2013), 9–10. Aschach, which lies fourteen miles northwest of Linz, was also affected by the floods of 1789. 39. Rousseau, cited from Karol Berger, Bach’s Cycle, Mozart’s Arrow: An Essay on the Origins of Musical Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 152. 40. A report in the Intelligenz Blatt of Frankfurt am Main, 7 November 1764, describes a child prodigy in concert, one “Maria Magdalena Graff.” See Maria Belli-Gontard, Leben in Frankfurt am Main: Auszüge der Frag- und AnzeigungsNachrichten (des Intelligenz-Blattes) von ihrer Entstehung an im Jahre 1722 bis 1821 (Offenbach am Main: F. Krähe, 1850), also cited in Hanna Bergmann and Jannis Wichmann, “Gräf, Gräff, Maria Magdalena, verh. Kauth,” Sophie Drinker Institute, dir. Freie Hoffmann, http://www.sophie-drinker-institut.de/cms/index.php/graef -maria-magdalena. On the title page of two publications, Kauth gave her maiden name as “Graeff” and “Gräff,” a close enough match with the above report for plausibility. Something of Kauth’s context can be reconstructed from the title pages of these two publications. In this regard, not Gemälde but the later Danses des muses: Consistant en 3. menuets, 3. angloises & 3. allemandes à plusieurs instruments ( J. J. Hummel: Berlin and Amsterdam, [c. 1791]) proves a richer source. This commemorative publication is dedicated to two noble couples on the occasion of their marriages in Berlin (which, taking place in late 1790 and 1791, provide the earliest date of this undated publication). Such dedication ordinarily required royal permission; it is reasonable to assume that Kauth was known to or in some way connected with (one or more of) the dedicatees. They were “Son altesse royale Msgr. Le Duc de York Evêque d’Osnabruck” (that is, Prince Frederick Duke of York and Albany, second son of George III of Great Britain) and his bride (and first cousin) “S. A. R. Madame la Princesse Fréderique de Prusse” (that is, Princess Frederica Charlotte of Prussia, daughter of Frederick William II and his first wife, Elisabeth Christine of Brunswick-Lüneberg); and “Son Altesse Seren. Msgr. Le Prince heréditaire D’Orange” (William I, born Willem Frederik Prins van Orange- Nassau) and his bride “S. A. R. Madame la Princesse Guillelmine de Prusse” (being his first cousin the Prussian princess Friederike Luise Wilhelmine). Among this rather intricate

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network of Prussian, Dutch, and Hannoverian aristocracy, one name—“Princesse Fréderique de Prusse”— is familiar from the title page of Gemälde, which (published two years earlier) bears a dedication to the then unmarried “Prinzessin Friedericke von Preussen, Pröbstin zu Quedlinburg” (that is, she was a member of the female order of the Abbey of Quedlinburg, in the Harz Mountains of today’s Anhalt-Saxony). It would appear, then, that Kauth’s connection was with this particular royal personage (who also subscribed to Gemälde, the work dedicated to her alone). On both title pages, Kauth styles herself a married woman and omits any mention of a court position (which would usually be mentioned on a composer’s title page). It seems unlikely that she was a court or church musician (which would have meant, to all intents and purposes, being a professional singer). How then did she become musically connected with German nobility? One possibility, which returns us to the spelling of her maiden name, is that she was the daughter of a court musician, employed by young female nobility (who, for reasons of decorum, sometimes had a preference for a female music teacher). The surname Gräff (as she spelled it— or Graff in the Intelligenz Blatt) recalls a family of German musicians of the period, headed by Johann Graf (also spelled Graff), a violinist and Kapellmeister from 1739 until his death in 1750 at the court of SchwarzburgRudolstadt. The best known of his musical sons was Christian Ernst, who was employed by Prince William V of Orange at the Dutch court in The Hague from 1766 to 1790. William V of Orange was the father of one of the dedicatees of Kauth’s Danses des muses (William I, born Willem Frederik Prins van Orange-Nassau). Although the differing spellings of the last name (Gräff versus Graf[f]) rule out certainty, I would speculate that Kauth was born to this family, and that she may have been the daughter (or much younger sister) of Christian Ernst Graf (1723–1801). The connection with him specifically is suggested by more than just his employment by Prince William V of Orange. He also dedicated his Op. 8 to the bride of William I (who of course appears on Kauth’s title page for the Danses des muses). Christian Ernst, like Kauth, published with Hummel in Berlin and Amsterdam. (In passing, I would suggest that the unsubstantiated reference in Gerber’s Lexikon to a young Hummel playing a keyboard concerto by Kauth is probably a mistake; the Danses des muses— despite its title-page reference “à plusieurs Instruments”— was published as solo keyboard music by Hummel). See Ernst Ludwig Gerber, Neues historisch-biographisches Lexicon der Tonkünstler (1812–14), 3 vols., rpt. ed. Othmar Wessely, 3 vols. (Graz: Akademische Druck- und Verlagsanstalt, 1966), 2:23–24. 41. The translation is my own. The original German score is available at http:// digital.staatsbibliothek-berlin.de/werkansicht?PPN=PPN889123551&PHYSID= PHYS_001&DMDID=. 42. See Barker-Benfield, The Culture of Sensibility, 262–68. 43. A formal history of Quedlinburg is available in Peter Kasper, Das Reichsstift Quedlinburg (936–1810): Konzept— Zeitbezug— Systemwechsel (Göttingen: V&R Unipress, 2013). 44. For example, Johann Albrecht Fabricius, Hydrotheologie; oder, Versuch durch aufmerksame Betrachtung der Eigenschaften, reichen Austheilung und Bewegung der Wasser (Hamburg: König und Richter, 1734). See also Manfred JakubowskiTiessen, “Gotteszorn und Meereswüten: Deutungen von Sturmfluten vom 16. bis 19. Jahrhundert,” in Naturkatastrophen: Beiträge zu ihrer Deutung, Wahrnehmung und

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Darstellung in Text und Bild von der Antike bis ins 20. Jahrhundert, ed. Dieter Groh, Michael Kempe, and Franz Mauelshagen (Tübingen: Narr, 2003) 101–18. 45. Richard Will, The Characteristic Symphony in the Age of Haydn and Beethoven (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 180–81. 46. Music as a component of mental imagery is discussed more fully in Deirdre Loughridge, “Haydn’s Creation as an Optical Entertainment,” Journal of Musicology 27, no. 1 (Winter 2010): 9–54. As Thomas Betzwieser explores in chapter 7 of this volume, there was no fixed role for music in early melodramas. Discussing Peter von Winter’s music for Lenardo und Blandine, he shows that the score sometimes describes the gestures and movements of the actors, movements of the body that— like music— were taken as natural signs of internal passions. In other passages, however, music calms and mediates the extremes and contrasts of sentiment conveyed by passionate speech. 47. Johann Jakob Engel, Über die musikalische Malerey (1780), in Strunk’s Source Readings in Music History, rev. ed., vol. 5, The Late Eighteenth Century, ed. Wye Jamison Allanbrook (New York: W. W. Norton, 1998), 220–31. The reference to the lion’s roar appears at 221. 48. Ibid., 222. 49. That reductio ad absurdum was not recommended by the originator of the theory of topics, Leonard Ratner; see his Classic Music: Expression, Form, and Style (New York: Schirmer, 1980), chap. 2, 9–30, which refers topics primarily to “ideas of expression” and (more lightly) to social rank and cultural themes. It was, however, pursued under the guise of a development of Ratner’s theory by V. Kofi Agawu in Playing with Signs: A Semiotic Interpretation of Classic Music (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991). 50. See William Weber, “Did People Listen in the Eighteenth Century?” Early Music 25, no. 4 (November 1997): 678–91. 51. Johann Friedrich Reichardt, Briefe eines aufmerksamen Reisenden die Musik betreffend, vol. 1 (Frankfurt: n.p., 1774), 18–19 52. “All representations of the passions in the soul are inseparably bound up with certain corresponding movements in the nervous system. . . . But it is not just that these corresponding natural vibrations arise in the body when the representations of the passions have already been stimulated in the soul; these representations also arise in the soul if the related vibrations are already produced in the body. The action is reciprocal: the same path that runs from the soul into the body runs back from the body into the soul.” Engel, Über die musikalische Malerey, 224. 53. For a brilliant way into these issues, see Emma J. Clery, “The Pleasure of Terror: Paradox in Edumund Burke’s Theory of the Sublime,” in Porter and Roberts, Pleasure in the Eighteenth Century, 164–81. 54. Engel, Über die musikalische Malerey, 224.

Chapter 10 1. “Cet hymne immense de reconnaissance et d’adoration s’élevant ver le ciel avec l’encens qui fume, le bruit de l’airan qui tonne, le son des cloches de toutes les églises; ces souverains entourés de leurs brilliants états- majors, ces uniformes varies, ces armes, ces cuirasses, ce bronze de l’artillarie, étincelant au soleil, ce prêtre

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en cheveux blancs bénissant du haut d’un autel la foule prosternée, ce mélange de guerre et de religion, formaient un tableau unique, qui peut-être ne se renouvellera pas, que la pinceau ne peut render, un scène poétique et sublime au-dessus de tout description.” Comte Auguste de la Garde-Chambonas, Souvenirs du Congrès de Vienne, 1814–1815, ed. le comte Fleury (Paris: Librairie Émile-Paul, 1904), 24–25. 2. See Nicholas Mathew, Political Beethoven (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), chap. 2. 3. De la Garde, Souvenirs, 24. 4. György von Gaal, Friedenshymne den drey erhabenen Monarchen ihren Majestäten Franz I, Alexander I, und Friedrich Wilhelm III (Vienna: Strauss, 1814). 5. On 1809, see Walter Langsam, The Napoleonic Wars and German Nationalism in Austria (New York: Columbia University Press, 1930), esp. 100–102; Mathew, Political Beethoven, 163–64; and Stephen Rumph, Beethoven after Napoleon: Political Romanticism in the Late Works (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), chap. 4. 6. “Non, jamais l’oreille humaine n’endendit rien de plus imposant que ces milliers de voix, qui n’en faisaient qu’une pour célébrer le bienfait de la paix et la gloire du Tout-Puissant.” De la Garde, Souvenirs, 24. 7. See David King, Vienna, 1814: How the Conquerors of Napoleon Made Love, War, and Peace at the Congress of Vienna (New York: Harmony Books, 2008), 110; and Dorothy Gies McGuigan, Metternich and the Duchess (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1975), 365–67. 8. Contemporary descriptions of these details include Carl Bertuch, Tagebuch von Wiener Kongress (Berlin: Gebrüder Paetel, 1916), 35; Matthias Franz Perth, Wiener Kongresstagebuch, 1814–1815 (Vienna: Jugend & Volk, 1981), 58–60; and Friedrich Anton von Schönholz, Traditionen zur Charakteristik Österreichs, seiner Staatsund Volkslebens unter Franz I, vol. 2 (Munich: Müller, 1914), 105–6. See also King, Vienna, 1814, 110–11. 9. See Gunther Rothenberg, Napoleon’s Great Adversary: Archduke Charles and the Austrian Army, 1792–1814 (Stroud: Spellmount, 2007), 236. 10. See ibid., 21, 49–50, 237, and 242–43. 11. Friedrich Starke, “Selbstgespräch eines Bauernmädschens nach der Schlacht bei Leipzig” (Vienna: Traeg, 1814). 12. See Michael Ladenburger, “Der Wiener Kongreß im Spiegel der Musik,” in Beethoven zwischen Revolution und Restauration, ed. Helga Lühning and Sieghard Brandenburg (Bonn: Beethoven-Haus, 1989), 275–306; and Mathew, Political Beethoven, 85–89. 13. Ladenburger, “Der Wiener Kongreß”; Mathew, Political Beethoven, 12–13. 14. Adalbert Gyrowetz, Sieges- und Friedens-Fest der verbündeten Monarchen (Vienna: Thadé Weigl, 1814). 15. Anton Diabelli and Friedrich August Kanne, Der 18te October, oder das große militärische Prater-Fest in Wien (Vienna: Steiner, 1814). 16. Anton Schindler, Beethoven as I Knew Him (1860), trans. Constance S. Jolly (London: Faber & Faber, 1966), 169; Mathew, Political Beethoven, 83 17. See the list of compositions of this sort in Mathew, Political Beethoven, Appendix. 18. Ibid., 85–89.

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19. Friedrich August Kanne, Die Schlacht von Belle-Alliance, oder Hermanns Herabkunft aus Walhalla (Vienna: Artaria, 1815). Dedicated to “the immortal heroes and victors.” 20. See Friedrich Schiller, “On Bürger’s Poems,” in Eighteenth-Century German Criticism, ed. Timothy J. Chamberlain (New York: Continuum, 1992), esp. 265–67; and Johann Adolf Grohmann, “Briefe über Gelegenheitsgedichte,” Der neue teutsche Merkur 6 (1794): 105–41. 21. Anne Janowitz, “The Artifactual Sublime: Making London Poetry,” in Romantic Metropolis: The Urban Scene of British Culture, 1780–1840, ed. James Chandler and Kevin Gilmartin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 246–60. 22. Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), esp. chaps. 12–14. 23. Richard Bright, Travels from Vienna through Lower Hungary: With Some Remarks on the State of Vienna during the Congress, in the Year 1814 (Edinburgh: Archibald Constable, 1818), 32. 24. “Errinnerung an die vielen glücklich überstandenen Gefahren”; “Lebhafte Rückerinnerung an das Getümmel der schrecklichen Schlacht.” 25. “Mit süssem Angedenken diese heil’gen Tages”; “Des Friedens Sonne wird nun auf uns gehen, den grössten Freudentag hab’ ich gesehen.” 26. See Golo Mann, Secretary of Europe: The Life of Friedrich Gentz, Enemy of Napoleon, trans. William H. Woglom (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1946). On the belief in the dangerously irrational collective sentiment of the Revolutionary mob in this period, see Mary Fairclough, The Romantic Crowd: Sympathy, Controversy and Print Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), esp. chap. 2. 27. See Fairclough on sympathy as mediation in The Romantic Crowd, chap. 3. 28. See Michael Jahn, Die Wiener Hofoper von 1810 bis 1836: Das Kärnthnerthortheater als Hofoper (Vienna: Der Apfel, 2007), 534. On Die Schweizer Familie, see John Rice, “German Opera in Vienna around 1800: Joseph Weigl and Die Schweizer Familie,” in Oper in Aufbruch: Gattungskonzepte des deutschsprachigen Musiktheaters um 1800, ed. Marcus Chr. Lippe (Kassel: Gustav Bosse, 2007), 313–22; and Mathew, Political Beethoven, 164–66. 29. “Ihr Werk ist dies alles, Herr Graf! Um mir den Aufenthalt hier erträglich zu machen, sucht er Erinnerungen in meiner Seele zu wecken.” 30. On musical recollection and memory in the melodrama from Die Schweizer Familie, see also Christiane Plank, Die Melodramatische Szene in der Oper des 19. Jahrhunderts: Eine musikdramatische Ausdrucksform (Munich: Herbert Utz, 2005), 101–4. 31. See Mathew, Political Beethoven, 153–54, 165. 32. The other most frequently performed melodrama on the operatic stage in 1814 was the gothic opening of the grave-digging scene of Beethoven’s revised Fidelio, which had one of its many performances of the Congress on the evening of 18 October 1814. There is a comparable, if more subtle, oscillation between interior and exterior worlds here, as the coldness of the dungeon is made continuous with Leonore’s internal tremors, silent prayers, and memories— a series of musical palpitations, sentimental sighs, and fragments of nostalgic oboe melody. Plank discusses this scene under the rubric of “inner and outer action” in Die Melodramatische Szene, 155–61.

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33. “Triumphgesänge, und kriegerische Lieder schallen durch die Strassen”; “Des Volkes jauchzende Menge strömmt in freudiger Eile hinab an den Ufern der grünen Donau.” 34. “Laut tönen ihre lieder, die sie in die Schlacht geführt.” 35. “Auf meiner hohen Gäst’ und Freunden Wohl! Dank meinen Tapfern und braven Führern!” 36. “Ein ländlicher Leyersmann mischt sich in die frohen Reihen.” 37. “Ausserordentliches Freudengeschrey beym Anblick Sr Majestät des Kaiser franz.” 38. Cited and translated in H. C. Robbins Landon, Haydn Chronicle and Works, vol. 4 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1977), 248. 39. “Ein tausendstimmiges Lebehoch ertönnt bey Ansicht der verbündeten Monarchen”; “Die Gesundheit der Befreyer Europens, wird von den hohen verbündeten Monarchen ausgebracht.” 40. Bright, Travels from Vienna, 22. 41. Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung 17 (December 1815), col. 854. 42. Franz Weidmann, Gedichte (Vienna: Wallishausser, 1815). 43. See Mathew, Political Beethoven, 114–15. 44. Peter Brooks, “Body and Voice in Melodrama and Opera,” in Siren Songs: Representations of Gender and Sexuality in Opera, ed. Mary Ann Smart (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 118–34. 45. See Langsam, German Nationalism in Austria, 56. 46. See also Mathew, Political Beethoven, 79–89. 47. Cited in The Congress of Vienna: An Eyewitness Account, ed. Hilde Spiel, trans. Richard H. Weber (London: Chilton Book Company, 1968), 80. 48. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), esp. chap. 7. 49. Ibid., 101. 50. “Verstummt ihr Freudenrufe; schweiget ihr Feuerschlünde; denn sie knien vor dem Altare hin in Demuth, dem Höchsten ihren Dank zu bringen.” 51. An example of what I have elsewhere called the “Volksjubel topos.” See Mathew, Political Beethoven, 156–67. 52. Later, though, most sources would pair the poem with the more famous hunt-topos tune of Carl Maria von Weber’s “Lützow’s Wilde Jagd”— one of his 1815 settings, for male chorus, of patriotic poems from Theodor Körner’s Leyer und Schwert. See Deutsche Lieder für Jung und Alt, ed. Lisa Feurzeig (Middleton, WI: A-R Editions, 2002), 119. 53. Dominique de Pradt, Du Congrès de Vienne, vol. 1 (Paris: Delaunay, 1815), 2, 4. 54. Introduction to “Letter to D’Alembert” and Writings for the Theater, vol. 10 of Collected Writings of Rousseau, ed. and trans. Allan Bloom, Charles Butterworth, and Christopher Kelly (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 2004), xxv.

Afterword 1. Ulrike Küster, Das Melodrama: Zum ästhetikgeschichtlichen Zusammenhang von Dichtung und Musik im 18.Jahrhundert (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1994),

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217; Andrew D. McCredie, “Leitmotive: Wagner’s Points of Departure and Their Antecedents,” Miscellanea Musicologica 14 (1985): 1–28. 2. “Si l’état des personnages est inconnu, le spectateur ne pourra prendre à l’action plus d’intérêt que les personnages: mais l’intérêt redoublera pour le spectateur, s’il est assez instruit.” Denis Diderot, De la poésie dramatique, in Œuvres esthétiques, ed. Paul Vernière (Paris: Garnier, 1988), 229; my translation. 3. Peter Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), 4. 4. “Mais le langage le plus énergique est celui où le signe a tout dit avant qu’on parle. . . . Ainsi l’on parle aux yeux bien mieux qu’aux oreilles.” Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Essai sur l’origine des langues in Œuvres complètes, vol. 5, Écrits sur la musique, la langue et le théâtre, ed. Bernard Gagnebin, Marcel Raymond, et al. (Paris: Gallimard, 1995), 376–77; English translation, Essay on the Origin of Languages and Writings Related to Music, trans. and ed. John T. Scott, vol. 7 of The Collected Writings of Rousseau (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1998), 290–91. 5. I develop this in my forthcoming Music and the Melodramatic Hybrid: From Rousseau to Schoenberg, trans. Steven Huebner (Rochester, NY: Rochester University Press, 2018), a revised and expanded English translation of my French monograph En musique dans le texte: Le mélodrame, de Rousseau à Schoenberg (Paris: Van Dieren, 2005). 6. Linda Williams, Playing the Race Card: Melodramas of Black and White from Uncle Tom to O. J. Simpson (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 17. 7. “Nous parlons trop dans nos drames; et, conséquemment, nos acteurs n’y jouent pas assez.” Deuxième entretien sur Le fils naturel, in Diderot, Œuvres esthétiques, 100. 8. For a thorough discussion of this shepherd’s pipe melody and its narratological implications, see Laura Tunbridge, “Schumann’s Manfred in the Mental Theatre,” Cambridge Opera Journal 15, no. 2 (2003): 153–83. 9. On melodrama as a reaction to the exacerbated tensions between melos and logos in opera, see my “Rousseau’s Pygmalion and the Limits of (Operatic) Expression,” in Performing Premodernity: Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, ed. Michael O’Dea and Maria Gullstam (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2017), 103–15. 10. Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination, 46.

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Contributors

Barbara Babić Institut für Musikwissenschaft Universität Wien 1090 Wien Austria Thomas Betzwieser Institut für Musikwissenschaft Goethe-Universität 60325 Frankfurt am Main Germany James Chandler Department of English Language and Literature The University of Chicago Chicago, IL 60637 USA Katherine Hambridge Department of Music University of Durham Durham DH13RL UK Matthew Head Music Department King’s College London London WC2R 2LS UK

266

Contributors

Jens Hesselager Department of Arts and Cultural Studies University of Copenhagen Karen Blixens Vej 1 DK-2300 Copenhagen S Denmark Sarah Hibberd Department of Music University of Bristol Victoria Rooms, Queens Road Bristol B88 UK Jonathan Hicks School of Arts and Cultures Newcastle University Newcastle upon Tyne NE1 7RU UK Ellen Lockhart Faculty of Music University of Toronto Toronto, Ontario M5S 2C5 Nicholas Mathew Department of Music University of California, Berkeley Berkeley, CA 94720-1200 USA Diego Saglia Dipartimento di Discipline Umanistiche, Sociali e delle Imprese Culturali Università Degli Studi di Parma Parma Italy

Contributors

George Taylor Department of Drama University of Manchester Manchester M13 9PL UK Jacqueline Waeber Department of Music Duke University Durham, NC 27708 USA

267

Index

A!A!A! (Abel Hugo, Armand Malitourne, and Jean-Joseph Ader), Traité du mélodrame, 8, 20, 63, 135, 209n21 absorption, 82, 90, 156, 168–69, 188; and cinema, x. See also spectatorship acting theory/style, 37, 95–96, 102–5; Diderot, 192; Engel, 102–3, 236n53; Goez, 102–4. See also gesture; naturalness adaptation, xii, 2, 4, 12–14, 30, 32, 43– 45, 50, 53, 55, 59, 67, 72, 74, 75, 143– 47, 216n28 Adelphi Theatre (London), 53 Ader, Jean-Joseph. See A!A!A! (Abel Hugo, Armand Malitourne, and Jean-Joseph Ader) Adorno, Theodor W., 32 Alaux, Jen-Pierre-Noël, 84–85, 87–88, 223n31, 223nn33–35, 224n38, 224n43 Alexander I (tsar), 172 Alexandre, Madame, Le Lévite d’Ephraïm, 69 Alfred (Michel Pichat), Ali-Pacha, 224n43 Allévy, Marie-Antoinette, 85 Amédée, Les Machabées, 63, 69, 72 America, x, 1, 12–13, 41 Amherst, J. H., The Murderer, 54–55 Amiens, Peace/Treaty of, 14, 45, 48– 49, 58, 137, 141 Angiolini, Gasparo, 36 animation, 28, 31–32, 41, 83, 194

Année, Antoine, Le premier Homme du monde, 214n8 aria, 10, 19, 35, 39, 73, 75 Arnold, Samuel James: The King’s Proxy, 52; The Maid and the Magpie, 52 Arnould-Mussot, Jean-François, La forêt noire, 33 Aspa, Mario, Il quadro parlante e la muta orfanella, 42 Asplmayr, Franz, Pygmalion, 36 atheism, 139–40, 147 attitudes, 32, 33, 103, 111, 112, 118, 147, 193. See also gesture Attwood, Thomas, The Old Clothes Man, 143 Auber, Daniel, 23; La muette de Portici, 193 audience, 4, 16, 17, 19, 22–24, 27, 30, 34, 39, 46, 51, 53, 55, 61, 65, 75, 77–78, 79, 81, 101, 112, 118, 121–29, 133, 136, 141, 143, 148, 149, 152, 161, 162, 166–67, 185, 192–93, 237n61. See also spectatorship Augsburg, 96–112 aural tag, 118, 129–31, 133, 192 Austria, 15, 62, 65, 67, 156, 172–73 Autorama (Paris), 83 avalanche, 81, 225n54 Avison, Charles, 151 Bach, Carl Philipp Emanuel, 157; Die Israeliten in der Wüste, 158

270

Bach, Johann Sebastian, h-moll Messe, 158 Baillie, Joanna, The Family Legend, 46 ballad opera, 19 ballet, 12, 14, 17, 28, 29, 36, 44, 45, 61, 65, 74, 88, 236n54; ballet d’action, 10; ballet-pantomime, 36, 105, 223n31 Balzac, Honoré de, xi, 26 Bannister, John, 144 Baour-Lormian, Pierre, Omasis, 62 Barker, Robert, 82, 222nn23–24 baroque theater, 80, 102 Barré, Pierre-Yves: La chaste Suzanne, 63, 214n4; La Récréation du monde, suite de la Création, 68, 214n8; Omazette, 62 Beaumarchais, Pierre-Augustin Caron de, Le mariage de Figaro, 52, 123, 139, 140 Beaurieu, Gaspard Guillard de, L’élève de la nature, 40 Beck, Franz, Pandore, 31, 204n25 Beethoven, Ludwig van: Egmont, 11, 197; Eroica, 20; Fidelio, 4, 20, 37, 130–31, 192, 244n32; Symphony No. 4, 184; Symphony No. 6, 163–64; Wellingtons Sieg, 20, 174 Benda, Georg Anton, ix, xi, 3, 6–12, 16, 19, 22–23, 59, 66–67, 87, 114, 151, 159, 170, 192, 194, 207n61, 209n16; Ariadne auf Naxos, 3, 10, 29, 56, 98, 160–62, 167, 195, 205nn42–43, 216n31, 237n1; Medea, 3, 10, 29, 56, 95, 98, 195–96, 216n31, 237n1; Pygmalion, 98, 205n42, 217n31; Theone, 10; “Ueber das einfache Recitativ,” 194 benevolence, 15, 140, 144, 151–58, 161– 70, 220n71, 239n22 Berlin, 2–23, 46–47, 160, 167, 240n40: Nationaltheater, 11, 18, 46 Berlioz, Hector, 23, 37 Berquin, Arnaud, Pygmalion, 36 blindness, 41, 50, 154, 169 Blücher, Gebhard Leberecht von, 175 Boaden, James, The Voice of Nature, 12 Bodmer, Johann Jakob, 158–59 Bohemia, 3, 23, 173–74

index

Boirie, Jean-Bernard-Eugène Cantiran de, La Forêt de Sénart, 85 Bouilly, Jean-Nicolas: L’Abbé de l’Epée, 144; Léonore, 130–33, 231n25 boulevard theater, ix, xi, 4, 5, 6, 9–10, 12–13, 23, 25, 31, 40, 59, 60, 62–65, 85, 141–42, 221n6 Braban, Destival de, La fausse mère, 33 Brandes, Charlotte, 160 Brandes, Johann Christian, Ariadne auf Naxos, 3, 10, 29, 56, 98, 160–62, 167, 195, 205nn42–43, 216n31, 237n1 Braun, Peter von, 65 Bright, Richard, 178, 184 Britain, ix, 14–19, 26, 31, 43–44, 49, 52– 56, 137–50, 154–57, 201n2 Brooks, Peter, 8, 25–26, 31–33, 193, 198; legibility of settings, 117, 127, 135; The Melodramatic Imagination, xi, 117, 191; mode of excess, 5–6, 118, 127, 184–85, 202n11; spaces of incarceration, 117, 121, 197; structures of the Manichaean, 117, 125, 191; text of muteness, 42, 123, 147–48, 193–94 Bürger, Gottfried August: Lenardo und Blandine, 97–99; “Lenore,” 192 Burgtheater (Vienna), 46, 182, 216n31 Burke, Edmund, 92, 121, 165, 178 burletta/burlesque, 48, 147 Burney, Charles, 157 Burney, Fanny, 154 Bursay, Louis, Orphée/Orfeo, 27–29, 31, 195 Busby, Thomas: Britannia, 236n52; The Captive, 236n52; Dictionary of Music, 8; A Tale of Mystery, x, 14–15, 43–44, 48–50, 55, 137–38, 143–50, 193, 207n61, 236n52 Byron, Lord, Manfred, 196 Caccini, Giulio, Euridice, 27 Caigniez, Louis-Charles, 26; Edgar, 52; La pie voleuse, 52; Le jugement de Salomon, 11–12, 62–65, 68; Le triomphe de David, 62, 68, 73, 215n20 Cammaille-Saint-Aubin, Nicolas, La fausse mère, 33

index

Cannabich, Christian, Electra, 98 canonicity, 10, 20, 46–47, 191, 239n22 Carnot, Lazare, 141 Castelli, Ignaz Franz, 173; Abraham, 69, 72, 75, 220n71; Die Mühle am Arpennerfelsen, 216n28; Die Schweizer Familie, 179, 196; Salmonäa und ihre Söhne, 69, 72, 75–76 Catholicism. See religion censorship, 3, 61, 67, 70–73, 76, 77–78, 217n40 Certeau, Michel de, 186–89 Chandezon, Louis-Léopold. See Léopold (Louis-Léopold Chandezon) Chardiny: Alexis et Rosette, 40; Annette et Basile, 40 charity. See benevolence Charlemagne, Armand, 9, 26 Charlton, David, 79, 81, 87, 90, 129, 199 Chartres, Duke de (Philippe “Égalité”), 139 Chateaubriand, Vicomte de (FrançoisRené), Le génie du christianisme, 60 Chaudron, Dom Louis Mayeul, Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire de M. de Voltaire, 139 Checcherini, Giuseppe, Il quadro parlante e la muta orfanella, 42 Chelard, Hippolyte-André-Baptiste, Macbeth, 10 Cherubini, Luigi: Eliza, 81, 225nn53– 55; Faniska, 131; Lodoïska, 52, 81, 92 Chevalier, La mort d’Abel, 60 Chodowiecki, Daniel, 95–96, 103 chorus, 10, 12, 19, 70, 73–76, 93, 172, 220n71, 245n52 Christianity. See religion cityscape, 82, 176–77, 180, 189. See also landscape class: aristocratic, 4, 14, 65, 138, 141–42, 145, 148, 171; bourgeois, 65, 98, 143, 154, 156, 160, 162, 177, 195, 238n16; lower, 9, 64, 65, 71, 149, 154, 171, 237n61 classicism (Greek/Roman), 3, 17, 25, 27, 29, 30, 36, 49, 66, 98, 152–54, 160, 161

271

Coburg Theatre (London), 53, 213n53 Coignet, Horace, Pygmalion, ix, xi, 3, 15, 19, 22, 25–30, 34–42, 159, 191–98, 205n42, 209n16 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 46, 51, 138, 141 collage (musical), 174, 180, 186, 197 Colman, George, 143; Bluebeard, 18, 45, 232n1 Comédie-Française (Théâtre-Français/ Théâtre de l’Empereur) (Paris), 17, 47, 61–62, 142–43, 235n36 comedy: as effect, 29, 118, 123–25, 133, 136, 145, 193; as genre, 19, 43, 44, 48, 49, 140, 143–44 commemoration, 15, 152, 163, 172, 174– 76, 178–79, 185, 188–89, 240n40 concert, 14, 61, 76, 158, 220n71 Concordat of 1801, 60–61 Condillac, Étienne Bonnot de, Traité des sensations, 41, 193–94 Conservatoire (Paris), 128 Cooke, Thomas, The King’s Proxy, 52 Corneille, Pierre, Le Cid, 134 cosmopolitanism, 48, 58, 137, 234n20 Cosmorama (Paris), 223n25 costumes, 11, 70, 72–73, 98 Covent Garden (London), 17–18, 41, 43–52, 137–44 crowds, 171–72, 176–78, 187–88 cultural transfer, ix, xii, 2, 5, 8, 11–15, 18, 26–31, 44, 46, 48, 52, 55, 59, 62, 64, 75, 77, 84, 93, 137, 139, 143–50. See also translation cultural value, 7, 9–10, 13, 16–18, 20, 23, 45, 52, 54, 62, 64, 141–42, 144–45 Cumberland, Richard, 143 Cuvelier de Trie, Jean-GuillaumeAugustin: Le sacrifice d’Abraham, 64, 69; Les Machabées, 63, 69, 72 Daguerre, Louis, 83–88, 223nn28–29, 223n34, 224nn37–38 Dalayrac, Nicolas-Marie: Camille, 130; Léhéman; ou, La tour de Neudstat, 130; Raoul de Créqui, 130 dance/dancers, 36, 45, 98, 174, 178, 184. See also ballet

272

Danube (river), 163, 172, 180, 240n38 Darondeau, Henri-Benoit-François, Le passage de la Mer Rouge, 69, 215n20 d’Aubigny, Baudouin, Ali-Pacha, 224n43 d’Aumale de Corsenville, Pandore, 31 David, Jacques-Louis, 152–55; Le serment des Horaces, 33 declamation, 3, 22, 35, 99, 101, 162, 175, 180, 184, 194–98, 205n43 Decomberousse, Hyacinthe François Isaac, Ali-Pacha, 224n43 décor/decorations, 9, 62, 70, 72, 79, 81, 83, 85, 118, 188. See scenery/scenography/staging Degotti, Ignazio (Ignace), 81, 84, 224nn37–38 Degotti, Ilario, 81 d’Ennery, Adolphe, Les deux orphelines, x Dercy (Alphonse François PalatDercy), La caverne, 4, 119–20, 128– 31, 133, 231n21 Deschamps, Jacques-Marie: La prise de Jéricho, 61; Saül, 61 Desfontaines (François-Georges Fouques Deshayes): La chaste Suzanne, 63, 214n4; La Récréation du monde, suite de la Création, 68, 214n8; Omazette, 62 Desiré (Nicolas Cammaille-SaintAubin), Le passage de la Mer Rouge, 69, 215n20 Desprès, Jean-Baptiste-Denis: La prise de Jéricho, 61; Saül, 61 Diabelli, Anton, 174–75; Der 18te October, oder das große militärische Prater-Fest in Wien, 174–83, 186–89 Dibdin, Thomas, Valentine and Orson, 41 Dickens, Charles, A Tale of Two Cities, x Diderot, Denis, 139, 147, 191, 193, 195– 96; Discours sur la poésie dramatique, 192; Salon de 1763, 82 Dieulafoy, Joseph-Marie-ArmandMichel, Omazette, 62 diorama, 83, 84, 221n8 disjointedness, 28, 33, 37–38, 174, 185– 86, 195–98

index

drame bourgeois, 139, 143, 144, 195 drame larmoyant, 29, 195 drame/tragédie lyrique, 17, 26, 35, 36, 128, 215n22 Draper, Don. See Mad Men Drury Lane (London), 14–15, 45, 50, 139, 140, 144 Dryden, John, “Alexander’s Feast,” 184 Dubois, Jean-Baptiste, 29–30, 32, 36– 37, 41 DuBos, Abbé ( Jean-Baptiste), 36 Dubreuil, Alphonse du Congé, Paul et Virginie, 36 Ducrow, Andrew, 147 Dunlap, William, The Voice of Nature, 12 Dupetit-Méré, Frédéric, Daniel, 69 Duval, Alexandre, Joseph en Égypte, 62 Duveyrier, Anne-Honoré-Joseph (Mélesville), Le songe, 85 Eckschlager, Joseph August, Noah; oder, die Sündfluth, 69, 76 Edinburgh Theatre Royal, 46 eidophusikon, 82–83, 223n29 Eigensatz, Christiane Dorothea, 66 ellipsis, 96, 104, 195–98, 226n4 emotion, 4, 21, 30–31, 102–3, 125–27, 148–49, 152, 156–70, 179; extremes of, 3–5, 8, 11, 32–34, 54, 57, 64, 66, 81, 98, 101, 102, 103, 111, 113, 125, 195; and gesture/motion, 32–34, 101, 102–14, 197. See also sensation (theories of emotion and) Empfindsamkeit. See sensibility Empire, French, 61, 80, 85 Empire, Holy Roman, 65, 67, 164 Engel, Johann Jakob, 102–3; Ideen zu einer Mimik, 102; Über die musikalische Malerey, 167–70 Englebach, G. L., 56 Enlightenment, 26, 137–40, 143–45, 147, 149, 152, 156, 191, 197 exteriority/interiority, 31, 82, 101, 156– 57, 162, 175, 178, 179, 182, 188–89, 196– 97, 242n46 fair theater (foires), 16, 60 farce, 20, 207n66, 221n6

index

Farley, Charles, 52, 236n54 Fassbinder, Rainer Werner, Ali, Fear Eats the Soul, x Federici, Camillo: Il Meleagro, 29, 31, 38, 40; La cieca nata, 42 Fibich, Zdeněk, 23 fighting (onstage), 17, 20–21, 79, 80, 82, 91–92, 120, 225n58 Fillette-Loraux, Claude-François, Lodoïska, 52, 81, 92 flood, 15, 152–53, 163–70 Florence, 27 Florentine Camerata, 27 Foignet, Raymond de Toulouse, 232n37 Fosse, Antoine de la, Manlius Capitolinus, 134, 232n35 Foucault, Michel, 185 Fournier, Les Français à Java, 16 France, 3, 14–15, 26, 45, 47, 48, 53, 60– 61, 67, 80, 140, 142, 145, 148, 173 Francis II (Holy Roman Emperor)/ Franz I (Austrian Emperor), 62, 65, 67, 70–71, 172, 174, 180, 183 Frankfurt, 47 Frederica, Princess of Prussia, 164 Freemasonry, 112, 158 Fusz, János ( Johann Fuß), Isaak, 69, 75 Gaal, György von, 172 Gagliano, Marco da, La Dafne, 27 Gainsborough, Thomas, 155 Galiani, Ferdinando, 35, 209n13 Garde-Chambonas, Auguste de la, 171– 72, 174, 188 Gassier, J.-M., Joseph, 62, 68 Gassmann, Florian, 158 Gaultier, Jean A., Joseph, 62, 68 Gaveaux, Pierre: Léonore, 130–33, 231n25; “Réveil du peuple,” 231n25 Gebauer, Franz Xaver, 76 Gelegenheitswerke. See occasional work (Gelegenheitswerk) gender, xi, 4, 28, 95–99, 154–55, 159–62, 166, 184, 203n16 generic. See melodrama: as formulaic Genest, John, 43 Geneva, xii Genlis, Stéphanie Félicité du Crest

273

de Saint-Aubin de, Les veillées du château, 139 genre, 5, 16–23, 27–30, 39–42, 99–100, 113, 174–76, 188, 207n64, 221n6, 222n17; hybridity, x, 16, 17–19, 22, 29, 35, 43, 48–50, 58, 62, 74, 78, 83, 93, 145, 151, 175–76, 194–95, 198, 207n66 genres: ballad opera, 19; burletta/burlesque, 48, 147; comedy, 19, 43, 44, 48, 49, 140, 143–44; drame bourgeois, 139, 143, 144, 195; drame larmoyant, 29, 195; farce, 20, 207n66, 221n6; grand opera, 87, 221n7; monodrama, 4, 5, 6, 10, 31, 59, 97, 152, 167; opéra comique, 20, 35, 62, 81, 87, 90, 92, 129–31, 225n50; opera seria, 4, 30, 159, 161, 194; pasticcio, 61; quodlibet, 174; Singspiel, 65, 111, 179; tragédie/ drame lyrique, 17, 26, 35, 36, 128, 215n22; tragedy, 17, 19, 29, 44, 46, 49, 57, 60–61, 62, 71, 143, 160, 207n66, 221n6, 232n35; vaudeville, 16, 60, 61, 63, 214n4, 214n8, 221n6 Gentz, Friedrich von, 178 Gérardin-Lacour: La femme à deux maris, 21, 38, 207n68; Robinson Crusoé, 21, 207n68 German lands, 4–8, 15, 46–49, 55–56, 61, 173, 196 Gerstenberg, Heinrich Wilhelm von, 194; Minona oder die Angelsachsen, 10 gesture, 4–5, 17, 21, 23, 25, 32–41, 95– 114, 162, 167, 192–94, 197; musical gestures (instrumental, sonic, vocal), 104–11, 166–67, 180; and pantomime, 4, 5, 17, 23, 25, 28–29, 34, 35, 41, 93, 105, 112, 123–24, 193–94, 197 Gleich, Josef Alois, Moses in Egypten, 68 Gluck, Christoph Willibald, 34, 118 Godwin, William, 139–40, 144, 148, 231n23; Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, 140 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 12, 51, 56, 187; Der Triumph der Empfindsamkeit, 205n43; Die Leiden des jungen Werthers, 40, 157; Egmont, 11, 197; Faust, 56, 213n53; Stella, 50; Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre, 37

274

Goez, Joseph Franz von, 95–115; Lenardo und Blandine, 32, 95–115, 195, 197; Versuch einer zalreichen Folge leidenschaftlicher Entwürfe für empfindsame Kunst- und SchauspielFreunde, 96–99, 102, 106, 109, 113 Gotha, 152, 159 gothic, 4, 49–51, 56, 85, 95–98, 117, 127, 133, 140, 143, 145 Gotter, Friedrich Wilhelm: Medea, 3, 10, 29, 56, 95, 98, 195–96, 216n31, 237n1; Pygmalion, 216n31 Goya, Francisco, 156 Grandi, Tommaso, 27 grand opera, 87, 221n7 Grétry, André Ernest Modeste: Barbebleu, 232n1; Le comte d’Albert, 130; Richard Coeur-de-lion, 130 Griffith, D. W., Orphans of the Storm, x Grillparzer, Franz, 56 Grobert, Jacques-François-Louis, 83 Grohmann, Johann Adolf, 176 Guillemain, Charles-Joseph: Alexis et Rosette, 40; Annette et Basile, 40 Guiraud, Alexandre, Les Macchabées, 85–86 Gyrowetz, Adalbert, 174; Der Augenarzt, 174; Sieges- und Friedens-Fest der verbündeten Monarchen, 174, 177–83, 187–89 Hager, Franz von, 71–72 Hamburg, 46–47, 141, 158 Hamilton, Emma, 147 Handel, George Frideric, 15, 61, 73, 76, 239n22; Judas Maccabaeus, 169–70; Messiah, 158 Hanover Square Concerts (London), 14 Hapdé, Jean-Baptiste-Augustin, 63, 215n20, 215n22; De grands et des petits théâtres de la capitale, 63, 215n17; Le déluge universel, 69, 215n22; Le passage de la Mer Rouge, 69, 215n20; Plus de mélodrames!, 63, 134–35, 215n17; Procès du Déluge, 215n22 Hardy, Thomas, 141 Harris, Henry, 144 Haslinger, Tobias, 175

index

Haydn, Joseph, 15, 158, 167, 174; Die Jahreszeiten, 73, 76, 158, 163; Die Schöpfung/La Création, 61, 68, 73, 76, 158; Die sieben letzten Worte unseres Erlösers am Kreuze, 170, 220n71; “Gott erhalte Franz, den Kaiser,” 180–83 Haymarket (King’s Theatre) (London), 12, 14, 45 Hazlitt, William, Notes on a Journey through France and Italy, 47 Heigel, Karoline, 99, 112 Hewetson, W. B., A Blind Boy, 41 Hibberd, Sarah, 7, 10, 17, 20, 79–93, 118, 120 high art. See cultural value Hobbes, Thomas, 155 Hoffmann, Ernst Theodor Amadeus, Saul, 219n54 Hoftheater (Vienna), 65, 70, 78 Hogarth, William, 95 Hohenwart, Sigismund Anton Graf von (archbishop), 71–72 Holcroft, Thomas, 49, 137–50; The Adventures of Hugh Trevor, 141; Alwyn, 139; Anna St. Ives, 140–41; Deaf and Dumb, 144; Duplicity, 140; The Follies of a Day, 52, 139, 143; Hear Both Sides/The Lawyer, 144, 236n48; Human Happiness, 140; Manthorne, 139; The Old Clothes Man, 143; The Road to Ruin, 140; A Tale of Mystery, x, 14–15, 43–44, 48–50, 55, 137–38, 143–50, 193, 207n61 Holy Roman Empire, 67, 164 Hook, Theodore, Tekeli, 50 Horne-Tooke, John, 141 Hugo, Abel. See A!A!A! (Abel Hugo, Armand Malitourne, and JeanJoseph Ader) Hume, David, 155, 234n20 Hus-Desforges, Pierre-Louis, Le sacrifice d’Abraham, 63–64, 69 illegitimate theater, 16, 18, 48, 52, 141– 42, 147, 221n6 imitation. See mimesis incarceration. See prison

index

Inchbald, Elizabeth, Such Things Are, 144 interiority/exteriority, 31, 82, 101, 156– 57, 162, 175, 178, 179, 182, 188–89, 196– 97, 242n46 intertextuality, 20–21, 117, 121, 129 Iriarte, Tomás Luis de, Guzmán el bueno, 31, 34–35, 40 irony, 20, 124–25, 193 Isouard, Nicolas, Aladin, 84 Italy, 13, 15, 26–31, 35, 40, 61, 194 James, Henry, xi, 26 Jerningham, Edward, Margaret d’Anjou, 15 Jerrold, Douglas, Black-Ey’d Susan, 53, 57 Jonson, Ben, 46 Josefstadt Theater. See Theater in der Josefstadt (Vienna) Joseph II (emperor), 64, 156; Schauspielfreiheit (freedom of the theaters), 64 Judaism. See religion Kalkbrenner, Christian: La prise de Jéricho, 61; Saül, 61 Kanne, Friedrich August, Der 18te October, oder das große militärische Prater-Fest in Wien, 174–83, 186–89 Karloff, Boris (William Henry Pratt), xii Kärnthnerthortheater (Kärntnertortheater) (Vienna), 179, 216n31 Kauth, Maria Magdalena, 163, 240n40; Das Gemälde der Natur, 152–53, 161–70 Kelly, Michael, 52 Kemble, John Philip, Lodoiska, 45 Kempelen, Wolfgang (Ritter) von, Andromeda und Perseus, 8 Kenney, James, The Blind Boy, 50 King’s Theatre. See Haymarket (King’s Theatre) (London) Klingemann, Ernst August Friedrich, Moses, 67, 69–70, 74, 220n71 Klopstock, Friedrich Gottlieb, 194; Frühlingsfeier, 163; Messiah, 158 Knight, Thomas, 143

275

Koch, Heinrich Christoph, 157–59 Körner, Theodor, 56, 245n52 Kotzebue, August von, 49–51, 56; Die Kreuzfahrer, 71–72; Graf Benyowski, 50; Menschenhass und Reue, 50 Kreutzer, Rudolphe, Paul et Virginie, 90, 225n53, 225n55 Lachnith, Ludwig Wenzel: La prise de Jéricho, 61; Saül, 61 La Martelière, Jean-Henri-Ferdinand, Robert, chef de brigands, 119, 231n22 landscape, 80–85, 87, 90, 92, 160, 164, 186, 224n49. See also cityscape La Roche, Sophie von, Die Geschichte des Fräuleins von Sternheim, 155 Lassala, Manuel: Andromaca, 40; Didone abbandonata, 40; Il misantropo, 40; Partenza d’Enea, 40; Pygmalion, 40 Laudes, Joseph, Pygmalion, 216n31 Leblanc: Esther, 68; Le triomphe de David, 62, 68, 73, 215n20 Lefranc(-Ponteuil), Pharaon, 62, 68 legitimate theater, 18, 44, 45, 48, 57–58 Legouvé, Gabriel-Marie, La mort d’Abel, 60 Leidesdorf, Max Josef, 175 Leipzig, 172; Battle of (VölkerSchlacht), 171–73, 185, 187–88 Lemaire, Henri, Joseph, 62, 68 Lemercier, Népomucène, Le Lévite d’Ephraïm, 60 Leon, Gottlieb, Pygmalion, 217 Léopold (Louis-Léopold Chandezon): La Forêt de Sénart, 85; Le sacrifice d’Abraham, 63–64, 69; Les Machabées, 63, 69, 72 Leopoldstadt Theater. See Theater in der Leopoldstadt (Vienna) L’Epée, Charles-Michel de, 144 Lesage, Alain-René, Gil Blas, 231n22 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim, 196; Emilia Galotti, 98; Hamburgische Dramaturgie, 46; Laokoon, 194 Le Sueur, Jean-François, 118; La caverne, 4, 119–20, 128–31, 133, 231n21; Paul et Virginie, 36

276

Lewis, Matthew Gregory, 143; The Captive, 236n52; The Wood Daemon, 50 lighting, 23, 80, 82–85, 87, 221n10, 223n28 Linz, 112, 152–53, 163 Liszt, Franz, Lenore, 192 Loaisel-Tréogate, Joseph-Marie: La Forêt Périlleuse, 232n27; Roland de Monglave, 9 London, xii, 2, 6–9, 12–19, 43–58, 139– 43, 177; Adelphi Theatre, 53; Coburg Theatre, 53, 213n53; Covent Garden, 17–18, 41, 43–52, 137–44; Drury Lane, 14–15, 45, 50, 139, 140, 144; Hanover Square Concerts, 14; Haymarket (King’s Theatre), 12, 14, 45; Lyceum, 52; Surrey Theatre, 53–54 Louis XV (king), 26 Louis Philippe (king), 139 Loutherbourg, Philippe-Jacques de, 14, 82 low art. See cultural value Lyceum (London), 52 Lyon, Hôtel de Ville, 3 Lytton Bulwer, Edward, 58; England and the English, 57–58 Mad Men, xi mad scenes, 3, 98, 103, 104–11, 160, 195, 196 Malipiero, Troilo, Prometeo, 31–33 Malitourne, Armand. See A!A!A! ! (Abel Hugo, Armand Malitourne, and Jean-Joseph Ader) Mandeville, Bernhard, 155 march, 74, 119, 167, 172, 180, 186, 187 Maréchal, Pierre-Sylvain, La passion de Notre Seigneur Jésus Christ, 60 Marie-Louise of Austria, 62, 67 Martainville, Alphonse, Noé, 214n4 Martineau, A., 30; Ariane, 35, 209n16 Marx, Adolph Bernhard, 204n35 Marx, Karl, 149 Mašek, Pavel, 175 Masi, Girolamo, Andromaca, 29 Maturin, Charles Robert, Bertram, 46 Mayeur de Saint-Paul, L’élève de la nature, 40–44

index

Méhul, Etienne Nicolas: Joseph en Égypte, 73, 75; Mélidore et Phrosine, 225n53, 225n55 melodrama: biblical, 15, 59–78, 192, 195; domestic, 53, 184, 202n11; and excess, 25, 118, 125, 127, 185, 188, 202n11; foreignness of, 18, 43, 48–58, 70, 75, 77, 211n6; as formulaic, 20–22, 117–18, 122, 124, 133, 134–36, 152, 170, 176, 182, 192, 193; French ideas of, 5–10, 12– 13, 15–16, 19, 21, 53–55, 57, 59, 66, 77, 196; German ideas of, xi, 5–10, 12–13, 15–16, 19, 21, 49, 51, 53–56, 59, 64, 66, 77, 95–97, 104, 113, 151–52, 159–60, 162, 194–95; and hybridity, x, 10, 16, 17–20, 22, 29, 35, 43, 48–51, 52–58, 62, 74, 78, 83, 93, 145, 151, 172, 175–76, 194–95, 198, 207n66; and legibility, 32–33, 42, 117, 118, 121, 127, 133, 192– 93; and Manichaean oppositions, xi, 5, 117, 118, 125, 191; as mode (e.g. the idea of the melodramatic outside the theatre), ix, 1–2, 5–6, 26, 135, 138, 175, 184–85, 188, 195, 201n1, 202n11; and modernity, 1, 4, 25–26, 30, 39, 98, 184, 195; and money, 14, 18, 46, 78, 80–84, 92, 124–27, 143–44, 152, 221n6; and monotony, 10–12; and morality, xi, 5, 44, 45, 49, 57, 64, 71, 77, 112, 118, 119, 123, 125, 145, 147, 151–70, 196, 198, 202n11; and music-movement coordination, 5, 9, 25, 34–37, 41, 192; nautical, 53; origins of, ix, 3–6, 25–33, 45–55, 162–63, 194–98; performance practice of, ix, 6, 12, 15, 19, 32, 35, 37, 97, 101, 112–13, 201n4, 220n3; politics of, 5, 87, 138, 143, 145–47, 148, 203n16, 214n57; as popular, x, 2, 5, 9–10, 17, 24–25, 39–40, 55, 57–59, 62, 92–93, 141–45, 204n36, 221n6; and trauma, 5, 64, 79, 81, 148–49 memory. See commemoration Mercier, Louise, 141 Mercier, Louis-Sebastien, 139–41, 144, 234n26 Metastasio, Pietro, 73; Isacco figura del Redentore, 69, 75 Metternich, Clemens von, 172

index

Meyerbeer, Giacomo, 19, 205n41 migration, 14–16. See also cultural transfer Milizia, Francesco, 30 Milner, Henry M., Masaniello, 45 mimesis, 167–69; musical, 22, 23, 36– 38, 41, 100, 108–9, 167–69, 176, 180– 82, 207n69 Mitgefühl. See sympathy mixedness. See melodrama: and hybridity Molière: Le Misanthrope, 40; Tartuffe, 145 Moncrieff, William Thomas, The Lear of Private Life, 53 monodrama, 4–6, 31, 59, 97, 152, 167 monologue, 9, 28, 30–31, 34, 37–40, 74, 105, 115, 121, 126, 130–31, 152, 173, 196– 97, 203n24 monstrosity, xii, 18, 35, 44, 48–49, 51, 53, 63, 135 Montague, Elizabeth, 154 Monteverdi, Claudio: L’Orfeo, 27; L’Arianna, 27 morality, 50, 57, 61, 138–40, 157, 161, 164–65, 234n20. See also melodrama: and morality Morel de Chedeville, Étienne: La prise de Jéricho, 61; Saül, 61 Moscheles, Ignaz, 175 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 61, 151, 167; C-Major Symphony (“Jupiter”), 128; Die Zauberflöte, 151–52; Zaide, 151 Müllner, Adolf, 56 multimedia, 12, 23, 81, 93, 95–97, 100– 102, 112–14, 195 Munich, 8, 12, 95–99, 102, 112–13; Salvatortheater, 95 muteness, xii, 28, 34, 41–42, 123, 126– 27, 142, 144, 147–49, 193–94 Naples, 35, 61, 209n13, 222n15 Napoleon I (Bonaparte), 14, 17, 47, 50– 51, 60–67, 72, 80, 135, 137, 142, 145, 150, 171–73, 233n2 Napoleonic Wars/period, 13–15, 18, 26, 45, 48–49, 52, 53, 58, 59, 73, 76, 150,

277

173, 175, 182, 184–85, 188, 206n50; Battle of Leipzig (Völker-Schlacht), 171–73, 185, 187–88; Battle of Waterloo, 47, 53, 58, 175; Concordat of, 1801, 60–61; Congress of Vienna, 70, 76, 171–72, 178, 184, 185, 188; occupation of Vienna, 11, 15, 62, 67, 70–71; Peace/Treaty of Amiens, 14, 45, 48– 49, 58, 137, 141 Napoléon-Louis, 61 Napoli-Signorelli, Pietro, 30–31 narrative: dramatic, 9, 22, 84, 91–93, 97, 99, 125, 163–64; graphic, 97, 99; historical, 13, 17, 18, 23–24, 27, 34, 39, 58, 137 national character, 7, 45, 55–56, 213n49 nationalism, 2, 13, 48, 173. See also patriotism Nationaltheater (Berlin), 11, 18, 46 national theater (idea of), 18, 43–47, 53, 55, 58, 77 natural disaster, 87, 152, 165; avalanche, 81, 225n54; flood, 15, 152–53, 163–70; storm, x, 79, 80, 83, 85, 87–92, 97–98, 108, 146, 160, 163–69, 225n52 naturalness, 4, 37, 41, 83, 101, 102, 104, 105, 113, 145, 162, 179, 196, 242n46 nature, 40–41, 81, 84, 88–90, 98, 113, 152, 156, 160, 163–69 Neefe, Christian Gottlob, 66 Néorama (Paris), 84 nervous system, 152, 170, 242n51 Newton, Isaac, 156 New York, Park Theater, 12–13 Niemeyer, August Hermann, Abraham von Moria, 75 Nodier, Charles, 64, 82, 92, 145 noise, 20, 36, 171, 180 Noverre, Jean-Georges, 14, 36 occasional work (Gelegenheitswerk), 67, 152, 174–76, 178, 185, 187, 188, 192, 196 Old Price Riots (Covent Garden), 18, 46 opera, 3–4, 10, 13, 14, 19–20, 21, 27, 29, 35–36, 39, 44, 45, 52, 58, 59, 73, 77, 80, 113, 140, 149, 151–52, 159, 177, 198; Italian opera, 13, 21, 45, 210n39. See also genres

278

Opéra (Théâtre des Arts) (Paris), 17, 61, 80, 84, 221n7, 222n13, 222n15, 223n33, 224n37, 224n38 opéra comique, 20, 35, 62, 81, 87, 90, 92, 129–31, 225n50 Opéra-Comique (Paris), 13, 62, 81, 224n38, 225n51 opera seria, 4, 30, 159, 161, 194 Ophuls, Max, Letter from an Unknown Woman (1948), x oratorio, 59, 61–62, 72–73, 75–77, 158, 220n70, 236n52 orchestra, 4, 20, 22, 26, 34–39, 81, 88, 127–33, 167, 170, 197 Otway, Thomas, 46 overture, 35, 73, 128–29, 220n71 Ovid, Metamorphoses, 25, 29–31 Pagano, Francesco Maria, Agamennone, 29 Paine, Thomas, The Rights of Man, 140, 234n23 Palais Garnier (Paris), 13 Pálffy von Erdőd, Ferdinand, 72 panorama, 80, 82–85, 91–92, 152, 222n21 pantomime, ix, 3, 5, 10, 16, 20, 25, 29, 36–37, 41, 74, 76, 105, 123–24, 145, 147, 191–94, 197; ballet-pantomime, 36, 105, 223n31; pantomime dialoguée, 69; pantomime-sacrée, 60. See also gesture Paris, x, xii, 2, 4–5, 8–9, 11–17, 21, 25–31, 38, 45–48, 52–55, 59–72, 77–78, 82– 84, 117–29, 139–49, 205n38, 207n68, 215n13, 221n6, 222n15, 222n24, 223n25, 224n38, 235n36; Autorama, 83; Comédie-Française (ThéâtreFrançais/Théâtre de l’Empereur), 17, 47, 61–62, 142–43, 235n36; Conservatoire, 128; Cosmorama, 223n25; foires (fair theater), 16, 60; Néorama, 84; Opéra (Théâtre des Arts), 17, 61, 80, 84, 221n7, 222n13, 222n15, 223n33, 224n37, 224n38; OpéraComique, 13, 62, 81, 224n38, 225n51; Palais Garnier, 13; salle de spectacle, Saint-Cloud, 61; Théâtre de la Gaîté, 16, 62–63, 68–69, 79, 81, 84, 87, 134,

index

142, 215n20, 221n6, 224n38; Théâtre de l’Ambigu-Comique, 11, 31, 62–63, 68–69, 81, 84, 141–42, 216n28, 221n6, 224n38; Théâtre de la Nation, 60; Théâtre de la Porte Saint-Martin, 13, 17, 19, 69, 81, 84, 221n6, 223n33, 224n38, 225n51; Théâtre de la République, 144; Théâtre de la rue Feydeau (see Théâtre Feydeau); Théâtre de l’Odéon (Théâtre de l’Impératrice), 142, 235n36; Théâtre de Mlle Montansier, 60; Théâtre des Beaujolais, 40; Théâtre des Grands Danseurs du Roi, 40; Théâtre des Jeunes-Artistes, 68; Théâtre des Variétés, 221n6; Théâtre de Versailles, 69, 215n21; Théâtre du Panorama-Dramatique, 84, 224n38, 224n43; Théâtre du Vaudeville, 62–63, 68; Théâtre Feydeau, 60, 62, 81, 84, 128, 222n15, 225n51, 231n25; Tuileries Palace, 80, 82 Park Theater (New York), 12–13 parody, 9–10, 29–30, 49–51, 62, 124 pasticcio, 61 pastoral, 40, 178, 180, 186 patriotism, 49, 51, 53, 57, 148, 154, 158, 172–73, 184–85, 188. See also nationalism Payne, John Howard, Clari, 45 Peake, Richard Brinsley, Presumption, xii, 32, 34, 42 pedestrianism, 180, 186, 188 Pelissier, Victor, The Voice of Nature, 12 Pepoli, Alessandro, Pandora, 31 Peri, Jacopo: Dafne, 27; Euridice, 27 Perinet, Joachim, Isaak, 69, 75 Piccinni, Louis Alexandre, 23, 128; La citerne, 79–93, 117–36, 192–93, 205n41; Robinson Crusoé, 21, 207n68 Piccinni, Niccolò, 118 Pierre, Monsieur, 83, 223n27 pirate, 79, 91, 118–19, 121, 123, 225n58 Pius VII, 60 Pixerécourt, René-Charles Guilbert de, ix–xii, 4–7, 13, 17, 23–26, 33, 79–80, 87–92, 128, 141–43, 149, 196, 205n41; Cœlina, ix, xi–xii, 14, 41, 43, 137–50,

index

193, 216n28; La citerne, 79–93, 117– 36, 192–93, 205n41; La femme à deux maris, 21, 38, 207n68; La muette de la forêt, 41; Le château des Apennins, 232n37; Le chien de Montargis, 41; Les mines de Pologne, 232n37; Raymond de Toulouse, 232n37; Robinson Crusoé, 21, 207n68; Tekeli, 50; Victor, 4, 41, 142, 148 Planché, James Robinson, The Vampire, 45 Plancher de Valcour, PhilippeAristide-Louis-Pierre, Esther, 68 plasticity, xi, 25, 28, 31–42, 144, 191 Pocock, Isaac, The Magpie or the Maid?, 52 Pössinger, Franz Alexander, Omasis; oder, Joseph in Egypthen, 69 Poultier-Elmotte, L’Anti-Pygmalion, 31 Pradt, Dominique de, 188 Preston, William, 50–51, 56; Democratic Rage, 50 Prévost, Pierre, 84, 222n24, 223n28 Princess of Oldenburg and Weimar (Katharina von Oldenburg; Maria Pawlowna von Weimar), 67 print culture, x, 173–75, 177–79, 182–85 prison, 37, 79, 117, 123, 130–33, 135, 197, 235n42; prisoners of war, 14, 206n50; prison soundscapes, 130–33 Propiac, Catherine Joseph Ferdinand Girard de, Le Lévite d’Ephraïm, 69 psychoanalysis, 26 public/private, 3, 15, 18, 70, 82, 99, 112, 156, 175, 176, 178–79, 182–85, 188 Puccini, Tommaso, Euridice, 27 Pugnani, Gaetano, Werther, 40 Quaisin, Adrien: Le jugement de Salomon, 11–12, 62–65, 68; Salomons Urtheil, 11–13, 22, 65–70 Quedlinburg, 164 quodlibet, 174 Racine, Jean-Baptiste, 61–62, 134; Athalie, 60–61, 72–73, 134, 232n35; Esther, 60–61, 72–74 Radet, Jean-Baptiste: La chaste Su-

279

zanne, 63, 214n4; La Récréation du monde, suite de la Création, 68, 214n8; Omazette, 62 Rae, Alexander, 52 ranz des vaches (Kuhreigen), 179, 196 recitative, 9, 35–36, 39, 56, 73, 75, 152, 159, 162, 166, 167, 180, 194, 237n1 reconciliation, 81, 142–43, 145–48 rehearsal, 6, 70, 79, 128 Reichardt, Johann Friedrich, 9–10, 19, 66, 111, 160–61, 167, 169–70; Cephalus und Prokris, 10; Der Tod des Herkules, 10 religion, 3; anti-Catholic sentiment, 60–61; anticlericalism, 59–60; atheism, 139–40, 147; Catholicism, 60– 61, 72; Christianity/Christian faith, 139–40, 147, 152, 158–59, 164–70, 172, 186–87; Judaism, 75; melodrama as substitute for the sacred, 5, 61, 64, 145; Methodism, 139; religious themes on stage, 59–78 reminiscence (musical), 111, 121, 129 Revolution, French, x, 2, 5, 9, 14, 17, 60, 61, 71–73, 79, 87, 128, 137–41, 144–45, 148, 172, 178, 188, 196; counterrevolutionary politics, 50–51, 63, 87, 141, 231n25; post-revolutionary condition, 4, 5, 59, 84, 93, 97, 138, 145, 198; post-revolutionary period, 25, 44, 52, 59–61, 64, 70–73, 80–82, 84, 87, 196 Ribié, César (Louis-François), Samson, 68 Richardson, Samuel, 159 Richter, Joseph, Eipeldauer Briefe, 182 Rinuccini, Ottavio: Dafne, 27; Euridice (with Caccini), 27; Euridice (with Peri), 27; La Dafne, 27; L’Arianna, 27 Robert, Hubert, 81, 85 Robespierre, Maximilien François Marie Isidore de, 141–42, 150, 201n2; Cult of the Supreme Being, 60 Rochefort, L’élève de la nature, 40–44 Rogati, Francesco Saverio de’, 35 Romagnesi, Jean-Antoine, Samson, 68 Romanticism, 2, 4, 9, 20, 25–26, 43, 60, 80, 137, 145, 151, 177, 204n35 Rossini, Gioachino, Mosè in Egitto, 72

280

Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, x, xii, 2–4, 8–10, 21, 23, 25–35, 87, 139, 147, 149, 163, 188, 191–98, 204n25; Confessions, 25, 42; Dictionnaire de musique, 210n29, 210n38; Du contrat social, ix, 3; Émile, ix; Essai sur l’origine des langues, 193; Julie, ix, 3, 195; Le devin du village, 40; Le Lévite d’Ephraïm, 60; Observations sur L’Alceste italien de M. Gluck, 34; Pygmalion, ix, xi, 3, 15, 19, 22, 25–30, 34–42, 159, 191–98, 205n42, 209n16 ruins, 81, 84–85, 88, 91–92, 117 Saint-Evremond, Charles de, 48 Sala, Emilio, 7, 10, 30, 40, 192 salle de spectacle, Saint-Cloud (Paris), 61 Salvatortheater (Munich), 95 Sayers, Frank, Pandora, 31 scenery/scenography/staging, 5, 9, 14, 17, 39, 62, 70, 72, 76, 79–93, 117– 20, 121, 136, 149, 188, 221n4, 221n7, 224n38, 224n39, 225n52 Schaffner, Nicolas Albert, Daniel, 69 Schikaneder, Emanuel, 67 Schiller, Johann Christoph Friedrich von, 49, 51, 56, 175, 224n49; Die Räuber, 50, 119; Kabale und Liebe, 50 Schlegel, August Wilhelm von, 9 Schoenberg, Arnold, 21 Schönholz, Friedrich Anton von, 185 Schulz, Johann Abraham Peter, 10, 19 Schumann, Robert, Manfred, 196 Schuster, Joseph Anton, Samson, Richter in Israel, 68 Schwarzenberg, Carl von, 172–73 Schweitzer, Anton: Alceste, 159; Ariadne auf Naxos, 160; Pygmalion, 159 Scott, Walter, 20, 46, 57 Scribe, Augustin Eugène, Le songe, 85 Sedaine, Jean-Michel, 144; Barbe-bleu, 232n1 semiotics, 21, 169, 193, 197–98. See also topic theory/topoi sensation (theories of emotion and), 40–41, 55, 102–3, 144, 152, 156, 158, 164, 167–69, 193–94, 242n51

index

sensibility, 3, 55, 96, 140, 156–70, 178. See also theater: sentimental sentimental theater, 41, 49, 96, 140, 179, 187 Servandoni, Jean-Nicolas, 80–81, 84–85 Sewrin (Charles Augustin de Bassompierre): Julia, 232n37; La passion de Notre Seigneur Jésus Christ, 60 Seyfried, Ignaz Ritter von, 72, 74, 77, 217n36; Abraham, 69, 72, 75, 220n71; Die Mühle am Arpennerfelsen, 216n28; Joseph und seine Brüder, 73; Moses, 67, 69–70, 74, 220n71; Noah; oder, die Sündfluth, 69, 76; Salmonäa und ihre Söhne, 69, 72, 75–76; Saul, König in Israel, 67–68, 73–74 Seyfried, Josef von, Saul, König in Israel, 67–68, 73–74 Seyler, Abel, 159 Shaftesbury, Earl of (Anthony Ashley Cooper), 155 Shakespeare, William, 18, 44, 46, 235n36; Hamlet, 103 Sharp, Granville, 139 Shelley, Mary, Frankenstein, xi–xii, 31 Singspiel, 65, 111, 179 Sirk, Douglas: All That Heaven Allows, x; Imitation of Life, x Skeffington, Lumley, Sleeping Beauty, 50 Sonnleithner, Joseph Ferdinand von: Faniska, 131; Fidelio, 4, 20, 37, 130–31, 192, 244n32; Omasis; oder, Joseph in Egypthen, 69 Southey, Robert, 141 spectacle (the spectacular), 5, 9, 16, 17, 19, 43, 44, 54, 59, 61, 64, 66, 67, 70, 74, 77, 79–94, 120, 143, 145, 171–72, 174, 177, 182, 186–88 spectacle d’optique, 20, 83, 221n8 spectacle pittoresque, 83, 85, 87, 91–92 spectatorship, 32–33, 66, 80, 82, 85, 90, 92, 172, 176–77, 185, 188–89, 192–93, 223n32; absorption, 82, 90, 156, 168– 69, 188 Spektakelstücke/pièce à grand spectacle, 5, 16–17, 19, 60, 64, 66, 68–69, 77, 79

index

Stahl, John, Imitation of Life, x Starke, Friedrich, 173, 175, 243n11 statue. See plasticity Stegmayer, Matthäus, Salomons Urtheil, 11–13, 22, 65–70 storm, x, 79, 80, 83, 85, 87–92, 97–98, 108, 146, 160, 163–69, 167, 225n52 Striggio, Alessandro, L’Orfeo, 27 Sturm, Christoph Christian, Reflections on the Works of God and His Providence, 165 Sturm und Drang, 95, 98 sublime, 61, 75, 81, 92, 121, 135, 152, 160, 164, 165, 171, 176, 177, 182 subterranean space, 40, 117, 119, 127–33, 134–36 Sulzer, Johann Georg, Allgemeine Theorie der schönen Künste, 158–59 Sumerau, Joseph Thaddäus Vogt von, 70–71 Surrey Theatre (London), 53–54 sympathy, 152, 155–56, 158–70, 179, 192–93 tableau, 5, 32–33, 42, 81, 83–93, 112, 116, 171, 188, 196, 209n21, 225n58 Taix, Benoît [?], Le jugement de Daniel, 62–63, 68 Talma, François-Joseph, 61 Taylor, Baron, Ali-Pacha, 224n43 temporal perception, 35, 39, 82–93 Testard, Paul, La Bible à ma tante, 214n4 theater: baroque, 80, 102; boulevard, ix, xi, 4, 5, 6, 9–10, 12–13, 23, 25, 31, 40, 59, 60, 62–65, 85, 141–42, 221n6; fair theater, 16, 60; illegitimate, 16, 18, 48, 52, 141–42, 147, 221n6; legitimate, 18, 44, 45, 48, 57–58; national, 18, 43–47, 53, 55, 58, 77; sentimental, 41, 49, 96, 140, 179, 187 Theater an der Wien (Vienna), 65–73, 77, 216n28, 216n31, 219n53 Theater auf der Wieden (Vienna), 64, 67 Theater in der Josefstadt (Vienna), 65 Theater in der Leopoldstadt (Vienna), 65–69, 75

281

Théâtre de la Gaîté (Paris), 16, 62–63, 68–69, 79, 81, 84, 87, 134, 142, 215n20, 221n6, 224n38 Théâtre de l’Ambigu-Comique (Paris), 11, 31, 62–63, 68–69, 81, 84, 141–42, 216n28, 221n6, 224n38 Théâtre de la Nation (Paris), 60 Théâtre de la Porte Saint-Martin (Paris), 13, 17, 19, 69, 81, 84, 221n6, 223n33, 224n38, 225n51 Théâtre de la République (Paris), 144 Théâtre de la rue Feydeau. See Théâtre Feydeau (Paris) Théâtre de l’Empereur. See ComédieFrançaise (Théâtre-Français/Théâtre de l’Empereur) (Paris) Théâtre de l’Odéon (Théâtre de l’Impératrice) (Paris), 142, 235n36 Théâtre de Mlle Montansier (Paris), 60 Théâtre des Arts. See Opéra (Théâtre des Arts) (Paris) Théâtre des Beaujolais (Paris), 40 Théâtre des Grands Danseurs du Roi (Paris), 40 Théâtre des Jeunes-Artistes (Paris), 68 Théâtre des Variétés (Paris), 221n6 Théâtre de Versailles (Paris), 69, 215n21 Théâtre du Panorama-Dramatique (Paris), 84, 224n38, 224n43 Théâtre du Vaudeville (Paris), 62– 63, 68 Théâtre Feydeau (Paris), 60, 62, 81, 84, 128, 222n15, 225n51, 231n25 Théâtre-Français. See ComédieFrançaise (Théâtre-Français/Théâtre de l’Empereur) (Paris) Thelwall, John, 141 topic theory/topoi, 242n49; dramatic topoi, 21, 31, 41–42, 117, 121, 193; musical topoi, 20, 117, 129, 166, 169, 180, 186, 187, 192, 242n49 tragédie/drame lyrique, 17, 26, 35, 36, 128, 215n22 tragedy, 17, 19, 29, 44, 46, 49, 57, 60– 61, 62, 71, 143, 160, 207n66, 221n6, 232n35 transition, 11–12, 22, 32, 66, 80–85, 99– 105, 111, 113, 159, 186

282

translation, 7, 11–12, 27, 29, 30, 40, 43, 45, 48–49, 51, 53–55, 58, 67, 77–78, 131, 137–39, 143–45, 148, 159, 160, 193, 196, 203n24 transnationalism, 11, 43–44. See also cultural transfer tremolo, 89, 90, 180, 182–83, 185, 192 Tuczek, Vincenz: Moses in Egypten, 68; Samson, Richter in Israel, 68 Tuileries Palace (Paris), 80, 82 Turzan (Generalvikar), 73 Vallée, Le jugement de Daniel, 62–63, 68 Vanhal, Johann Baptist, 175 van Swieten, Gottfried, 73 vaudeville, 16, 60, 61, 63, 214n4, 214n8, 221n6 Venice, 27, 31, 195 Vidor, King, Stella Dallas, x Vieillard, Pierre-Ange, Le premier Homme du monde, 214n8 Vienna, 2, 6, 8, 12–13, 15, 18, 36, 39, 46– 47, 59, 60, 62, 64–78, 112, 158, 171–89, 210n31; Burgtheater, 46, 182, 216n31; Congress of, 70, 76, 171–72, 178, 184, 185, 188; Hoftheater, 65, 70, 78; Kärnthnerthortheater (Kärntnertortheater) (Vienna), 179, 216n31; occupation of, 11, 15, 62, 67, 70–72; Theater an der Wien, 65–73, 77, 216n28, 216n31, 219n53; Theater auf der Wieden, 64, 67; Theater in der Josefstadt, 65; Theater in der Leopoldstadt, 65–69, 75; Vorstadttheater, 18, 59, 64, 70–71, 77, 217n31 Viganò, Salvatore, Il Prometeo, 31 Viotti, Giovanni Battista, 14 voice, 146, 148–49, 162–63, 167, 179, 194. See also muteness

index

Völker-Schlacht. See Leipzig: Battle of (Völker-Schlacht) Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet), 11, 139; L’enfant prodigue, 205n40; Marianne, 71; Zaïre, 134 Vorstadttheater (Vienna), 18, 59, 64, 70–71, 77, 217n31 Waeber, Jacqueline, xi, 11, 21, 23, 35, 191–98 Wagner, Richard, 23 Walker, John, The Factory Lad, 147 Waterloo, Battle of, 47, 53, 58, 175 Weber, Bernhard Anselm, Der Gang nach dem Eisenhammer, 22 Weber, Carl Maria von, Der Freischütz, 4, 56 Weidmann, Franz, 184; “Die Macht des Liedes,” 184 Weigl, Joseph, Die Schweizer Familie, 179, 196 Weimar, 70, 159–60, 205n43 Wellington, Duke of (Arthur Wellesley), 175 Whale, James, Frankenstein, xii Wieland, Christoph, Alceste, 159 Wilkins, William, 58 William Frederick II of Prussia, 46 Winter, Peter von: Lenardo und Blandine, 32, 95–116, 195, 197; Salomons Urtheil, 12 Wollstonecraft, Mary, 148 Wordsworth, William, 141 Zacchiroli, Francesco, Giuda all’albero, 40 Zimmermann, Anton, 66; Andromeda und Perseus, 8