Melodrama

Melodrama (pronounced mel-uh-drah-muh or mel-uh-dram-uh)

(1) A dramatic form (used in theatre, literature, music etc) that does not observe the laws of cause and effect and that exaggerates emotion and emphasizes plot or action at the expense of characterization.

(2) Loosely, (sometimes very loosely), behavior or events thought “melodramatic” (overly dramatic displays of emotion or behavior and applied especially to situations in which “things are blown out of proportion”).

(3) In formal definition (seventeenth, eighteenth & nineteenth centuries), a romantic dramatic composition characterized by sensational incident with music interspersed.

(4) A poem or part of a play or opera spoken to a musical accompaniment (technically, a passage in which the orchestra plays a somewhat descriptive accompaniment, while the actor speaks).

(5) A popular nickname conferred on highly-strung young women with a Mel*.* given name (Melanie, Melissa, Melina, Melinda, Melisandre, Melodie, Melody et al).

1784 (used in 1782 as melodrame): From the French mélodrame (a dramatic composition in which music is used), the construct being mélo- , from the Ancient Greek μέλος (mélos) (limb, member; musical phrase, tune, melody, song) + drame (refashioned by analogy with the Ancient Greek δρᾶμα (drâma) (deed, theatrical act) and cognate to the German Melodram, the Italian melodramma and the Spanish melodrama.  The adjective melodramatic (pertaining to, suitable for, or characteristic of a melodrama) came into use in 1789 (unrelated to political events that year).  Melodrama, melodramaticism, melodramaturgy, melodramatics & melodramatist are nouns, melodramatize, melodramatizing & melodramatized are verbs, melodramatic is an adjective and melodramatically is an adverb; the noun plural is melodramas or melodramata.

As late as the mid-nineteenth century “melodrama” was still used of stage-plays (usually romantic & sentimental) in which songs were interspersed, the action accompanied by orchestral music appropriate to the situations.  By the 1880s, the shift towards a melodrama being understood as “a romantic and sensational dramatic piece with a happy ending” and this proved influential, the musical element ceasing gradually to be an essential feature, the addition of recorded sound to “moving pictures” (movies) the final nail in the coffin.  Since then, a “melodrama” is understood to be “a dramatic piece characterized by sensational incidents and violent appeals to the emotions, but with (usually) a happy ending”.

The origins of melodrama lie in late sixteenth century Italian opera and reflect an attempt to convince audiences (or more correctly, composers and critics) that the form (ie opera or melodrama) was a revival of the Classical Greek tragedy.  It was a time in Europe when there was a great reverence for the cultures of Antiquity, something the result of the scholars and archivists (and frankly the publicists) of the Renaissance building a somewhat idealized construct of the epoch and the content providers noted the labels, the German-British Baroque composer Frederick Handel (1685–1759) using both for his works.  In the late eighteenth century French dramatists began to develop melodrama as a distinct genre by elaborating the dialogue and adding spectacle, action and violence to the plot-lines, a technique still familiar in the 2020s, sensationalism and extravagant emotionalism as effective click-bait now it was for ticket sales in earlier times.

The use of “melodrama” to refer to the life of a troubled popular culture figure represents a bit of a jump in meaning but it’s now well-understood.

The path of the musical form had earlier been laid in text, something becoming a more significant influence as the spread of the printing press made mass-market publications more accessible and they spread even within non-literate populations because as public and private readings became common forms of entertainment.  Although elements of what would later be understood as melodrama exist in the gloomy tragedies of the French novelist Claude Prosper Jolyot de Crébillon (1707–1777), more of an influence on the composers would be those who wrote with a lighter touch including the Swiss philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778) whose Pygmalion (1775) and French theatre director and playwright René-Charles Guilbert de Pixerécourt (1773–1844) whose Le Pèlerin blanc ou les Enfants du hameau (The White Pilgrim (or The Children of the Village)) both came to be regarded as part of the inchoate framework of the genre.  Literary theorists still debate the matter of cause & effect between melodrama and the growing vogue of the Gothic novel, one of fiction’s more emotionally manipulative paths, many concluding the relationship between the two was symbiotic.

There was also the commercial imperative.  Literary historians have documented the simultaneous proliferation of melodramas produced for the English stage during the nineteenth century (notably adaptations of novels by popular authors such as Charles Dickens (1812–1870) and Sir Walter Scott (1771–1832)) and the paucity in original work of substance.  There are some who have argued the writers had “lost their ear” for dramatic verse and prose but it more likely they realized they had “lost their audiences” and these were people with bills to pay (the term “potboiler” was coined later to describe “books written only to provide food for the stove” but few authors of popular fiction have ever been far removed from concerns with their sales).  The reason the melodramas which flourished in the 1800s were so popular will be unsurprising to modern film-makers, political campaign strategists and other content providers for they can be deconstructed as a class of naively sensational entertainment in which the protagonists & antagonists were excessively virtuous or exceptionally evil (thus all tiresome complexities reduced for something black & white), the conflict played out with blood, thrills and violence (spectres, ghouls, witches & vampires or the sordid realism of drunkenness, infidelity or personal ruin used as devices as required).

The word “melodrama” appears often in commentaries on politics and that’s a trend which was probably accelerated by the presentation moving for most purposes to screens and Donald Trump (b 1946; US president 2017-2021) revolutionizing the business by applying the tricks & techniques of reality TV (itself an oxymoron) meant the whole process can now be thought an unfolding melodrama, indeed, the Trump model cannot work as anything else.  The idea of “politics as theatre” was first discussed in the US in the 1960s but then a phenomenon like Mr Trump would have been thought absurdly improbable.

Because of the popularity of the form, melodrama has rarely found much favor with the critics and that old curmudgeon Henry Fowler (1858–1933) in A Dictionary of Modern English Usage (1926) noted (and, one suspects, not without some satisfaction) that the term generally was “…used with some contempt, because the appeal of such plays as are acknowledged to deserve the title is especially to the unsophisticated & illiterate whose acquaintance with human nature is superficial, but whose admiration for goodness and detestation of wickedness is ready & powerful.”  Henry Fowler moved among only a certain social stratum.  He added that the task of the melodramatist’s was to establish in the audience’s mind the notion of the dichotomous characters as good & wicked and then “…provide striking situations that shall provoke and relieve anxieties on behalf of poetic justice.”  One device once used to produce the desired effect was of course music and a whole academic industry emerged in the mid-twentieth century to explain how different sounds could be used to suggest or summon certain emotions and because music increasingly ceased to be an essential part of the melodramatic form, the situations, dialogue and events in purely textual productions became more exaggerated.