ABSTRACT
The increase in American musical melodramas between 1880 and 1935 stemmed in part from the popularity of accompanied recitation among women. British and American composers' melodramatic settings of Romantic and Victorian poetry by such authors as Henry Wadsworth Longfellow or Edgar Allan Poe were available for reciters, and Americans sometimes performed Richard Strauss's melodrama Enoch Arden or Max von Schillings's Hexenlied. Women's dominance of American melodrama can be traced to their training in elocution, which began earlier in the nineteenth century. In the 1880s and 90s Werner's Voice Magazine, which was increasingly geared toward women, included poems with accompanying bits of music and treated musical recitation in various articles.
