Missouri Classical Music News

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".