Fierce. Flawless. Frenchie. With opinions on brunch (always boozy), work (something for lesser life forms), and everything (really, everything) in between, René-Charles is the ultimate New York City tastemaker. Whether he's dining at the finest restaurants or luxuriating in his king-size bed, this discerning French bulldog accepts nothing less than the best. And if you don't meet his standards? Well, he'll let you know.
Fierce. Flawless. Frenchie. With opinions on brunch (always boozy), work (something for lesser life forms), and everything (really, everything) in between, Renéharles is the ultimate New York City tastemaker. Whether he's dining at the finest restaurants or luxuriating in his king-size bed, this discerning French bulldog accepts nothing less than the best.And if you don't meet his standards? Well, he'll let you know.
Throughout the nineteenth century, people heard more music in the theatre—accompanying popular dramas such as Frankenstein, Oliver Twist, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Lady Audley’s Secret, The Corsican Brothers, The Three Musketeers, as well as historical romances by Shakespeare and Schiller—than they did in almost any other area of their lives. But unlike film music, theatrical music has received very little attention from scholars and so it has been largely lost to us. In this groundbreaking study, Michael V. Pisani goes in search of these abandoned sounds. Mining old manuscripts and newspapers, he finds that starting in the 1790s, theatrical managers in Britain and the United States began to rely on music to play an interpretive role in melodramatic productions. During the nineteenth century, instrumental music—in addition to song—was a common feature in the production of stage plays. The music played by instrumental ensembles not only enlivened performances but also served other important functions. Many actors and actresses found that accompanimental music helped them sustain the emotional pitch of a monologue or dialogue sequence. Music also helped audiences to identify the motivations of characters. Playwrights used music to hold together the hybrid elements of melodrama, heighten the build toward sensation, and dignify the tragic pathos of villains and other characters. Music also aided manager-directors by providing cues for lighting and other stage effects. Moreover, in a century of seismic social and economic changes, music could provide a moral compass in an uncertain moral universe. Featuring dozens of musical examples and images of the old theatres, Music for the Melodramatic Theatre charts the progress of the genre from its earliest use in the eighteenth century to the elaborate stage productions of the very early twentieth century.
The genre of mélodrame à grand spectacle that emerged in the boulevard theatres of Paris in the 1790s - and which was quickly exported abroad - expressed the moral struggle between good and evil through a drama of heightened emotions. Physical gesture, mise en scène and music were as important in communicating meaning and passion as spoken dialogue. The premise of this volume is the idea that the melodramatic aesthetic is central to our understanding of nineteenth-century music drama, broadly defined as spoken plays with music, operas and other hybrid genres that combine music with text and/or image. This relationship is examined closely, and its evolution in the twentieth century in selected operas, musicals and films is understood as an extension of this nineteenth-century aesthetic. The book therefore develops our understanding of opera in the context of melodrama's broader influence on musical culture during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This book will appeal to those interested in film studies, drama, theatre and modern languages as well as music and opera.
"The Novel Stage: Narrative Form from the Restoration to Jane Austen traces the novel's relation to the theater over the course of the long eighteenth century, arguing that the familiar account of the novel as 'new' and distinct from other literary genres risks distorting a true reckoning of the form by failing to engage with the borrowings and departures from other more familiar genres, particularly drama. The Novel Stage traces the migration of tragicomedy, the comedy of manners, and melodrama from the stage to the novel. These genres were shared across print and performance, media that were not construed as opposites in a world in which individual silent reading took place beside playgoing, play-reading, amateur theatricals, and sociable reading aloud. The book thus expands an overly narrow conception of the novel as the genre of realism or domesticity whose highest achievement is its representation of characters' mental lives by describing the influence of the stage and its genres. Beginning in the later 1600s with Aphra Behn, The Novel Stage concludes with a chapter on some novelists of the Romantic period and a coda about Victorian novels. The Novel Stage's account of the novel provides an enriched, because more specific, sense of its formal accomplishments that drew on this ensemble of cultural forms and turns that lens back onto drama"--Provided by publisher.
