| Melodrame, a form of spoken theatre of immense popularity in Paris of 1800, exercised a profound influence on its operatic contemporaries---in France, grand opera, in Italy, opera semiseria and Romantic melodramma. This study focuses mainly on the Italian side, on concrete connections between operas and the plays that served as their models. Excerpts by Bellini, Donizetti, Meyerbeer, and Halevy, selected from dozens of operas based on melodrames, will demonstrate the imprint of the distinctive Parisian genre. These connections will help to illuminate a larger, cosmopolitan process involving opera, melodrame, and Italian spoken theatre: the emergence of a commercial theatre characterized by integrated, realistic staging and an emphasis on sentiment, spectacle, and melodramatic expression. Though the logic of the model may seem simple, theatre can lend things to an opera on different levels: a specific detail, a way of signifying, or a shared historical process. Chapter one introduces the features of melodrame before turning to the Paris Opera and its relationship to the boulevard. The focus then shifts to Italy, where melodrames appeared as spoken plays on provocative subjects. Their polarized characters, extreme situations, and excessive spectacle were a lure to librettists and composers, who then reshaped these features according to generic and cultural demands. In Naples (chapter two), melodrames helped to coin a local genre of opera semiseria that filtered sentiment and spectacle through dialect and comedy, while accommodating such Romantic experiments as Donizetti's Otto mesi in due ore. The handling of sensibility (chapter three) also shows the distance from Paris. In youthful operas by Halevy (Clary) and Bellini ( Adelson e Salvini), the sentimental rhetoric characteristic of melodrame, once detached from post-revolutionary politics, is discarded in favor of sentimental strategies of representation---framing, exclusion, and oscillation. Meyerbeer's Margherita d'Anjou illustrates a successful adaptation of melodramatic spectacle, reducing excessive staging and seizing on a pathetic situation for a key aria to set up a finale. Boulevard models lent distinctive shape to two seminal Romantic operas (chapter four), inspiring the sentimental highlights of Bellini's Il pirata and the action and narrative color of Donizetti's Lucrezia Borgia. |
