Journal of Film Music 5.

1-2 (2012) 29-39

doi:10.1558/jfm.v5i1-2.29

ISSN (print) 1087-7142

ISSN (online) 1758-860X

ARTICLE

The Corsican Brothers and the Legacy of its

Tremulous Ghost Melody
Michael V. Pisani
Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, New York
mipisani@vassar.edu
Abstract: Audiences for stage plays, like audiences for narrative film, rarely remember much about the music,
only whether or not it was appropriate to the dramatic genre. The Ghost Melody represents one specific case
of nineteenth-century music for melodramatic theatre that lingered in the minds of audiences long afterward.
It appeared in the original French production of The Corsican Brothers (1850) and carried over into British and
American stage productions. Always coupled with special scenic effects, it worked as a persuasive tool to help
suspend disbelief. The melody with its setting represents a specific type of melodramatic music, one used for the
supernatural appearance of a deceased loved one. Its effect resonates in the music of other stage plays and in music
composed to films of a similar genre.
Keywords: The Corsican Brothers; Ghost Melody; incidental music; swashbuckler; television drama

y the time Gregory Ratoff directed The Corsican

Brothers with Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. in 1941,
the novella by Alexander Dumas pre on
which it was very loosely based had already had a
long theatrical, and indeed filmic, history. Like the
original, the plot of the film concerns the relationship
and affairs of twin brothers caught up in the politics
of republican France, and while it might seem that to
have Fairbanks play two look-alikes was a gimmick of
cinematography and film editingas it had been for
the 1937 The Prisoner of Zenda with Ronald Colman
the device was actually a part of theatrical productions
since the beginning. On stage it required some very
careful timing, some special lighting and mechanical
wizardry, and persuasive music to convince the
audience. The 1941 film was wildly popular, not just
for its wartime resonance of hereditary vengeance, but
also for its handsome sword-fighting star, and Dmitri
Tiomkin provided some appropriately swashbuckling
music for this action-costume drama. In 1985, Trevor

Eve attempted both roles for a television version, for

which veteran TV composer Allyn Ferguson supplied
the music. But neither of these cinematic recreations
needed music to solve the problem of allowing the
actor to physically switch costumes and places, as it
did in stage versions. Nor of course did any of the five
silent film versions made between 1896 and 1920,
although perhaps the earliest of these attempted to
reenact, in an age before film editing, something like
the sensation that audiences must have felt in seeing
the ghost of one character appear to another when
both roles were obviously being played by the same
actor.
Dumas published Les frres corse in 1844 and an
English-language dime-novel version was already
available in the United States the following year. First
produced on the stage in 1850 in Paris, The Corsican
Brothers, or The Vendetta was brought to London in
1852 by Charles Kean and staged at the Princesss
Theatre, named for now Queen Victoria and also her

Copyright the International Film Music Society, published by Equinox Publishing Ltd 2013, Unit S3, Kelham House, 3 Lancaster Street, Sheffield, S3 8AF.

30 THE JOURNAL OF FILM MUSIC

favorite theatre. The English version was a classic of

its type, a theatrical genre known as gentlemanly
melodrama. This was a chatty kind of play, though
still shot through with plenty of action for the dashing
hero, and was developed partly from Keans skills
as a Shakespearian and also from his incorporation
of French acting and playwriting techniques. The
French influence was hardly new, seeing how many
English popular dramas since the 1790s were adapted
from French originals. What was new was a whole
generation of authors, playwrights, and actors who
had grown up in the melodramatic theatre, who were
deeply familiar with its signs, and who were gradually
coming under the influence of French realism, both
the historical realism of Hugo, Balzac, Fval,
Mrime, and Dumas, and the literary realism of
Stendhal, Sue, and Dumas fils. Balzacs characters,
for example, negotiated moral ambiguities that would
have been unthinkable in the Manichaeistic worlds
of the gothic and nautical melodramas of Ren
Pixercourt or Edward Fitzball. The realism of these
dramas was further enhanced by smaller performing
spaces, intensified lighting effects, more direct and
sincere delivery of lines, and a more nuanced approach
in the use of music. Dumas is quoted as saying that
in La dame aux camlias (1852) he endeavored to cause
the footlights to disappear and to bring the spectator
in direct communication with [the plays] characters.
Dumas apparently got his idea for The Corsican
Brothers from a 300-year-old document held in the
Corsican archives at Bastia: Two brothers, born as
Siamese twins and surgically separated, remained
joined by uncanny telepathic powers. In the novella,
they swear that if one should ever be near death,
he would appear in spirit to alert and summon the
other. The story also had some connection to recent
events, for the author had known about two French
republican brothers coincidentally also from Corsica,
the twins Charles and Louis Blanc. Though not joined
at birth, they were nevertheless so close in thought
and feeling that one would experience the others joy
or pain. When one brother was in fact wounded in a
fight, the other, many miles away, instantly felt the
sharp stab of pain in his arm. (This is in fact what
happens in Ratoffs film.) In the theatrical version,
the brothers are named Louis and Fabien dei Franchi.
Louis is killed in a duel with a jealous suitor in a
forest outside Paris while Fabien is attending to local
business at the family estate in Corsica.
The Corsican Brothers contains many of the choice
elements of successful mid-century melodrama:
swashbuckling heroes, extravagant ballroom scenes,
and a good dose of suspense in the plot. Moreover,
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it features a death-defying swordfight between the

hero and the villain in the last act. Two coups de
thtre that no doubt greatly contributed to the plays
notoriety were the unusual handling of the principal
characters (the twin brothers were both played by
the same actor) and secondly, the authors use of
time (the events in Acts 1 and 2 were supposed to
occur simultaneously). The duel therefore formed the
climactic conclusion to both acts, though seen from
two different perspectives. The cachet of realism was
of course one essential component in the mid-century
melodrama, and Dumas added the extra sensational
touch of having one brother transcend the time and
space barrier to appear to the other in ghostly form.
The original French version opened at the Thtre
Historique in Paris. Playing the twin brothers was
Charles Fechter, the British-born French actor who
two years later would create the role of Armand Duval
in La dame aux camlias, the play that so impressed
Verdi and of course served as the basis for La Traviata.
As would Douglas Fairbanks in the next century,
Fechter dazzled European and American audiences
with his unique combination of extraordinarily good
looks, charm that could melt all but the coldest hearts,
and remarkable athletic agility. Charles Kean saw
Fechter in the dual-role. Though he certainly could
not match Fechters physical attractiveness, he did
excel in sword fighting and so arranged with Dion
Boucicault to prepare an English version. Boucicault,
the Irish-born playwright-actor who had made an
unprecedented introduction to the British stage as the
twenty-year-old author of the sparkling drawing-room
comedy London Assurance, had been working in Paris
and was well versed in French melodrama. His
adaptation of The Corsican Brothers, like The Courier of
Lyons and other French melodramas he translated,
was among the first steps in the evolution of the
sensation drama, a genre that captivated British and
American audiences in the 1860s.
Les frres corse was also taken up in other
Parisian boulevard theatres, such at the Thtre de
lAmbigu-Comique and the Porte Saint-Martin. All
of these would have had musical accompaniment,
which was standard in the production of French
melodrama. Though none of the music used for these
has yet been found, parts may still reside in French
libraries for a persistent researcher to locate. Thanks
to Charles Keans prominence as an actor and his
many outstanding Shakespeare productions at the
Princesss, however, the musical scores to many of
his productions have been carefully preserved at the
Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, which
includes an anonymously composed set of orchestra

The Corsican Brothers and the Legacy of its Tremulous Ghost Melody

parts for The Corsican Brothers. In 1995, Barry Yzereef

examined both this music and Charles Keans
promptbook of the play for his dissertation at the
University of Victoria, Canada. In this, he reproduced
the music in full score and also provided a complete
line-by-line reconstruction of Keans production with
full stage business.1
In addition to the Folger parts, other versions of
The Corsican Brothers music have been found, among
these two American versions: a set of ten orchestra
parts from Boston, 1860 (anonymous, but signed
property of J. B. Roberts, an American actor) and a
set from the Chestnut Street Theatre, Philadelphia,
1864 (also anonymous, but signed property of Mark
Hassler, music director). Both of these correlate very
closely, in terms of numbered cues, length of cues,
and almost identical music, to Keans version. So
there was clearly a transatlantic professional network
in the nineteenth century for providing theatre music
of this type. Thomas Hailes Lacy, who published the
text of the Kean-Boucicault version, held the rights
of production and may have also provided a set of
orchestra parts for legitimate rentals. (Samuel French
held the rights to a rival translation.) In addition,
there exist at least two different musical settings for
productions later in the century. One of these (now
at the Harry Ransom Center for the Humanities in
Austin, Texas) was composed by Hamilton Clarke
for Henry Irvings 1880 production at the Lyceum
Theatre in London. Irvings production of The Corsican
Brothers created an even greater sensation than
Keans, for Irving possessed both hauntingly beautiful
looks and physical deportment, and he was a
spectacular sword fighter. He brought to a melodrama
such as this great technical polish and proficiency,
in terms of lighting, set design, and costume. In
addition, his audience at the Lyceum represented the
cream of London society. For this, Clarke created an
original and very elaborate score, through-composed
in many parts. But it does reproduce what by then
was almost de rigeur in any production of The Corsican
Brothers, the ghost melody, a small but famous bit
of music used to accompany the scene where the dead
Louis appears to Fabien (and where both brothers
appear to be onstage at the same time). While The
Corsican Brothers at the Princesss or elsewhere used
a considerable amount of action and under-dialogue
music, the ghost melody is the only music that
anyone ever seemed to remember.
1 Barry Yzereef, The Art of Gentlemanly Melodrama: Charles Keans
Production of The Corsican Brothers, (Ph.D. diss., University of Victoria,
1995).

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31

Most nineteenth-century plays, at least as

produced in the major theatres of Paris, London,
Dublin, Edinburgh, New York, Philadelphia, Boston,
Toronto, Chicago, San Francisco, and many other
cities, used an extensive amount of music played by a
modest-sized orchestra. In fact, these orchestras, like
those in film theatres in the 1910s and 1920s, were
major professional opportunities for many musicians.
Not all plays required music, of course, but it was
essential in the popular drama, the three-act play
with its many convoluted plot twists and often
but not alwaysresolution in some form of happy
ending. The music used for these plays represents
the prehistory of film music, not just because
music often accompanied action and dialogue, as
it does in film, but also because the techniques of
how actor-managers and theatre orchestra leaders
applied music to drama and the various stylistic links
between music and genre of play resemble those in
the sound film. French swashbucklers from the 1850s
and 1860s like The Corsican Brothers and The Count of
Monte Cristo required a certain type of action score,
which would have been completely out of place in
a drawing-room comedy or courtroom drama. But
like film music from the 1930s to the 1960s, even
an extensive score for a stage play remained invisible
to many audiences and critics, hence they did not
acknowledge it much. A glance at any surviving
music, most of it in manuscript parts and hidden
away in uncatalogued parts of theatrical collections,
will demonstrate that it was there nonetheless.
Tiomkins score for the 1941 Corsican Brothers is
probably about three times longer in terms of
numbers of notes than the music used for the 1852
stage production, given all the edited action in the
film that would have required music. Still, music
for stage productions such as this, how and when it
entered, how it ended, the purposes it served, even
how it interacted with dialogue and action, resembles
the film score in significant ways. We will examine
just a few of these resemblances here.
Though some of the music provided for
nineteenth-century plays is the result of a compilation
of various sources and the compiler rarely signed
his or her name, theatre playbills often specify
a composer or compiler. Sometime this was the
theatres resident orchestra leader, but not always.
The only way to truly get a sense of the music in
a specific play is to examine all the production
materials. Several scholarslike Yzereefhave
undertaken this work, as have David Mayer and Anne
Dhu McLucas in their published editions of music

32 THE JOURNAL OF FILM MUSIC

to nineteenth-century plays.2 Emilo Sala, also, has

painstakingly gone through thousands of pages of
music manuscripts in the Bibliothque nationale de
France and the Bibliothque de lOpra and drew
several important conclusions about music in French
theatre production of the 1840s and early 1850s.
He demonstrates, for example, that popular dramas
produced in the boulevard theatres during these
years used an extensive amount of music. Le chevalier
de maison-rouge at the Thtre Historique contained
seventy music cues. Monte-Cristo at the same theatre
was a two-evening affair, containing fifty-five cues
on the first night and thirty-eight on the second.
Robert Macaire, a classic French melodrama about one
of the early centurys glamorous villains, contained
sixty-four music cues when produced at the Thtre
Porte Saint-Martin. Moreover, there are composers
credited on some of the music Sala found, most of
them theatre musicians such as Alphonse Varney,
Auguste Pilati, Adolphe Vaillard, and Robert Stoepel.3
How did this music sound? As we learn more about
this variety of nineteenth-century theatre music, we
realize that generalizations can be misleading and each
situation needs to be taken on its own merits.4 There
was both good theatre music and bad theatre music,
just as there are good and bad film scores. Musical
solutions to dramatic problems were sometimes
creative, sometimes humdrum and workaday. As
for the classic Hollywood film, however, certain
expectations prevailed. In 1849 the German actress
Karoline Bauer observed a production of Ducanges
The Two Galley Slaves in Paris. Playing the villain, who
in the cast of characters is described only as the
unknown, was Frdrick Lematre, who excelled
in such spooky roles. He infused shudder and awe
by his very appearance when he came onstage in the
background during the playing of the mysteriously
quavering, muffled, melodramatic music.5 In those
days melodramatic did not have the pejorative sense
that it does today. It referred to a certain dramatic
technique involving music and pantomime. (After
mid-century, the reference was more typically applied
to music and spoken text.) What did Bauer actually
hear? Was this quavering a chromatic trill, a finger
2 David Mayer, ed., Henry Irving and The Bells: Irvings Personal Script of the Play
by Leopold Lewis, with Etienne Singlas original musical score arranged by
Nigel Gardner (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1980), and Anne
Dhu McLucas, ed., Later Melodrama in America: Monte Cristo (ca. 1883) (New
York: Garland, 1994).
3 Emilio Sala, trans. Mary Ann Smart, Verdi and the Parisian Boulevard
Theatre, 1847-9, Cambridge Opera Journal 7, no. 3 (1995).
4 See the authors forthcoming Music and the Popular Drama: Theatres, Actors,
Orchestras, and Audiences in Britian and America, 1770 to 1900 (Iowa City:
University of Iowa Press).
5 Memoirs of Karoline Bauer, from the German, vol. 3 (London, 1885), 306.

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tremolo, or a bowed tremolo? Obviously, the effect

would be somewhat different for each. Still, it was
the shivering mysterious music that signaled some
nefarious plot development about to ensue, and
audiences were clearly impressed by this kind of
musically enhanced theatricality. This was true of the
shivering music in The Corsican Brothers as well, though
the ghost melody was a combination of both affect
and lyricism, such that the melody itself could even be
marketed as sheet music.
Effective and memorable as this music was, its
author cannot be pinned down. Keans playbills
normally credit a composer: for example, The
Overture, Entractes, and a portion of the Incidental
Music [for Faust and Marguerite] composed expressly
for the drama by Mr. J. L. Hatton. No composer
was specified for The Corsican Brothers, however, and
despite the number of times this music was copied,
no composer or compiler was ever credited.6 Of the
eleven melodramas Kean produced at the Princesss,
music to only three of these is known to survive.
Richard Hughes, who had been leading the orchestra
for Kean since 1850, was the music director when The
Corsican Brothers opened on 24 February 1852. During
the run of this play, Kean hired the German-born
Robert Stoepel on recommendation of Boucicault,
who had worked with him in Paris. Stoepel remained
with Kean only a year and a half, however, and John
Liptrot Hatton took over when Stoepel left to go with
Bouicicault to America.
An 1881 article in the British Daily Newsand
reproduced in the Musical Worldtried to get to the
bottom of the authorship question. The reviewer
corresponded with Boucicault, who said Stoepel
composed it. He then interviewed Stoepel, who said
that the music Kean used was adapted from the
original music at the Thtre Historique, where Stoepel
himself had been part arranger and adapter. Was he
responsible for writing the famous ghost melody
then? Stoepel declined to confirm, leaving the matter
open to continued speculation.7 It if it is true that
Stoepel was involved in the original assemblage of the
Parisian music, Boucicault must have secured a copy of
this music and sent it to Kean, who had Hughes adapt
it for his production.
The music for The Corsican Brothers in the Princesss
orchestra parts contains thirty-two items. In addition
6 The playbills for that date still list R. Hughes as music director (and
no mention of a guest conductor). The massive collection of Playbills and
Programmes of the British Theatres, 1800-1899 was filmed by Chadwyck-Healey
(1983) and is available as a set on microfiche at the New York Public Library
Theater Collection and elsewhere.
7 The Ghost Melody in The Corsican Brothers, The Musical World (15 January
1881): 42.

The Corsican Brothers and the Legacy of its Tremulous Ghost Melody

to one song sung by a minor character at the opening

of Act 3, ten of the items were stage music
analogous to source music in filmballroom dances
such as waltzes, galops, and polkas. There were also
several longer pieces, unnumbered, that were played
during the intervals or as pre-curtain music. The first
entractenotes the violist in his partlasted about
five-and-a-half minutes, the second about two minutes.
The playbill for The Corsican Brothers does not announce
any additional selections played during the evening, as
do some other playbills at the Princesss.
Twenty-two of the items are specifically numbered
with cues that correspond to the indication for music
in the stage managers promptbook. These numbers
range from extremely short cuesonly four or six
measuresto much longer pieces, up to seventy
measures for the dances and scene changes. The
orchestra included five wind players (one flute, one
oboe, two clarinets, one bassoon), five brass players
(two horns, two cornets, one trombone), drums,
and a small body of strings in the usual five parts.
One first violin part for The Corsican Brothers, marked
with additional instrumental cues, also served as
the leaders book. (The leader of most theatre
orchestras, at least until the 1870s, led performances
with his violin.) Most of the melos numbers functioning
as dialogue underscore consist of about sixteen to
twenty-five measures and are nearly always for strings
alone. No list of orchestra personnel seems to have
survived, so we have to estimate the number of strings
that would have played these. Smaller theatres were
often known to have a thin string sound compared to
the winds and brass, and sometimes there was only
one string player to a part. But Keandespite often
merely breaking even with his expensive productions
at the Princesssprobably used at least double strings
on a part, if not triple, given some of the indications in
Hattons score for Henry V.8
The final minutes of Act 1 exemplify the close
interaction between the music and the stage action of
the play. The setting is Madame dei Franchis chateau
in Corsica, to which Fabien has returned. It is late
evening. The three music cues in this scene are:
No. 11
Andante, W8, D major
No. 12
Moderato Andante, "2, G minor
No. 13 (in two parts)
Moderato, "4, B minor
Andante, "4, B major

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Fabien has just dispensed with businesssettling

a local disputewhen he turns his attention to his
brothers impending crisis. Earlier that day, as he told
his friend Alfred, he had experienced the first urgent
sign of distress: a sharp, sword-like pang in his chest.
Not wishing to alarm his mother, he interrupts his
story and asks her to show their guest to his room.
Four bars of a reassuring Bellini-esque melody to
a romanza accompaniment (music no. 11) serve
to facilitate Alfreds exit as Madame dei Franchi
graciously escorts him out. The music resolves and
ends. Fabien, certain that something has happened to
his brother, reveals to his servant Griffo a mysterious
experience earlier that day: I looked at my watch;
it was ten minutes after nine. At this line, music
begins again (no. 12). The eerily undulating strings
imbue the dialogue with tension. Look, Fabien
cries, noticing the standing clock. It had stopped at
the same moment as his watch. Madame returns in
time to overhear the latter part of this discussion,
and she confirms that the clock had recently been
rewound. This was the second warning. As the
strings continue, Fabien affects a calm demeanor and
quietly bids his mother good night. The violins relax
to a slow oscillation between two neighboring tones
while the lower strings creep downward through
slowly changing chords. Bless you, my son, good
night, Madame says. If evil hovers over us, may
Providence avert it. As she goes off to bed, the
texture of the music thins to a violin tremolo on a
single note, lingering only until Madame is safely
out of earshot. Without waiting for the final note to
fade, Fabien hastily directs Griffo to ready a horse
so that a letter might be quickly dispatched to Louis
in Paris. The orchestra follows immediately with
music no. 13, a tempo moderato. The rhythmic motto
alternating between violins and violas is punctuated
by persistent pizzicati in the second violins and lower
strings. To this active contrapuntal music, Fabien
takes off his jacket and gets to work. As Fabien tries
to write, the violins gradually slow to a tremolo,
and a shiver seems to spread through all the strings
(Example 1).

4 measures
14 measures
21 measures
16 measures, ad lib repeat (the ghost melody)

8 See Stephen Cockett, Music and the Representation of History in Charles

Keans Revival of Shakespeares Henry V, Nineteenth-Century Theatre and Film
34, no. 1 (June 2007): 9-11.

33

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Example 1: The Corsican Brothers, music no. 13, beginning; piano score prepared from
orchestra parts in the Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington, D.C.

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The Corsican Brothers and the Legacy of its Tremulous Ghost Melody

In the long fermata on a dominant F-sharp seventh

chord, Fabien folds and seals the letter while his
brother Louis gradually begins to appear, hovering
upwards from the floor in his shirt sleeves, with
blood upon his breast. Fabien, absorbed in writing, is
unaware of the ghost, played by an actor-double who
rose through a specially designed Corsican trap, as it
came to be called. This ingenious bit of Victorian stage
carpentry consisted of a horizontally sliding trap door
with a rising platform directly beneath it, the latter
built on an inclined railway, so that as the platform
and trap glided through a channel cut along the stage,
Louis, standing on the platform, appeared to rise
up and move toward his brother as if floating.9 The
ghostly Louis touches Fabien gently on the shoulder
just as the latter is about to place his seal on the wax.
Fabien looks up suddenly as if realizing and calls out:
my brotherDead?! This was the cue for music
change to the famous ghost melody, played by the
first violins tremolo, the rest of the strings in pizzicato
accompaniment (Example 2).
As the wistful melody begins, Madame dei Franchi
reappears in the door stage right, visibly alarmed.
Who uttered that word? she asks, coming toward
Fabien. At some point here, in the dim, candle-lit
room, Fabiens double had replaced him. The ghost
waves his arm toward the wall, while a sink and rise
effect with an increase in backlighting caused the wall
of the chateau to appear to melt away, revealing the
misty setting of a snow-covered glade in the forest
of Fontainebleau. The vision is of the heartless rou
wiping the blood from his sword with a handkerchief,
while Louis lay fatally wounded on the ground,
supported by his two seconds and a surgeon (Figure
1). To this stage picture, the music swells slightly as
the act drop falls.
The effectboth technologically and musically
must have been electrifying, not just at the Princesss
but nearly everywhere The Corsican Brothers was
produced. George Henry Lewesno fan of the
melodramatic genredescribed in a review the
ghostly terror heightened by the low tremolos of the
violins The audience, breath-suspended, watches
the slow apparition, and the vision of the duel which
succeeds, a scenic effect more real and terrible than
anything I remember.10

9 Details and subsequent history of the Corsican trap can be found in

Michael R. Booth, ed., The Revels History of Drama in English, vol. 6: 1750-1880
(London: Methuen and Co., 1975), 88-89.
10 The Leader (28 February 1852), cited in John McCormick, Popular Theatres of
Nineteenth-Century France (London: Routledge, 1993), 65.

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Figure 1: Cover of sheet music, London

[1852]. Special Collections, Templeman
Library, University of Kent
As Barry Yzereef explained it in his detailed study,
the back wall of the room inconspicuously rose up
exposing a transparent gauze scrim on which was
painted an exact replica of the wall. This mysterious
transformation gave the actor playing Louis time to
get in place, and then the gradual change in lights
from front to back caused the vision behind it to
be illuminated through the scrim. Audiences, first
spellbound by the ghost melody, were then stupefied
by the sudden appearance of Charles Kean as he lay
dying in the vision, an actor-double now standing in
as Fabien with his back to the audience and clutching
his mother. When and how did the switch take place,
audiences wondered? (For further discussion of this
scene, including a probable solution, see Yzereefs
analysis.11)
The elements of the ghost melody themselves
are really quite simple: two parallel musical phrases,
eight bars each, consisting of a narrow melodic shape,
a hint of passion or longing built into the rising fourth
or fifth which falls a step. A few chromatic motions
creep into both melody and bass line, but the tone of
the music is hardly mysterious in itself. The musical
affect is not of a villainous misterioso type, as in the Two
11 Yzereef, Art of Gentlemanly Melodrama, 114-28.

36 THE JOURNAL OF FILM MUSIC

Example 2: The Corsican Brothers, continuation of music no. 13.

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The Corsican Brothers and the Legacy of its Tremulous Ghost Melody

Galley Slaves description above. It is more melancholic,

representing sadness or longing through a kind of
sweetness of memory, at which the melody hints.
The mystery, of course, is added by the fast tremolo
in the first violins, a technique that had long served to
convey fear and agitation, at least since its evocation of
the supernatural in eighteenth-century opera, as Clive
McClelland has shown.12 The tremolo of the ghost
melody increased dramatic tension and even raised the
level of suspense. (For a recent analogy, think of the
moment near the climax of Alfred Hitchcocks Vertigo,
while Scotty waits for the transformed Judy to appear
as the dead Madeleine, and the strings play a hushed
sul ponticellotremolo version of his longing motive.
The sense of combined fear and anticipation is eerily
similar.)
Whoever crafted the music to The Corsican Brothers
planned the cues very carefully, both with respect
to drama and musical shape. Following his business
with the local peasants, Fabiens scene is musically
coordinated in terms of keys, tempos, and articulation.
Madame and Alfred exit to D major. The G minor
that follows seems like a somber change from D
major, and indeed the discussion at hand is about the
mysterious signal. The promptbook at this point also
asks for dimming of the wing lights and bringing the
house chandelier half down in preparation for the
ghostly scene to follow. This dimmingunusual in
theatres in those dayswould itself have caused some
titillation among the audience, especially accompanied
by minor-mode music. When Fabien went back to
work, the music was in yet a darker key: B minor.
The modal shift to B major at the appearance of the
vision is surprisingly unexpected, even ethereal,
transcendent. But instead of reunionto which this
key and melody hintFabien is devastated to see his
brother murdered. The only evidence of this in the
music is that the accompanying pizzicato seems cold
and unfeeling, leaving the lyrical melody to shiver in
relative isolation and loneliness. For the audience, this
combinationheard while viewing the sublime vision
in the misty forestserved to increase the sense of
tragedy.13

12 Clive McClelland, Ombra: Supernatural Music in the Eighteenth Century

(Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2012).
13 A key of five sharps was rather unusual for mid-century melodramatic
music. But music theorists such as Wilhelm Mller (1830) and August Gathy
(1835) described B major as appropriate to convey overexcitement and
wild passions, tempered through great dignity, as well as moonlit night.
Wilhelm Christian Mller, Versuch einer sthetik der Tonkunst (1830) and
August Gathy, Musicalisches Conversations-Lexikon (Hamburg: Niemeyer, 1835).
Table of Mller and Gathys key characteristics cited in Rita Steblin, History
of Key Characteristics in the Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries (Rochester:
N.Y.: University of Rochester Press, 1996), 166.

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37

Chappell Music in London brought out a version

of the Ghost Melody in sheet music form in
1852. According to Richard Fawkes, Boucicaults
biographer, it ultimately became one of the most
popular pieces of music in town and sold in the
thousands.14 Some capitalized on the popularity of
the play. There was a Corsican Brothers Polka and a
Corsican Brothers Waltz, and Francis Edward Bache
(under the pseudonym Franz Habec) published a
series of glittering piano variations in 1853, which
he called Habecs Ghost Melody! There were other
variations and fantasias for various instruments, one
by Gustavus Prasca and another for violin and piano
by Bernard Keller, which reproduced an illustration
from the end of Act 1 on the cover (see above, Figure
1). Through all this, the authorship of the actual
tune remained stubbornly elusive. Percy Fitzgerald,
Henry Irvings biographer, recalled that a piano reverie
by Henri Rosellen (composer and theorist at the
Paris Conservatoire) began and continued similarly.
According to Fitzgerald, Stoepel was amused at the
importance and notoriety attached to such a trifle.15
The Chappell publication says right on the title page
that the melody was composed by M. Varny of the
Thtre Historique (actually Pierre-Joseph-Alphonse
Varney) and in this publication was only arranged
by R. Stoepel.16 Anonymously, however, the tune
circulated to dozens of theaters and must have
been arranged by numerous music directors. When
Hamilton Clarke composed the music for Irvings
The Corsican Brothers in 1880, he included the ghost
melody (still in B major) and also featured it in an
adagio middle section of a prelude-overture. There
were even nineteenth-century parodieslike the
Cheech and Chong parody of the 1941 filmincluding
The Corsican Twins as an American Ethiopian drama
in 1857 and an 1880 burlesque at Londons Gaiety
Theatre by F. C. Burnand and H. P. Stephens called The
Corsican Brothers and Co. (Limited). The ghost melody
even showed up in English Christmas pantomimes
like so many well-known tunes doamong them,
Frank Hiams Beauty and the Beast in 1881 (possibly on
account of the burlesque earlier that season).
Remarkable as it may seem, however, the emotional
effect of the original duel scene and its accompanying
melody still formed a part of the theater-goers
experience as late as 1908, when John Martin-Harvey
14 Richard Fawkes, Dion Boucicault: A Biography (London: Quartet Books,
1979), 73.
15 Percy Fitzgerald, Sir Henry Irving: A Biography (Philadelphia: George W.
Jacobs, 1906), 118-19.
16 Varney died in 1879, so he obviously would not have been available to
verify the matter to the Musical World reviewer noted above.

38 THE JOURNAL OF FILM MUSIC

acted the twin brothers at Londons Adelphi Theatre.

The British composer and music director Norman
ONeill must have seen this production, for in 1910 he
wrote that the ghostly effect of lights and music still
holds the audience.17 While in the twentieth century
the theme was eventually forgotten, its influence
lingered in countless examples of supernatural
appearancesfor example, in the Bernard Herrmann/
Hitchcock example noted aboveand even in such
popular culture icons as Robert Coberts quivering
theme music for the 1960s gothic TV series Dark
Shadows. While nearly all melodramasboth
nineteenth-century plays and twentieth-century
filmsused extensive music that seemed to go almost
entirely unheard or unnoticed, it was a simply
crafted tune coupled with a sensational dramatic image
that audiences seemed to remember, even for decades
afterwards.

17 From a speech given by Norman ONeill to the National Music Teachers

Association and printed as Music to Stage Plays in the Proceeding for the
Royal Musical Association (21 March 1911): 85-102. The Ghost Melody
is cited on p. 89. For some discussion on the music in Martin-Harveys
production, which was by C. von Frankenstein, see David Mayer,
Nineteenth-Century Theatre Music, Theatre Notebook 30, no. 3 (1976): 11522.

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The Corsican Brothers and the Legacy of its Tremulous Ghost Melody

39

References
Booth, Michael R., ed. 1975. The Revels history of drama in English, vol. 6: 1750-1880. London: Methuen and
Co.
Cockett, Stephen. 2007. Music and the representation of history in Charles Keans revival of Shakespeares
Henry V. Nineteenth-Century Theatre and Film 34, no. 1 (June): 1-14. http://dx.doi.org/10.7227/
NCTF.34.1.2
Fawkes, Richard. 1979. Dion Boucicault: a biography. London: Quartet Books.
Fitzgerald, Percy. 1906. Sir Henry Irving: a biography. Philadelphia: George W. Jacobs.
Mayer, David. 1976. Nineteenth-century theatre music. Theatre Notebook 30, no. 3: 115-22.
Mayer, David, ed. 1980. Henry Irving and The Bells: Irvings personal script of the play by Leopold Lewis, with
Etienne Singlas original musical score arranged by Nigel Gardner. Manchester: Manchester
University Press.
McClelland, Clive. 2012. Ombra: Supernatural Music in the Eighteenth Century. Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books.
McCormick, John. 1993. Popular theatres of nineteenth-century France. London: Routledge. http://dx.doi.
org/10.4324/9780203168110
McLucas, Anne Dhu, ed. 1994. Later melodrama in America: Monte Cristo (ca. 1883). New York: Garland.
Memoirs of Karoline Bauer, from the German, vol. 3. London, 1885.
N.a. 1881. The Ghost Melody in The Corsican Brothers. The Musical World (15 January): 42.
ONeill, Norman. 1911. Music to stage plays. Proceeding for the Royal Musical Association (21 March): 85-102.
Pisani, Michael V. forthcoming. Music for melodramatic theatre in London and New York, 1780-1900. Iowa City:
University of Iowa Press.
Playbills and programmes of the British theatres, 1800-1899. Chadwyck-Healey, 1983.
Sala, Emilio (trans. Mary Ann Smart). 1995. Verdi and the Parisian boulevard theatre, 1847-9. Cambridge
Opera Journal 7, no. 3: 185-205. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S0954586700004560
Steblin, Rita. 1996. History of key characteristics in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Rochester, N.Y.:
University of Rochester Press.
Yzereef, Barry. 1995. The art of gentlemanly melodrama: Charles Keans production of The Corsican Brothers. Ph.D.
diss. University of Victoria.

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Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without
permission.