(n.) 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".
Example Sentences:
(1) Reith, “his dour handsome face scarred like that of a villain in a melodrama”, was “a strange shepherd for such a mixed, bohemian flock … he had under his aegis a bevy of ex-soldiers, ex-actors, ex-adventurers which … even a Dartmoor prison governor might have had difficulty in controlling”.
(2) Ian Hislop, editor of Private Eye, said Mr Carman would be remembered for turning "the courtroom into melodrama".
(3) Before the digital age, they created their own technology to make sound montages, taking ironic liberties with pastiche and parody, as in "Sugar-cane fields forever", or the exaggerated Latin melodrama of El Justiciero (The Avenger) They were influenced by concrete poetry and avant-garde music.
(4) Basing the film on Walter Lord's meticulously researched book (adapted by Ambler), Baker opted for a documentary approach that focused on the human interest without recourse to melodrama, making it both moving and exciting.
(5) While on television the US capital is fascinated by a glamorous, distorting mirror of itself: The West Wing (liberal fantasy), House of Cards (the devil as president) and Scandal (preposterous melodrama).
(6) Dallas had buckets of money, on and off screen, and buckets of melodrama.
(7) It's just that he gets ultra-stressed by things that many of us choose to ignore, and melodrama can ensue.
(8) Transposing the Brothers Grimm to 1920s Spain, he doffs his montera not only to European silent cinema of the period, but to bullfighting and flamenco, with an atmospheric Gothic melodrama that has lashings of humour – mostly provided by Maribel Verdú as the social-climbing evil stepmother with a penchant for S&M – bags of invention, and an expressive, flamenco-inflected score by Alfonso de Vilallonga.
(9) His other forte was as a 1950s director of widescreen colour melodramas often adapted from the fatter, racier bestsellers of the postwar paperback revolution, many of which have developed separate cults of their own.
(10) It took two weeks for him to address the issue publicly, while his wife Patience was accused of melodrama smacking of insincerity when she met mothers of the kidnapped girls.
(11) For many, France's elimination from the tournament after six days of melodrama in which obscenities were thrown, players went on strike and a coach walked out, came as something of a relief.
(12) A h, the many Proustian pleasures to be derived from a renewed acquaintance with Roy Ward Baker 's 1958 Titanic melodrama A Night To Remember ... Last seen by me on some wintry Sunday afternoon in the prepubescent early 1970s, probably in the same post-prandial time-slot where I first encountered The Cockleshell Heroes, Carve Her Name With Pride and The Colditz Story – the dull roar of British postwar self-congratulation on film.
(13) It was a difficult production – the director wanted it to be a slightly Edwardian melodrama and we couldn't get our heads around the concept.
(14) Despite a testament as harrowing as his, and for all its meticulous refusal of melodrama, the Holocaust has become subject to sneering scepticism – now outright denial, now the slower drip of devaluation and diminishment.
(15) For the life of me I cannot understand why it is somehow correct for all of your privacy to be invaded for a commercial purpose and not allow me to do it to save your life.” Irvine added: “Is that dramatic enough?” The Victorian Labor senator Jacinta Collins said: “It’s an amusing defence because I think you’ll find most people are concerned about the other also.” Ludlam said: “I think it’s probably heading towards melodrama rather than just drama.” 'Not seeking a big brother arrangement' During the Senate hearing Irvine also laid out the case for a mandatory data retention scheme forcing telecommunications providers to store customer data for two years.
(16) Twenty-five years ago, soap operas were delivery systems for melodrama, cliffhangers, women's issues, comedy and social critique, and, best of all, white-knuckle rides on the narrative express.
(17) The best hour records lack melodrama, but are marked instead by a constantly building sense of history in the making as the raw statistics make it obvious what is coming.
(18) McDowell, a film-maker in his own right, collaborated with Kuchar on several movies, as an actor in Siamese Twin Pinheads (1972), The Sunshine Sisters (1972) and The Devil's Cleavage (1975), a 130-minute recreation of 1940s and 50s black-and-white melodramas.
(19) But disillusionment is, though often painful – and Beware of Pity has moments of high melodrama that have the power to make one put one's free hand over one's mouth as one reads – a very necessary process, and the stripping away of illusions was, after all, one of the abiding aims of the Freudian project.
(20) They approached the cold war as melodrama and McCarthyism by way of allegory.
Opera
Definition:
(n.) A drama, either tragic or comic, of which music forms an essential part; a drama wholly or mostly sung, consisting of recitative, arials, choruses, duets, trios, etc., with orchestral accompaniment, preludes, and interludes, together with appropriate costumes, scenery, and action; a lyric drama.
(n.) The score of a musical drama, either written or in print; a play set to music.
(n.) The house where operas are exhibited.
(pl. ) of Opus
Example Sentences:
(1) It became just like a soap opera: "When Brookside started it was about Scousers living next to each other and in five years' time there were bombs going off and three people buried under the patio."
(2) I’m very sorry.” Who is Billy Bush: the man egging on Trump in tape about groping women Read more Trump and Bush had been on a bus headed to the set of the soap opera Days of Our Lives, in which Trump was set to make a cameo.
(3) She has more than made up for it since, building opera houses in China, art museums in America and car factories in Germany, all bearing her unmistakable influence in every detail.
(4) Sculthorpe’s catalogue consists of more than 350 pieces ranging from solos to orchestral works and opera.
(5) No wonder public discussion of this most unexpected scientific development has so far been muted and respectful, waiting for the expert community that discovered the anomaly by accident – the Opera experiment at Gran Sasso was devised to isolate different varieties of neutrino, not to test Einstein – to work out what it all means, or doesn't.
(6) Tommy (1975), an engaging version of the Who's slightly dotty rock opera, was followed by two of his less successful freeform biographies, Lisztomania (1975), starring the Who's Roger Daltrey, and Valentino (1977), starring Rudolf Nureyev.
(7) As a viewer you really feel for him.” Mental illness is not the only health issue soap operas are approaching from a more understanding angle.
(8) She says that, while she stayed away from the more difficult ramifications of that upbringing, she nevertheless plunged right into the "hot quicksand" of the Arab-Israeli conflict, right down into the Biblical roots of Jewish-Muslim conflict in the story of Abraham, Hagar, Isaac and Ishmael (which she meditates upon in the opera's Hagar chorus), and into the vortex of questions about Israel's right to exist and what motivates terrorists.
(9) The room never existed in the Palais Garnier, but belongs to its predecessor the Opera Choiseul which had burned to the ground some years earlier.
(10) This weekend, the Montpellier dance festival and the Tours jazz festival were among cancelled events while the opening of the summer's biggest opera gathering, at Aix-en-Provence, was postponed.
(11) Of the big national companies, the only one to take a major hit was English National Opera, while there was also a big cut for the Lowry, and complete cuts for Theatre Royal Bury St Edmunds and touring companies including the long-standing Red Ladder.
(12) You say we should consider the matter of the universality of the BBC, but surely the golden thread that runs through the concept of the BBC is that we all pay in and we should all get something out – and that includes my constituents as well as his constituents, those who like opera and those who like soap opera.” Whittingdale replied: “Even if I wanted to close down Strictly Come Dancing, which I don’t, it would be completely wrong for the government to try and decide which programmes the BBC should make and which they shouldn’t.
(13) The arts broadcaster Lord Bragg said Hall, who moves to the BBC from running the Royal Opera House, had no option but to cut a swath through BBC middle management in the wake of the damning conclusions of the Pollard report into the Savile crisis.
(14) "In our last golden age, we built an opera house with plantation money.
(15) Ninety-one instrumentalists and 51 opera singers of the Royal Theatre in Copenhagen, Denmark, were examined, in order to study the frequency of symptoms from the musculoskeletal system and upper airways.
(16) Inside, Suge is propped up on a mattress on the floor watching soap operas, an overflowing spittoon at his side.
(17) English National Opera's new production next month will be the first time it has been staged in London – astounding given the popularity of Adams, and the fact that some regard it as his most impressive achievement.
(18) A secret 10-day emergency process has culminated in the appointment of Royal Opera House chief executive Lord (Tony) Hall to the £450,000-a-year job of running the BBC , as the corporation turns to a former veteran to help begin the process of recovering from the Jimmy Savile and Newsnight crises.
(19) Disney is producing Star Wars Episode VII after buying all rights to the long-running space opera for $4.05bn (£2.5bn) last October.
(20) Other schemes include a plan for Paternoster Square beside St Paul's cathedral in 1987 and designs for the Royal Opera House.