The genre of mélodrame à grand spectacle that emerged in the boulevard theatres of Paris in the 1790s - and which was quickly exported abroad - expressed the moral struggle between good and evil through a drama of heightened emotions. The premise of this volume is the idea that the melodramatic aesthetic is central to our understanding of nineteenth-century music drama, broadly defined as spoken plays with music, operas and other hybrid genres that combine music with text and/or image.

Introduction; I: Melodrama as Genre; 1: Music in Pixérécourt's Early Melodramas; 2: Operatic or Theatrical? Orchestral Framings of the Voice in the Melodrama Sept heures (1829); 3: Reconstructing Greek Drama: Saint-Saëns and the Melodramatic Ideal; 4: In a Woman's Voice: Musical Recitation and the Feminization of American Melodrama 1; II: Melodrama on the Operatic Stage; 5: 'Si L'Orchestre seul chantait': Melodramatic Voices in Chelard's Macbeth (1827 ); 6: Melodramatic Spectacle on the English Operatic Stage; 7: Janá?ek and Melodrama; 8: Dismembering 'Expectations': The Modernization of Monodrama in Fin-de-siècle Theatrical Arts; 9: Opera for the People: Melodrama in Hugo Herrmann's Vasantasena (1930) 1; III: Melodramatic Transformations; 10: Berlioz's 'Roméo au tombeau': Melodrama of the Mind; 11: Be it [N]ever so Humble? The Narrating Voice in the Underscore to The Wizard of Oz (MGM, 1939); 12: The Voice-Over as 'Melodramatic Voice'; 13: Dismembering the Musical Voice: Mahler, Melodrama and Dracula from Stage to Screen 1