The Corsican Brothers and the Legacy of Its Tremulous 'Ghost Melody

Journal of Film Music 5.1-2 (2012) 29-39 ISSN (print) 1087-7142doi:10.1558/jfm.v5i1-2.29 ISSN (online) 1758-860X

© Copyright the International Film Music Society, published by Equinox Publishing Ltd 2013, Unit S3, Kelham House, 3 Lancaster Street, Sheffield, S3 8AF.

B y the time Gregory Ratoff directed The Corsican Brothers with Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. in 1941, the novella by Alexander Dumas père on

which it was very loosely based had already had a long theatrical, and indeed filmic, history. Like the original, the plot of the film concerns the relationship and affairs of twin brothers caught up in the politics of republican France, and while it might seem that to have Fairbanks play two look-alikes was a gimmick of cinematography and film editing—as it had been for the 1937 The Prisoner of Zenda with Ronald Colman—the device was actually a part of theatrical productions since the beginning. On stage it required some very careful timing, some special lighting and mechanical wizardry, and persuasive music to convince the audience. The 1941 film was wildly popular, not just for its wartime resonance of hereditary vengeance, but also for its handsome sword-fighting star, and Dmitri Tiomkin provided some appropriately swashbuckling music for this action-costume drama. In 1985, Trevor

Eve attempted both roles for a television version, for which veteran TV composer Allyn Ferguson supplied the music. But neither of these cinematic recreations needed music to solve the problem of allowing the actor to physically switch costumes and places, as it did in stage versions. Nor of course did any of the five silent film versions made between 1896 and 1920, although perhaps the earliest of these attempted to reenact, in an age before film editing, something like the sensation that audiences must have felt in seeing the ghost of one character appear to another when both roles were obviously being played by the same actor.

Dumas published Les frères corse in 1844 and an English-language dime-novel version was already available in the United States the following year. First produced on the stage in 1850 in Paris, The Corsican Brothers, or The Vendetta was brought to London in 1852 by Charles Kean and staged at the Princess’s Theatre, named for now Queen Victoria and also her

The Corsican Brothers and the Legacy of its Tremulous “Ghost Melody”

MIChAEL V. PISANIVassar College, Poughkeepsie, New [email protected]

Abstract: Audiences for stage plays, like audiences for narrative film, rarely remember much about the music, only whether or not it was appropriate to the dramatic genre. The “Ghost Melody” represents one specific case of nineteenth-century music for melodramatic theatre that lingered in the minds of audiences long afterward. It appeared in the original French production of The Corsican Brothers (1850) and carried over into British and American stage productions. Always coupled with special scenic effects, it worked as a persuasive tool to help suspend disbelief. The melody with its setting represents a specific type of melodramatic music, one used for the supernatural appearance of a deceased loved one. Its effect resonates in the music of other stage plays and in music composed to films of a similar genre.

Keywords: The Corsican Brothers; Ghost Melody; incidental music; swashbuckler; television drama

ARTICLE

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favorite theatre. The English version was a classic of its type, a theatrical genre known as “gentlemanly melodrama.” This was a chatty kind of play, though still shot through with plenty of action for the dashing hero, and was developed partly from Kean’s skills as a Shakespearian and also from his incorporation of French acting and playwriting techniques. The French influence was hardly new, seeing how many English popular dramas since the 1790s were adapted from French originals. What was new was a whole generation of authors, playwrights, and actors who had grown up in the melodramatic theatre, who were deeply familiar with its signs, and who were gradually coming under the influence of French realism, both the “historical realism” of hugo, Balzac, Féval, Mérimée, and Dumas, and the “literary realism” of Stendhal, Sue, and Dumas fils. Balzac’s characters, for example, negotiated moral ambiguities that would have been unthinkable in the Manichaeistic worlds of the gothic and nautical melodramas of René Pixerécourt or Edward Fitzball. The realism of these dramas was further enhanced by smaller performing spaces, intensified lighting effects, more direct and sincere delivery of lines, and a more nuanced approach in the use of music. Dumas is quoted as saying that in La dame aux camélias (1852) he “endeavored to cause the footlights to disappear and to bring the spectator in direct communication with [the play’s] characters.”

Dumas apparently got his idea for The Corsican Brothers from a 300-year-old document held in the Corsican archives at Bastia: Two brothers, born as Siamese twins and surgically separated, remained joined by uncanny telepathic powers. In the novella, they swear that if one should ever be near death, he would appear in spirit to alert and summon the other. The story also had some connection to recent events, for the author had known about two French republican brothers coincidentally also from Corsica, the twins Charles and Louis Blanc. Though not joined at birth, they were nevertheless so close in thought and feeling that one would experience the other’s joy or pain. When one brother was in fact wounded in a fight, the other, many miles away, instantly felt the sharp stab of pain in his arm. (This is in fact what happens in Ratoff’s film.) In the theatrical version, the brothers are named Louis and Fabien dei Franchi. Louis is killed in a duel with a jealous suitor in a forest outside Paris while Fabien is attending to local business at the family estate in Corsica.

The Corsican Brothers contains many of the choice elements of successful mid-century melodrama: swashbuckling heroes, extravagant ballroom scenes, and a good dose of suspense in the plot. Moreover,

it features a death-defying swordfight between the hero and the villain in the last act. Two coups de théâtre that no doubt greatly contributed to the play’s notoriety were the unusual handling of the principal characters (the twin brothers were both played by the same actor) and secondly, the author’s use of time (the events in Acts 1 and 2 were supposed to occur simultaneously). The duel therefore formed the climactic conclusion to both acts, though seen from two different perspectives. The cachet of realism was of course one essential component in the mid-century melodrama, and Dumas added the extra sensational touch of having one brother transcend the time and space barrier to appear to the other in ghostly form.

The original French version opened at the Théâtre historique in Paris. Playing the twin brothers was Charles Fechter, the British-born French actor who two years later would create the role of Armand Duval in La dame aux camélias, the play that so impressed Verdi and of course served as the basis for La Traviata. As would Douglas Fairbanks in the next century, Fechter dazzled European and American audiences with his unique combination of extraordinarily good looks, charm that could melt all but the coldest hearts, and remarkable athletic agility. Charles Kean saw Fechter in the dual-role. Though he certainly could not match Fechter’s physical attractiveness, he did excel in sword fighting and so arranged with Dion Boucicault to prepare an English version. Boucicault, the Irish-born playwright-actor who had made an unprecedented introduction to the British stage as the twenty-year-old author of the sparkling drawing-room comedy London Assurance, had been working in Paris and was well versed in French melodrama. his adaptation of The Corsican Brothers, like The Courier of Lyons and other French melodramas he translated, was among the first steps in the evolution of the “sensation drama,” a genre that captivated British and American audiences in the 1860s.

Les frères corse was also taken up in other Parisian boulevard theatres, such at the Théâtre de l’Ambigu-Comique and the Porte Saint-Martin. All of these would have had musical accompaniment, which was standard in the production of French melodrama. Though none of the music used for these has yet been found, parts may still reside in French libraries for a persistent researcher to locate. Thanks to Charles Kean’s prominence as an actor and his many outstanding Shakespeare productions at the Princess’s, however, the musical scores to many of his productions have been carefully preserved at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, which includes an anonymously composed set of orchestra

31The CorsiCan BroThers and the Legacy of its tremuLous “ghost meLody”

© the international film music society 2013.

parts for The Corsican Brothers. In 1995, Barry Yzereef examined both this music and Charles Kean’s promptbook of the play for his dissertation at the University of Victoria, Canada. In this, he reproduced the music in full score and also provided a complete line-by-line reconstruction of Kean’s production with full stage business.1

In addition to the Folger parts, other versions of The Corsican Brothers’ music have been found, among these two American versions: a set of ten orchestra parts from Boston, 1860 (anonymous, but signed “property of J. B. Roberts,” an American actor) and a set from the Chestnut Street Theatre, Philadelphia, 1864 (also anonymous, but signed “property of Mark hassler,” music director). Both of these correlate very closely, in terms of numbered cues, length of cues, and almost identical music, to Kean’s version. So there was clearly a transatlantic professional network in the nineteenth century for providing theatre music of this type. Thomas hailes Lacy, who published the text of the Kean-Boucicault version, held the rights of production and may have also provided a set of orchestra parts for legitimate rentals. (Samuel French held the rights to a rival translation.) In addition, there exist at least two different musical settings for productions later in the century. One of these (now at the harry Ransom Center for the humanities in Austin, Texas) was composed by hamilton Clarke for henry Irving’s 1880 production at the Lyceum Theatre in London. Irving’s production of The Corsican Brothers created an even greater sensation than Kean’s, for Irving possessed both hauntingly beautiful looks and physical deportment, and he was a spectacular sword fighter. he brought to a melodrama such as this great technical polish and proficiency, in terms of lighting, set design, and costume. In addition, his audience at the Lyceum represented the cream of London society. For this, Clarke created an original and very elaborate score, through-composed in many parts. But it does reproduce what by then was almost de rigeur in any production of The Corsican Brothers, the “ghost melody,” a small but famous bit of music used to accompany the scene where the dead Louis appears to Fabien (and where both brothers appear to be onstage at the same time). While The Corsican Brothers at the Princess’s or elsewhere used a considerable amount of action and under-dialogue music, “the ghost melody” is the only music that anyone ever seemed to remember.

1 Barry Yzereef, “The Art of Gentlemanly Melodrama: Charles Kean’s Production of The Corsican Brothers,” (Ph.D. diss., University of Victoria, 1995).

Most nineteenth-century plays, at least as produced in the major theatres of Paris, London, Dublin, Edinburgh, New York, Philadelphia, Boston, Toronto, Chicago, San Francisco, and many other cities, used an extensive amount of music played by a modest-sized orchestra. In fact, these orchestras, like those in film theatres in the 1910s and 1920s, were major professional opportunities for many musicians. Not all plays required music, of course, but it was essential in the popular drama, the three-act play with its many convoluted plot twists and often—but not always—resolution in some form of happy ending. The music used for these plays represents the prehistory of film music, not just because music often accompanied action and dialogue, as it does in film, but also because the techniques of how actor-managers and theatre orchestra leaders applied music to drama and the various stylistic links between music and genre of play resemble those in the sound film. French swashbucklers from the 1850s and 1860s like The Corsican Brothers and The Count of Monte Cristo required a certain type of action score, which would have been completely out of place in a drawing-room comedy or courtroom drama. But like film music from the 1930s to the 1960s, even an extensive score for a stage play remained invisible to many audiences and critics, hence they did not acknowledge it much. A glance at any surviving music, most of it in manuscript parts and hidden away in uncatalogued parts of theatrical collections, will demonstrate that it was there nonetheless. Tiomkin’s score for the 1941 Corsican Brothers is probably about three times longer in terms of numbers of notes than the music used for the 1852 stage production, given all the edited action in the film that would have required music. Still, music for stage productions such as this, how and when it entered, how it ended, the purposes it served, even how it interacted with dialogue and action, resembles the film score in significant ways. We will examine just a few of these resemblances here.

Though some of the music provided for nineteenth-century plays is the result of a compilation of various sources and the compiler rarely signed his or her name, theatre playbills often specify a composer or compiler. Sometime this was the theatre’s resident orchestra leader, but not always. The only way to truly get a sense of the music in a specific play is to examine all the production materials. Several scholars—like Yzereef—have undertaken this work, as have David Mayer and Anne Dhu McLucas in their published editions of music



to nineteenth-century plays.2 Emilo Sala, also, has painstakingly gone through thousands of pages of music manuscripts in the Bibliothèque nationale de France and the Bibliothèque de l’Opéra and drew several important conclusions about music in French theatre production of the 1840s and early 1850s. he demonstrates, for example, that popular dramas produced in the boulevard theatres during these years used an extensive amount of music. Le chevalier de maison-rouge at the Théâtre historique contained seventy music cues. Monte-Cristo at the same theatre was a two-evening affair, containing fifty-five cues on the first night and thirty-eight on the second. Robert Macaire, a classic French melodrama about one of the early century’s glamorous villains, contained sixty-four music cues when produced at the Théâtre Porte Saint-Martin. Moreover, there are composers credited on some of the music Sala found, most of them theatre musicians such as Alphonse Varney, Auguste Pilati, Adolphe Vaillard, and Robert Stoepel.3

how did this music sound? As we learn more about this variety of nineteenth-century theatre music, we realize that generalizations can be misleading and each situation needs to be taken on its own merits.4 There was both good theatre music and bad theatre music, just as there are good and bad film scores. Musical solutions to dramatic problems were sometimes creative, sometimes humdrum and workaday. As for the classic hollywood film, however, certain expectations prevailed. In 1849 the German actress Karoline Bauer observed a production of Ducange’s The Two Galley Slaves in Paris. Playing the villain, who in the cast of characters is described only as “the unknown,” was Frédérick Lemaître, who excelled in such spooky roles. he “infused shudder and awe” by his very appearance when he came onstage in the background “during the playing of the mysteriously quavering, muffled, melodramatic music.”5 In those days “melodramatic” did not have the pejorative sense that it does today. It referred to a certain dramatic technique involving music and pantomime. (After mid-century, the reference was more typically applied to music and spoken text.) What did Bauer actually hear? Was this “quavering” a chromatic trill, a finger

2 David Mayer, ed., Henry Irving and The Bells: Irving’s Personal Script of the Play by Leopold Lewis, with Etienne Singla’s original musical score arranged by Nigel Gardner (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1980), and Anne Dhu McLucas, ed., Later Melodrama in America: Monte Cristo (ca. 1883) (New York: Garland, 1994).3 Emilio Sala, trans. Mary Ann Smart, “Verdi and the Parisian Boulevard Theatre, 1847-9,” Cambridge Opera Journal 7, no. 3 (1995).4 See the author’s forthcoming Music and the Popular Drama: Theatres, Actors, Orchestras, and Audiences in Britian and America, 1770 to 1900 (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press).5 Memoirs of Karoline Bauer, from the German, vol. 3 (London, 1885), 306.

tremolo, or a bowed tremolo? Obviously, the effect would be somewhat different for each. Still, it was the shivering mysterious music that signaled some nefarious plot development about to ensue, and audiences were clearly impressed by this kind of musically enhanced theatricality. This was true of the shivering music in The Corsican Brothers as well, though the “ghost melody” was a combination of both affect and lyricism, such that the melody itself could even be marketed as sheet music.

Effective and memorable as this music was, its author cannot be pinned down. Kean’s playbills normally credit a composer: for example, “The Overture, Entr’actes, and a portion of the Incidental Music [for Faust and Marguerite] composed expressly for the drama by Mr. J. L. hatton.” No composer was specified for The Corsican Brothers, however, and despite the number of times this music was copied, no composer or “compiler” was ever credited.6 Of the eleven melodramas Kean produced at the Princess’s, music to only three of these is known to survive. Richard hughes, who had been leading the orchestra for Kean since 1850, was the music director when The Corsican Brothers opened on 24 February 1852. During the run of this play, Kean hired the German-born Robert Stoepel on recommendation of Boucicault, who had worked with him in Paris. Stoepel remained with Kean only a year and a half, however, and John Liptrot hatton took over when Stoepel left to go with Bouicicault to America.

An 1881 article in the British Daily News—and reproduced in the Musical World—tried to get to the bottom of the authorship question. The reviewer corresponded with Boucicault, who said Stoepel composed it. he then interviewed Stoepel, who said that the music Kean used was adapted from the original music at the Théâtre historique, where Stoepel himself had been part arranger and adapter. Was he responsible for writing the famous “ghost melody” then? Stoepel declined to confirm, leaving the matter open to continued speculation.7 It if it is true that Stoepel was involved in the original assemblage of the Parisian music, Boucicault must have secured a copy of this music and sent it to Kean, who had hughes adapt it for his production.

The music for The Corsican Brothers in the Princess’s orchestra parts contains thirty-two items. In addition

6 The playbills for that date still list R. hughes as music director (and no mention of a guest conductor). The massive collection of Playbills and Programmes of the British Theatres, 1800-1899 was filmed by Chadwyck-healey (1983) and is available as a set on microfiche at the New York Public Library Theater Collection and elsewhere.7 “The Ghost Melody in The Corsican Brothers,” The Musical World (15 January 1881): 42.



to one song sung by a minor character at the opening of Act 3, ten of the items were “stage music”—analogous to “source music” in film—ballroom dances such as waltzes, galops, and polkas. There were also several longer pieces, unnumbered, that were played during the intervals or as pre-curtain music. The first entr’acte—notes the violist in his part—lasted about five-and-a-half minutes, the second about two minutes. The playbill for The Corsican Brothers does not announce any additional selections played during the evening, as do some other playbills at the Princess’s.

Twenty-two of the items are specifically numbered with cues that correspond to the indication for music in the stage manager’s promptbook. These numbers range from extremely short cues—only four or six measures—to much longer pieces, up to seventy measures for the dances and scene changes. The orchestra included five wind players (one flute, one oboe, two clarinets, one bassoon), five brass players (two horns, two cornets, one trombone), “drums,” and a small body of strings in the usual five parts. One first violin part for The Corsican Brothers, marked with additional instrumental cues, also served as the leader’s book. (The “leader” of most theatre orchestras, at least until the 1870s, led performances with his violin.) Most of the melos numbers functioning as dialogue underscore consist of about sixteen to twenty-five measures and are nearly always for strings alone. No list of orchestra personnel seems to have survived, so we have to estimate the number of strings that would have played these. Smaller theatres were often known to have a thin string sound compared to the winds and brass, and sometimes there was only one string player to a part. But Kean—despite often merely breaking even with his expensive productions at the Princess’s—probably used at least double strings on a part, if not triple, given some of the indications in hatton’s score for Henry V.8

The final minutes of Act 1 exemplify the close interaction between the music and the stage action of the play. The setting is Madame dei Franchi’s chateau in Corsica, to which Fabien has returned. It is late evening. The three music cues in this scene are:

8 See Stephen Cockett, “Music and the Representation of history in Charles Kean’s Revival of Shakespeare’s Henry V,” Nineteenth-Century Theatre and Film 34, no. 1 (June 2007): 9-11.

Fabien has just dispensed with business—settling a local dispute—when he turns his attention to his brother’s impending crisis. Earlier that day, as he told his friend Alfred, he had experienced the first urgent sign of distress: a sharp, sword-like pang in his chest. Not wishing to alarm his mother, he interrupts his story and asks her to show their guest to his room. Four bars of a reassuring Bellini-esque melody to a romanza accompaniment (music no. 11) serve to facilitate Alfred’s exit as Madame dei Franchi graciously escorts him out. The music resolves and ends. Fabien, certain that something has happened to his brother, reveals to his servant Griffo a mysterious experience earlier that day: “I looked at my watch; it was ten minutes after nine.” At this line, music begins again (no. 12). The eerily undulating strings imbue the dialogue with tension. “Look,” Fabien cries, noticing the standing clock. It had stopped at the same moment as his watch. Madame returns in time to overhear the latter part of this discussion, and she confirms that the clock had recently been rewound. This was the second warning. As the strings continue, Fabien affects a calm demeanor and quietly bids his mother good night. The violins relax to a slow oscillation between two neighboring tones while the lower strings creep downward through slowly changing chords. “Bless you, my son, good night,” Madame says. “If evil hovers over us, may Providence avert it.” As she goes off to bed, the texture of the music thins to a violin tremolo on a single note, lingering only until Madame is safely out of earshot. Without waiting for the final note to fade, Fabien hastily directs Griffo to ready a horse so that a letter might be quickly dispatched to Louis in Paris. The orchestra follows immediately with music no. 13, a tempo moderato. The rhythmic motto alternating between violins and violas is punctuated by persistent pizzicati in the second violins and lower strings. To this active contrapuntal music, Fabien takes off his jacket and gets to work. As Fabien tries to write, the violins gradually slow to a tremolo, and a shiver seems to spread through all the strings (Example 1).

No. 11 Andante, W8, D major 4 measuresNo. 12 Moderato Andante, "2, G minor 14 measuresNo. 13 (in two parts)

Moderato, "4, B minor 21 measuresAndante, "4, B major 16 measures, ad lib repeat (the “ghost melody”)



Example 1: The Corsican Brothers, music no. 13, beginning; piano score prepared from orchestra parts in the Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington, D.C.



In the long fermata on a dominant F-sharp seventh chord, Fabien folds and seals the letter while his brother Louis gradually begins to appear, hovering upwards from the floor in his shirt sleeves, with blood upon his breast. Fabien, absorbed in writing, is unaware of the ghost, played by an actor-double who rose through a specially designed “Corsican trap,” as it came to be called. This ingenious bit of Victorian stage carpentry consisted of a horizontally sliding trap door with a rising platform directly beneath it, the latter built on an inclined railway, so that as the platform and trap glided through a channel cut along the stage, Louis, standing on the platform, appeared to rise up and move toward his brother as if floating.9 The ghostly Louis touches Fabien gently on the shoulder just as the latter is about to place his seal on the wax. Fabien looks up suddenly as if realizing and calls out: “my brother—Dead?!” This was the cue for “music change” to the famous ghost melody, played by the first violins tremolo, the rest of the strings in pizzicato accompaniment (Example 2).

As the wistful melody begins, Madame dei Franchi reappears in the door stage right, visibly alarmed. “Who uttered that word?” she asks, coming toward Fabien. At some point here, in the dim, candle-lit room, Fabien’s double had replaced him. The ghost waves his arm toward the wall, while a “sink and rise” effect with an increase in backlighting caused the wall of the chateau to appear to melt away, revealing the misty setting of a snow-covered glade in the forest of Fontainebleau. The vision is of the heartless roué wiping the blood from his sword with a handkerchief, while Louis lay fatally wounded on the ground, supported by his two seconds and a surgeon (Figure 1). To this stage picture, the music swells slightly as the act drop falls.

The effect—both technologically and musically—must have been electrifying, not just at the Princess’s but nearly everywhere The Corsican Brothers was produced. George henry Lewes—no fan of the melodramatic genre—described in a review the “ghostly terror heightened by the low tremolos of the violins… The audience, breath-suspended, watches the slow apparition, and the vision of the duel which succeeds, a scenic effect more real and terrible than anything I remember.”10

9 Details and subsequent history of the “Corsican trap” can be found in Michael R. Booth, ed., The Revels History of Drama in English, vol. 6: 1750-1880 (London: Methuen and Co., 1975), 88-89.10 The Leader (28 February 1852), cited in John McCormick, Popular Theatres of Nineteenth-Century France (London: Routledge, 1993), 65.

Figure 1: Cover of sheet music, London [1852]. Special Collections, Templeman Library, University of Kent

As Barry Yzereef explained it in his detailed study, the back wall of the room inconspicuously rose up exposing a transparent gauze scrim on which was painted an exact replica of the wall. This mysterious transformation gave the actor playing Louis time to get in place, and then the gradual change in lights from front to back caused the vision behind it to be illuminated through the scrim. Audiences, first spellbound by the “ghost melody,” were then stupefied by the sudden appearance of Charles Kean as he lay dying in the vision, an actor-double now standing in as Fabien with his back to the audience and clutching his mother. When and how did the switch take place, audiences wondered? (For further discussion of this scene, including a probable solution, see Yzereef’s analysis.11)

The elements of the “ghost melody” themselves are really quite simple: two parallel musical phrases, eight bars each, consisting of a narrow melodic shape, a hint of passion or longing built into the rising fourth or fifth which falls a step. A few chromatic motions creep into both melody and bass line, but the tone of the music is hardly “mysterious” in itself. The musical affect is not of a villainous misterioso type, as in the Two

11 Yzereef, ‘Art of Gentlemanly Melodrama,’ 114-28.



Example 2: The Corsican Brothers, continuation of music no. 13.



Galley Slaves description above. It is more melancholic, representing sadness or longing through a kind of “sweetness of memory,” at which the melody hints. The “mystery,” of course, is added by the fast tremolo in the first violins, a technique that had long served to convey fear and agitation, at least since its evocation of the supernatural in eighteenth-century opera, as Clive McClelland has shown.12 The tremolo of the ghost melody increased dramatic tension and even raised the level of suspense. (For a recent analogy, think of the moment near the climax of Alfred hitchcock’s Vertigo, while Scotty waits for the transformed Judy to appear as the dead Madeleine, and the strings play a hushed—sul ponticello—tremolo version of his longing motive. The sense of combined fear and anticipation is eerily similar.)

Whoever crafted the music to The Corsican Brothers planned the cues very carefully, both with respect to drama and musical shape. Following his business with the local peasants, Fabien’s scene is musically coordinated in terms of keys, tempos, and articulation. Madame and Alfred exit to D major. The G minor that follows seems like a somber change from D major, and indeed the discussion at hand is about the mysterious signal. The promptbook at this point also asks for dimming of the wing lights and bringing the house chandelier half down in preparation for the ghostly scene to follow. This dimming—unusual in theatres in those days—would itself have caused some titillation among the audience, especially accompanied by minor-mode music. When Fabien went back to work, the music was in yet a “darker” key: B minor. The modal shift to B major at the appearance of the vision is surprisingly unexpected, even ethereal, transcendent. But instead of reunion—to which this key and melody hint—Fabien is devastated to see his brother murdered. The only evidence of this in the music is that the accompanying pizzicato seems cold and unfeeling, leaving the lyrical melody to shiver in relative isolation and loneliness. For the audience, this combination—heard while viewing the sublime vision in the misty forest—served to increase the sense of tragedy.13

12 Clive McClelland, Ombra: Supernatural Music in the Eighteenth Century (Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2012).13 A key of five sharps was rather unusual for mid-century melodramatic music. But music theorists such as Wilhelm Müller (1830) and August Gathy (1835) described B major as appropriate to convey “overexcitement” and “wild passions, tempered through great dignity,” as well as “moonlit night.” Wilhelm Christian Müller, Versuch einer Ästhetik der Tonkunst (1830) and August Gathy, Musicalisches Conversations-Lexikon (hamburg: Niemeyer, 1835). Table of Müller and Gathy’s key characteristics cited in Rita Steblin, History of Key Characteristics in the Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries (Rochester: N.Y.: University of Rochester Press, 1996), 166.

Chappell Music in London brought out a version of the “Ghost Melody” in sheet music form in 1852. According to Richard Fawkes, Boucicault’s biographer, it ultimately became “one of the most popular pieces of music in town” and sold in the thousands.14 Some capitalized on the popularity of the play. There was a “Corsican Brothers Polka” and a “Corsican Brothers Waltz,” and Francis Edward Bache (under the pseudonym Franz habec) published a series of glittering piano variations in 1853, which he called “habec’s Ghost Melody”! There were other variations and fantasias for various instruments, one by Gustavus Prasca and another for violin and piano by Bernard Keller, which reproduced an illustration from the end of Act 1 on the cover (see above, Figure 1). Through all this, the authorship of the actual tune remained stubbornly elusive. Percy Fitzgerald, henry Irving’s biographer, recalled that a piano reverie by henri Rosellen (composer and theorist at the Paris Conservatoire) began and continued similarly. According to Fitzgerald, Stoepel was amused at the importance and notoriety attached to such a trifle.15 The Chappell publication says right on the title page that the melody was “composed by M. Varny of the Théâtre historique” (actually Pierre-Joseph-Alphonse Varney) and in this publication was only “arranged by R. Stoepel.”16 Anonymously, however, the tune circulated to dozens of theaters and must have been arranged by numerous music directors. When hamilton Clarke composed the music for Irving’s The Corsican Brothers in 1880, he included the “ghost melody” (still in B major) and also featured it in an adagio middle section of a prelude-overture. There were even nineteenth-century parodies—like the Cheech and Chong parody of the 1941 film—including The Corsican Twins as an American “Ethiopian drama” in 1857 and an 1880 burlesque at London’s Gaiety Theatre by F. C. Burnand and h. P. Stephens called The Corsican Brothers and Co. (Limited). The ghost melody even showed up in English Christmas pantomimes—like so many well-known tunes do—among them, Frank hiam’s Beauty and the Beast in 1881 (possibly on account of the burlesque earlier that season).

Remarkable as it may seem, however, the emotional effect of the original duel scene and its accompanying melody still formed a part of the theater-goer’s experience as late as 1908, when John Martin-harvey

14 Richard Fawkes, Dion Boucicault: A Biography (London: Quartet Books, 1979), 73.15 Percy Fitzgerald, Sir Henry Irving: A Biography (Philadelphia: George W. Jacobs, 1906), 118-19.16 Varney died in 1879, so he obviously would not have been available to verify the matter to the Musical World reviewer noted above.



acted the twin brothers at London’s Adelphi Theatre. The British composer and music director Norman O’Neill must have seen this production, for in 1910 he wrote that the ghostly effect of lights and music “still holds the audience.”17 While in the twentieth century the theme was eventually forgotten, its influence lingered in countless examples of supernatural appearances—for example, in the Bernard herrmann/hitchcock example noted above—and even in such popular culture icons as Robert Cobert’s quivering theme music for the 1960s gothic TV series Dark Shadows. While nearly all melodramas—both nineteenth-century plays and twentieth-century films—used extensive music that seemed to go almost entirely “unheard” or unnoticed, it was a simply crafted tune coupled with a sensational dramatic image that audiences seemed to remember, even for decades afterwards.

17 From a speech given by Norman O’Neill to the National Music Teachers’ Association and printed as “Music to Stage Plays” in the Proceeding for the Royal Musical Association (21 March 1911): 85-102. The “Ghost Melody” is cited on p. 89. For some discussion on the music in Martin-harvey’s production, which was by C. von Frankenstein, see David Mayer, “Nineteenth-Century Theatre Music,” Theatre Notebook 30, no. 3 (1976): 115-22.



References

Booth, Michael R., ed. 1975. The Revels history of drama in English, vol. 6: 1750-1880. London: Methuen and Co.

Cockett, Stephen. 2007. Music and the representation of history in Charles Kean’s revival of Shakespeare’s Henry V. Nineteenth-Century Theatre and Film 34, no. 1 (June): 1-14. http://dx.doi.org/10.7227/NCTF.34.1.2

Fawkes, Richard. 1979. Dion Boucicault: a biography. London: Quartet Books.

Fitzgerald, Percy. 1906. Sir Henry Irving: a biography. Philadelphia: George W. Jacobs.

Mayer, David. 1976. Nineteenth-century theatre music. Theatre Notebook 30, no. 3: 115-22.

Mayer, David, ed. 1980. Henry Irving and The Bells: Irving’s personal script of the play by Leopold Lewis, with Etienne Singla’s original musical score arranged by Nigel Gardner. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

McClelland, Clive. 2012. Ombra: Supernatural Music in the Eighteenth Century. Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books.

McCormick, John. 1993. Popular theatres of nineteenth-century France. London: Routledge. http://dx.doi.org/10.4324/9780203168110

McLucas, Anne Dhu, ed. 1994. Later melodrama in America: Monte Cristo (ca. 1883). New York: Garland.

Memoirs of Karoline Bauer, from the German, vol. 3. London, 1885.

N.a. 1881. The Ghost Melody in The Corsican Brothers. The Musical World (15 January): 42.

O’Neill, Norman. 1911. Music to stage plays. Proceeding for the Royal Musical Association (21 March): 85-102.

Pisani, Michael V. forthcoming. Music for melodramatic theatre in London and New York, 1780-1900. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press.

Playbills and programmes of the British theatres, 1800-1899. Chadwyck-healey, 1983.

Sala, Emilio (trans. Mary Ann Smart). 1995. Verdi and the Parisian boulevard theatre, 1847-9. Cambridge Opera Journal 7, no. 3: 185-205. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S0954586700004560

Steblin, Rita. 1996. History of key characteristics in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Rochester, N.Y.: University of Rochester Press.

Yzereef, Barry. 1995. The art of gentlemanly melodrama: Charles Kean’s production of The Corsican Brothers. Ph.D. diss. University of Victoria.

http://dx.doi.org/10.7227/NCTF.34.1.2

http://dx.doi.org/10.7227/NCTF.34.1.2

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The Corsican Brothers and the Legacy of Its Tremulous 'Ghost Melody