Musicologica Olomucensia

The term "melodrama" has come, in the current sense of the word, to have the established meaning of a syncretic joining of the recited word with instrumental music, which respects the relative independence and separateness of both parallel layers as opposed to the interconnection implied by the term synthetic (as used with regard to songs, choruses, cantatas, oratoria, operas and the like) in which music engulfs or swallows up the spoken word, changing it to a suitable "deformation" as an inseparable part of its own specific form. From the historical perspective, the term "melodrama" has gone through certain changes, homonymic (this term was used when referring to original Italian opera) as well as synonymic (in ancient Greece, the term "paracaralogue", that is "words or speech added to music" and, in the era of Benda, the words "monodrama" or "duodrama" were used to mean a monologue of one or two dramatic figures).
J. Rousseau and J. A. Benda are considered to be the founders of modern European melodrama. Both express a distaste for "recitativo secco" and the non-dramatic conventions of old Italian and French court opera and attempt, via singspiel, to effect a dramatic reform analogous to what Gluck accomplished with opera. Their departure points, however, differ from one another. Rousseau, who himself was a composer as well, was above all a writer, who endeavoured to musically lyricize the dramatic word (he rejected the supposed lack of musicality of the French language in particular). At the same time, he had an enlightened spirit with regard to the priority of the word over music and became the founder of a literary line of the development of melodrama and its conciliation with other dramatic forms (ballet, "mimodram"). Benda, on the other hand, was a composer who hung on to, in that syncretic artistic form, a primary respect for music and became a pioneer of the musical form of melodrama and the evolutionary line arising therefrom.
The tectonic priority of this or that component unfolded in accordance with historical transformations of styles and genres. Classic style placed the main emphasis on the word, in the spirit of enlightened rationalism, and so it was no accident that the 18th century was the very time in which there was a great interest in the new syncretic artistic form on the part of writers themselves. After the Great French Revolution, in that strange period of the rebirth of preromantic aesthetics, "folkiness" or popular character, the so-called popular melodrama was born, aimed on purpose at a broad range of classes of society. This discredited the term melodrama, making it a surrogate for kitsch and kitchiness (a source of the pejorative naming of literature, film and the like as being "melodramatic"). Benda´s sometime endeavour to create a melodramatic musical form finally found its application in romanticism, which placed music on an aesthetic pedestal above all other forms of art. A new form, concert melodrama, was formed and, in neoromanticism, a modern scenic melodrama as well, based upon dialogue. The peak thereof is represented by the Shakespearean dramatic trilogy Hippodamie by Z. Fibich based on the original stage play by J. Vrchlický. Expressionism continued further down the path of romantic dominance of music over the spoken text by heavy usage of so-called "bound" melodrama (by this it is meant that the words are tied to the music). The spoken elements were regulated rhythmically as well as in terms of the direction and shape of the melodic line, in some cases both and did not even hesitate to float freely between recitative and singing or vice versa. Neoclassicism, on the other hand, developed a so-called mixed melodrama (with both choral and solo singing, with ballet, mimodrama and the like), the ancestors of which we have seen from the very beginning (as in Rousseau´s Pygmalion). If, in the mutual proportions of utilitarian types of music, melodrama plays only a limited role (as in a whole series of operas in which recitatives were replaced by melodrama, as well as in the great oratory, cantata and dramatic compositions), it is better to speak of utilitarian melodramatic technique rather than of melodrama itself. This is also true for contemporary postmodernism, which places various historic styles, kinds and genres side by side, synchronistically.