Definition of Melodrama

Melodrama

Formerly, a kind of drama having a musical accompaniment to intensify the effect of certain scenes. Now, a drama abounding in romantic sentiment and agonizing situations, with a musical accompaniment only in parts which are especially thrilling or pathetic. In opera, a passage in which the orchestra plays a somewhat descriptive accompaniment, while the actor speaks; as, the melodrama in the gravedigging scene of Beethoven's "Fidelio".

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Melodrama Quotations

I think that's what distinguishes Schmidt, really. In the movies now, so much of what is appealing to an audience is the dramatic or has to do with science fiction, and Schmidt is simply human. There's no melodrama; there's no device, It's just about a human being.
Jack Nicholson

If you believe, as the Greeks did, that man is at the mercy of the gods, then you write tragedy. The end is inevitable from the beginning. But if you believe that man can solve his own problems and is at nobody's mercy, then you will probably write melodrama.
Lillian Hellman

If a man went simply by what he saw, he might be tempted to affirm that the essence of democracy is melodrama.
Irving Babbitt

The constraints of melodrama can be a great blessing, because they demand that all the characters involved - as absurd and extreme as they may initially seem - must stay utterly rooted in their own reality, or the whole project collapses.
Stanley Tucci

I'm obsessive about the kind of melodrama of getting through the days and trying to make them good and funny and a happy experience. But my feeling towards the fans is that they delivered me from darkness.
Tom Baker

So slowly in my mind formed the idea of melodrama, a form I found to perfection in American pictures. They were naive, they were that something completely different. They were completely Art-less.
Douglas Sirk

More Melodrama Quotations

Melodrama Translations

melodrama in Dutch is melodrama
melodrama in Spanish is melodrama
melodrama in Swedish is melodrama

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