Tosca and Social Melodrama

Abstract

It is a critical commonplace that Italy’s most sophisticated contribution to melodrama occurs via opera (Elsaesser 69). First performed at La Scala, Giacomo Meyerbeer’s 1820 Margherita d’Anjou featured a libretto after a text by Pixérécourt.¹ Other playwrights whose melodramas inspired operas include Anicet-Bourgeois (who provided librettos for Verdi and Gounod), Adolphe d’Ennery, Benjamin Antier (Van 91–92), Hugo, and Dumas (Kimbell 461). The multiple registers through which opera produces meaning suggests it is particularly suited to the melodramatic sensibility and its efforts to make present that which is “beyond” words. No wonder it flourished in this most synthetic of the arts.