1. Melodrama
Popular culture
Popular culture

2. Beginnings of melodrama
France - late 18th and early 19th centuries - as part of the Romantic literary period (emotions through art, imagination, individuality, nature as a source of spirituality and intuition).
spoken lines alternating with musical accompaniment.

3. The first full melodrama was Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Pygmalion (1762): consisting of dialogue, pantomime, and music).
Georg Benda, Czech composer: Ariadne auf Naxos (1775) and Medea (1778) – melodrama in opera.

4. Rene Charles Guilbert de Pixérécourt (1773-1844)
Prolific dramatist : more than a hundred plays during the first third of the 19th century. These were performed in the théâtres des boulevards, which were patronized by middle – and working-class audiences.

5. August von Kotzebue (1761-1819)
German playwright widely influential in popularizing poetic drama, into which he instilled melodramatic sensationalism and sentimental philosophizing. He wrote over 200 plays.

6. Melodrama in the theatre

7. Characteristics Originally a play embellished with music (Gr. melos)
Strict observance of poetic justice
There are stock characters (hero, heroine, comic character & villain) who do not change psychologically or morally, which means the interest lies in the manipulation of the plot in which fate, Providence and justice play important parts.
The action arises out of the evil machinations of the cold-blooded villain
Emotional appeals are very basic: "arousal of pity and indignation at the wrongful oppression of good people and intense dislike for wicked oppressors."
Romantic situations, comic effects, spectacle, and a happy ending

8. Melodrama: Spectacle, performance, and music
Theatre:
‘official’ theatre, which largely drew on a classical repertoire, catering for the tastes of the aristocratic elite maintaining their ideas and values.
“illegitimate theatre” catering for the growing urban audience, composed of the newly emerging ‘middle classes’ and the industrial working-class, and drawing on other popular entertainment traditions: ‘dumb show, pantomime, ballets, spectacles, acrobatics, the exhibition of animals and freaks, and, above all, musical accompaniment and song.’

9. Open quality of melodrama: both porous and fluid – accepting elements from other genres and itself overflowing into them:
Gothic melodrama
Crime melodrama (film noir)
Family melodrama
Historical melodrama
Colonial melodrama

10. Silent Film
Charles Chaplin ( ), “The Kid”

11. Popular Media (melodrama and journalism)

14. Dracula: 1992 movie directed by Francis Ford Coppola

15. James Bond