ABSTRACT
In the eighteenth century the term 'melodrama' signified a specific musical technique whereby a section of monologue or dialogue within a play alternated with dramatic music. The main focus of this chapter will be the incidental music between Arlen and Harburg's hit songs in the MGM musical in 1939, and in the first licensed stage production in the early 1940s. Unfortunately, the original handwritten orchestral score and parts for The Wizard of Oz were discarded in the late 1960s during MGM's fateful clear-out; only some piano-vocal manuscripts of the songs and keyboard reductions of the underscore survive. The arrival of film sounded the death knell for stage melodramas, but, as Ben Singer's study has shown, the same sensational melodramas that formed the staple of American popular theatre in the late nineteenth century.
