ABSTRACT
Elena Kats-Chernin is an Australian (b. 1957, Tashkent) composer who has a highly successful career in composing for the concert stage, ballet, musical theatre, opera and her own instrument the piano. Early in 2011, she was commissioned by Opera Australia to compose the music for a television opera mini-series titled The Divorce. With an engaging and entertaining score distinctive of this composer’s style The Divorce is a musical adaptation of the “soap-opera” genre, which is defined by its serial nature characterised by melodrama and sentimentality. This chapter examines how the composer crafts the music to underpin the drama played out on television and constructs a score that projects the meaning, mood and feeling to bring out the emotion in the drama.
