Reclaiming the melodrama as an area of serious musicological study is no easy task. In today's parlance, melodrama carries the connotation of exaggerated sensationalism, the province of soap operas and reality TV shows. Even in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, at the height of its fame, the melodrama frequently attracted disdain, and was, paradoxically, accused of being both too formulaic and too experimental. The earliest studies of the melodrama in the 1970s were highly bifurcated, with literary scholars concentrating on the melodramas of post-revolutionary France, particularly the boulevard works of René-Charles Guilbert de Pixerécourt, and musicologists focused on the German tradition as epitomized by Georg Benda. The Melodramatic Moment addresses for the first time in any scholarly work both the French and German traditions as a unified phenomenon of musical and theatrical culture. While the volume primarily examines the melodrama between the French revolution and the end of the Napoleonic era, Ellen Lockhart's chapter provides a thorough introduction to the genre's origins and essential characteristics, and there are many connections to theatrical cultures of the Enlightenment, including both the sentimental and the sublime. Addressing both the French and Germanic traditions of melodrama does more than allow the volume to have an international scope: this inclusivity aims to undo the legacy of scholarly bias that has dismissed large portions of the melodramatic repertory as unworthy of serious attention. For musicologists, this means grappling with a body of works geared towards popularity rather than high art, one in which music often played a secondary role.

One of the editors’ stated aims for this volume is to ‘sonorize’ the discussion of melodrama, allowing music to take a more central place in our considerations of the genre. Two significant challenges stand in the way of this goal. First, while the texts of many melodramas have survived, there is little extant music, limiting the number of works available for musicological interrogation. In this volume, two essays centre on Pixerécourt's La citerne (1809), the music being readily accessible and complete. Second, the music written for melodramas does not constitute what we would consider a full score. The music was often fragmentary, sometimes just several bars long, with no guarantee of thematic development or even tonal closure. Pastiche was often employed, with the music compiled from a variety of pre-existing sources. Standard musical tropes – running scales, tremolos and so forth – were frequently employed to create a mood and emphasize the emotional state of the character. Such music has rarely been the focus of scholarly study. As Jacqueline Waeber notes in the Afterward, musicology ‘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’ (191).

This volume takes the first steps at speeding up this process, with most of the essays discussing melodramatic music directly. While somewhat limited in number, the musical examples provided are well chosen and easy to read, even when reproducing primary sources. And while discussion of the music can at times take a back seat to matters of social context, several essays succeed in demonstrating how integral music was to the overall experience. Melodramas were often criticized for over-expression, with text, music, gesture and scenic effects all being used to communicate the same information. In his discussion of Pixerécourt's La citerne, Jens Hesselager argues that music could be more playful than has previously been understood, and could even be ironic, not merely matching the tone of the text but highlighting inconsistencies in the characters’ actions (similar to the means by which Gluck undercuts Orestes’ statement of calm in Iphigénie en Tauride). In this light, music is not a repetition of the text, but a commentary upon it. Thomas Betzwieser, analysing the illustrations that accompany the libretto of Lenardo und Blandine (1779), similarly shows that, even when it played a secondary role in conveying the story, music was carefully crafted in conjunction with text and gesture. Music may not have been at the centre of the melodrama's effect, but that does not mean it can be dismissed without damaging the overall effect of the work, either in performance or in scholarly study.

Further essays address how the melodrama's ubiquity in European culture allowed it to serve a variety of political and social purposes. The melodrama moved freely across borders, national as well as artistic and cultural, taking on a hybrid nature that adapted easily (though not uncontentiously) to a variety of different situations. Diego Saglia and George Taylor both discuss the meaning of melodrama as a French import in England during the Napoleonic era, in which support for a foreign genre was tantamount to support for a foreign country, making the melodrama an inherently politicized genre. If this is true of most genres during the time period, the mutability of the melodrama also meant that it could readily be used for a surprisingly wide variety of social purposes. Chapters by Matthew Head and Nicholas Mathew describe how the explicit use of melodramas – to raise funds for the victims of disaster and to commemorate the Congress of Vienna respectively – could have deeper psychological resonances, whether encouraging a feeling of sympathy or serving as a locus of public memory. Several essays provide an excellent discussion of how melodrama interacted with and was shaped by the visual arts. Sarah Hibberd's chapter, in particular, offers an analysis of how changing scenic design and special effects influenced the staging of the genre. Her essay provides a model for an analysis that treats the melodrama not as a site of experimentation that was to be fully realized in other genres, notably opera, but as a satisfying theatrical experience in its own right.

Demonstrating both the cultural pervasiveness and the public appeal of the melodrama, this volume makes a call for the genre to be granted both greater awareness and further musicological consideration. Scholars of both eighteenth- and nineteenth-century theatrical cultures will find engaging correlations between the melodrama and genres that have enjoyed more thorough study. The topic has significant potential for further scholarship, and one hopes that future studies will provide greater access to scores and librettos. Beyond bringing to light an ignored genre, this volume asks us to reflect upon the stories our scholarship tells about musical and cultural history. The turn of the nineteenth century is generally associated with the development of the work concept, the prioritizing of internal musical cohesion and a greater emphasis on originality. Yet the melodrama, a genre characterized by hybridity and adaptation, stands in opposition to this narrative. The melodrama's prevalence clearly indicates that we cannot dismiss it as a product of a bygone era, nor ‘mere’ popular culture. Instead, as the editors indicate, the contrast between the reception of melodrama and mainstream music history points to a problem in our methods of historical enquiry (23). As much as this volume is an informative resource on the melodrama itself, on a broader level it compels us to look beyond our own scholarly biases, questioning both our narratives and the tools we use to create them.