Let me be clear from the start that Michael Pisani's Music for the Melodramatic Theatre in Nineteenth-Century London & New York is a major study. It makes a very significant contribution to our knowledge and understanding of nineteenth-century musical theater in Pisani's two chosen centers, whose cultural relationship during the period was significant. Drama and theater historians have investigated melodrama in a wide range of contexts; however, music historians have only more recently begun to reconsider the form. According to Sarah Hibberd's concise explanation in her recent edited collection, Melodramatic Voices: Understanding Music Drama, the ‘mélodrame à grand spectacle’ emerged in Parisian boulevard theaters after the French Revolution and presented “the moral struggle between good and evil in dramas of suspense and heightened emotion.” With its linkage of “physical gesture, mise-en-scène and music,” melodrama spread rapidly across Europe and thence to the United States, influencing a wide range of popular theater and, eventually, film.Footnote ¹

In his introduction, Pisani addresses questions of genre and terminology. Melodrama is clearly a theatrical form that resists easy classification, as well as the methods of traditional musicology. Hibberd observes that musicologists have tended to restrict the term “melodrama” to recitation with musical accompaniment, reflecting their historical lack of interest in a theatrical genre whose scores were often inaccessible or unavailable, its composers often unnamed or multiple. Ephemeral melodrama productions had an uncertain claim on conventional work status and therefore fell foul of most of the tenets of canonic musicology. Given these disciplinary barriers, one can sympathize with Pisani's twice-ventured decision that he will, in fact, address what might more usefully be called “popular drama” than “melodrama” (xii, 73). However, the implications of his book's title, Music for the Melodramatic Theatre, and his own investment in “old” musicological ways, dictate his occasionally excessive concern about genre, originality, authorship, and sources—while eloquently revealing his subject's resistance to them.

These contradictions shadow Pisani's preliminary account of “melodrama” and of the kinds of music that were played between or beneath stretches of stage business. His chapters 2 and 3 describe how, in popular London theaters in the early nineteenth century, the “burletta laws” forbade unaccompanied dialogue because of French-revolutionary potential that was assumed to exist within inflammatory speech unadorned by music (which obscured its meaning). Various mixed- and cross-generic forms of “burletta” resulted, comprising pantomime, narrative ballet, and tableaux in various configurations that endlessly confuse scholarly efforts at precise designation. Pisani's introduction has nevertheless established three “categories or types” of music being used in late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century theaters: “music that fills up the intervals between plays and acts: overtures and entr'actes,” “music with precise visual or aural reference within the play,” and then, thirdly, “the great invisible mechanical apparatus of melodramatic music” (xix–xxi).

Given the complexity and occasional inconsistencies of Pisani's categorizations of the types of musical interventions and accompaniments often called “melos,” my recommendation would be for readers new to the genre to start with chapter 2, “The Rise of Melodrama in the Age of Revolution” (was this even intended to be the opening of the book, I wonder?). Here the writing achieves a more self-confident engagement with “the development of the popular drama … during a period of complex licensing laws in which theatrical proprietors enthralled their audiences while treading a fine line when it came to placating the censors and the clergy” (40). A lively picture emerges of an uninhibited theater that the authorities ever sought to inhibit. Social, political, and theatrical histories intertwine as Pisani traces music's many roles in a popular theatrical culture that included opera, opéra comique, ballet, pantomime, and “melodramatic” boulevard theater, with its heroines and villains, its storms and sinking ships, and its stories based on contemporary events and popular novels (including those of Dickens).

The depth and scope of Pisani's research becomes ever more evident as his history moves into the second half of the nineteenth century. His evocations of specific London theaters are excellent, not least of those in “transpontine” territory, south of the Thames, where the censors had little power but where dangerous streets and unruly audiences inclined to name-calling and orange-peel throwing deterred the better class of theatregoer. Even so, the middle classes seem to have drifted towards the popular theater for its production values, its music, its sensations, and its increasingly high profile actors. There remain bumps and oddities along the way in Pisani's account. For example, why the prolific French originator of melodrama is permitted only one acute accent in U.S. writing remains darkly obscure. (My edition of Peter Brooks's celebrated 1976 study The Melodramatic Imagination similarly denies Pixérérecourt his first accent.)Footnote ² The later chapters of Pisani's book are much the best. They offer surprises for music historians who may have accepted received wisdom that there was no significant nineteenth-century English musical theater (usually meaning opera) apart from Gilbert and Sullivan. Even the traditional musicologist in Pisani seems rather shocked as he tells us how much material from the later nineteenth century survives (“the prospects for future research are ripe,” 276) while elsewhere insisting on the problems involved in any planned attempt to “revive” these melodramas (e.g., xii, 71–72).

I wonder. The later sections of his book are filled with detailed evocations of grandly conceived popular dramas, filled with music that Pisani has obviously been moved and enthralled by, as well he might be. Opportunities are missed, like confronting the implication that Wagner's “sunken” Bayreuth orchestra pit was anticipated by similar experiments in popular theaters in London and New York. Yet who, after reading Pisani, would not long to see a production of a “suspense drama” like The Courier of Lyons (1854), or Boucicault's Irish drama The Colleen Bawn (1860)? Here is a relevant extract from Pisani's account of the latter (Myles was played by the indefatigable Dion Boucicault himself):

Pisani's readers may be assured that they will discover what happens next and whether Eily will be saved, but not before he has elaborated on the visual sensation of this once-famous scene: “The exquisite blue gauze that represented the lake was a completely new effect—the ripples were caused by the movement of some twenty small men and boys beneath it. Agnes Robertson also played her drowning struggles with graphic verisimilitude, sinking down into a trap and then being forced up again through the gauze” (199). There is much more, along with the information that The Colleen Bawn, which had opened in New York in March 1860 and then, six months later, started a continuous seven-month run at the Adelphi in London, was seen no less than three times by Queen Victoria and Prince Albert.

Pisani paints an impressive picture of the ever-circulating exchange between popular novels and dramas and the world of opera as melodrama gained in status, particularly in locations frequented by the middle classes. The music by Edward German for Beerbohm's Tree's 1893 The Tempter was praised by none other than Joachim on a London visit (229); this had opened with a shipwreck for which the Haymarket stage had had to be specially excavated. Then, with the turn of the century, there came the great dramas of David Belasco, whose Madame Butterfly and Girl of the Golden West we know from Puccini's versions for the opera house. Other discoveries from the period include Henry Irving's 1895 version of King Arthur, with Arthur Sullivan's “most elaborate theatrical score” (270) and “pre-Raphaelite” sets designed by Sir Edward Burne-Jones, which ran for 150 performances in spite of critics who found its blank-verse text old fashioned. One can hardly be surprised that Pisani is captivated by the opening scene, where Excalibur emerges from the waters of a lake in the pale light of dawn, to “a shimmering tremolo in the strings,” after which “a solo violin heralds a rising, nine-note ‘Excalibur motive’ […which] coincided with a ray of light aimed directly at the jeweled sword” (271).

For all this I am, in the end, prepared to forgive Pisani his poor index, his lack of a bibliography, and his apparent reticence about making more than a few cautious references to the world of silent film (it would soon take over many of these dramatic styles and topics and most of the musical devices and techniques that had been developed in melodramatic theater). By the end of the book, many readers will surely want to begin agitating for revivals, or at least readings or performances with speaking actors supported by an appropriately sized orchestra. This is just the sort of thing that the BBC could surely do. A whole lost cultural world is opened up here—we would do well to take note.