Monodrama
Music theatre for a single performer, with the orchestra playing everyone else
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A monodrama is music theatre for one performer: monologue, song and instruments form a single stretch, with no partner on stage. Schoenberg's Erwartung gives the sole soprano an orchestra; Poulenc's La voix humaine gives her a telephone.
It often turns inner life outward: the orchestra is not accompaniment but another character, a landscape and a memory. The shape may be one continuous scene or several monologues, but it never leaves the single figure.
It is not a play with a few songs added, nor an aria concert: a spoken play can have no music at all, and an aria still belongs to an opera full of partners. Compared with melodrama, monodrama mostly sings where melodrama mostly speaks.
Sources
- 独角音乐剧的独唱者配置与勋伯格、普朗克作品，参 The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, "Monodrama"；本文为原创表述
Used for fact-checking only; all prose is original.