Newsgroup: it.arti.musica.classica.mod
Titolo: Come si traduce "melodrama" in Italiano?

Carissimi,
Ho trovato questo articolo sul Guardian che vi incollo.....
Mi sembra interessante. Ma non saprei come tradurre la parola
"melodrama" perché mi sembra che melodramma in Italiano acquisti
un significato un po' diverso. Qualcuno mi aiuta? :-)
Baci,
Lulu
http://www.guardian.co.uk/arts/fridayreview/story/0,12102,1551527,00.html
Drama queens
Melodrama wasn't always about villains twirling moustaches. It was once
regarded as high art. Misha Donat on how the genre and its composers
changed opera for ever
Friday August 19, 2005
The Guardian
"Nothing has ever surprised me so much," wrote Mozart enthusiastically
to his father after seeing Georg Benda's melodrama Medea in Mannheim,
towards the end of 1778. "It is not sung, but only declaimed, and the
music is like an obbligato recitative. Occasionally there is also
speech underneath the music, which makes a marvellous effect. Do you
know what I think? One ought to treat operatic recitative in this way,
and only have sung recitative when the words can be well expressed by
the music."
In the 18th century, the word melodrama was applied in its literal
Greek meaning, as a combination of music and acting. Although it tended
to be used for depicting heightened emotion - with highly wrought
heroines abandoned by husband or lover, such as Medea or Ariadne, a
favourite subject - it had none of the pejorative associations of
moustache-twirling villainy it later acquired in the Victorian theatre.
It was Jean-Jacques Rousseau who invented the melodrama in his dramatic
monologue Pygmalion, first performed in Paris in the early 1760s. An
influential philosopher and author of the famous Confessions, Rousseau
was also a capable composer - he wrote the short folk-style operatic
intermezzo Le Devin du Village (The Village Soothsayer) and contributed
part of the music to Pygmalion. His conviction that the French language
was unsuited to musical setting, and particularly to recitative, led
him to evolve a genre in which, as he explained, "the spoken phrase was
announced and prepared by the musical phrase".
Rousseau's lead was not followed up in France, but the form of the
melodrama achieved considerable success in Germany, particularly
through Benda. His Medea and Ariadne auf Naxos, both composed in 1775,
consist of a single continuous scene involving no more than two
characters. In Ariadne, the heroine awakes from a troubled sleep full
of dark premonitions to find that her lover Theseus has left her to her
fate on the island of Naxos. He has sadly returned to his duties in
Athens, summoned back to his ship by the imperious sound of off-stage
trumpets. In her anger and despair - mirrored by a storm - Ariadne
throws herself off a cliff into the sea.
Following an elaborate overture, Benda adopts more or less the
procedure advocated by Rousseau: each burst of highly descriptive music
anticipates the emotional content of the short speech that follows it.
In one of the climactic moments, music and speech unfold
simultaneously, with the music following the flow of the text in such a
way that the changes in harmony coincide with crucial words - "death",
"sufferings", "lightning bolts".
Mozart was so moved by Benda's melodramas ("I love these two works so
much", he told his father, "that I carry them around with me") that he
planned to write one himself, on the subject of the Babylonian queen
Semiramis. In all likelihood, he never composed any of it, but he did
include two melodramas in his unfinished Singspiel Zaide, written
around the time he saw Benda's Medea. In the first, the vain efforts of
the slave Gomatz to sleep are represented by a soothing oboe melody,
while his wakeful agitation is depicted in violently syncopated
orchestral phrases. The second melodrama forms a turbulent introduction
to the sultan's aria of fury at the realisation that the heroine,
Zaide, has escaped from his harem.
As a self-contained theatrical form, the fragmentary nature of both
music and text in the melodrama meant that it had its limitations, but
the intervention of an individual melodrama within an opera could be
highly effective.
For Beethoven, the dramatic high point of Fidelio was the scene in
which the heroine, Leonore, finds herself having to dig a grave for her
incarcerated husband, Florestan, who is about to be murdered by the
prison governor. The scene is prepared by a short melodrama whose
musical interjections depict the Florestan turning over in his sleep,
as well as Leonore's shudders of fear and anticipation. Beethoven
included further melodramas in some of the incidental music he wrote
for theatrical productions: towards the end of his music for Goethe's
Egmont, the eponymous hero bids farewell to life on the eve of his
execution, and seeks comfort in sleep, portrayed in a short section
combining speech and music, before the orchestra takes over in a
sustained passage of calm.
The greatest and most substantial of early 19th-century melodramas is
the famous "horror" scene of the wolf's glen in Weber's Der Freischütz
- a masterpiece of psychological insight which sees the guilt-stricken
hero, Max, resort to black magic to help him win his bride at a
shooting contest the next day. Weber blends spoken dialogue, recitative
and arioso into a scene of overwhelming dramatic power, and, for all
Wagner's distaste for melodrama (which he dismissed as "a mixture of
the most unedifying kind"), he was hugely indebted to this scene.
The tradition was continued by Schubert, and by Mendelssohn in his
Midsummer Night's Dream music and his once popular but now forgotten
setting of Sophocles's Antigone. But with Schumann and Liszt melodrama
became essentially a vessel for declaiming poetry to a musical
accompaniment, generally a solo piano. Schumann wrote three pieces of
this kind towards the end of his life, using poems by Shelley and
Friedrich Hebbel, and Liszt composed a handful of recitations, one of
them with orchestral accompaniment. But the genre was dealt a severe
blow at the end of the century by Strauss, with his infamously long and
tedious setting of Tennyson's Enoch Arden.
Melodrama was further transformed by its leading 20th-century exponent,
Schoenberg. The penultimate section of his vast post-Wagnerian
Gurrelieder is a wonderful depiction for speaker and orchestra of
nature at the dawn of a new day. But far more influential was his 1912
cabaret piece Pierrot Lunaire - a cycle of 21 poems for reciter and
chamber ensemble. Schoenberg sought what he called "speech melody" -
something between declamation and song - and he devised a notation that
indicated the rise and fall of the voice, as well as its rhythm. His
later works invoking the spoken voice include two strong antifascist
statements: a setting for reciter and piano quintet of Byron's heavily
ironic Ode to Napoleon; and A Survivor from Warsaw - a seven-minute
orchestral piece (with a text by Schoenberg himself) suggesting the
horrors of the Warsaw ghetto under Nazi occupation.
In the music of Alban Berg and, in particular, the prologue to his
opera Lulu, the progression from speech, through speech-melody
(Sprechgesang) to singing, and back again becomes an essential part of
the structure. In one particularly striking passage, the voices of the
impassive Lulu and her panic-stricken lover, Dr Schön, accompanied
only by a battery of percussion instruments, are heard preparing to
break down the door of her husband's studio before they discover his
gruesome suicide.
If, in its original form, melodrama had a relatively short shelf-life,
the sudden intrusion of the spoken voice into opera has been used by
most composers ever since. Even that arch-melodist Puccini acknowledged
its theatrical value: at the end of La Bohème, Rodolfo, realising from
the expression on his friends' faces that Mimi has died, bursts into
speech strangled with emotion. The effect is - well, melodramatic.
· Benda's Ariadne auf Naxos and Mozart's Zaide will be performed at
the Usher Hall as part of the Edinburgh International Festival on
Tuesday. Box office: 0131-473 2000
Useful links
More about Benda's Ariadne auf Naxo and Mozart's Zaide at Edinburgh
Wikipedia: Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Mozart Forum
Classical.net: More about Mozart's Zaide

 ha scritto nel messaggio 
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

Grazie Stefano!
Sě credo proprio che sia melologo!
Baci,
Lulu

Sì credo proprio che sia melologo!
Infatti: anche la mia Enc. della Musica dice che MELOLOGO è genere
teatrale costituito dalla sovrapposizione della lettura di un  testo
poetico (o in prosa) a un accompagnamento orchestrale (o  pianistico).
1° saggio del genere: appunto il Pygmalion di Rousseau citato nell'
art. del Guardian.
LUX