Monodrama

Monodrama is a stage work for a single performer, in which one character carries the entire dramatic action through speech, song or a mixture of the two. The form emerged in the eighteenth century as the melodrama experiments of *Jean-Jacques Rousseau* and *Georg Benda*, who set spoken declamation over orchestral music, and it proved ideally suited to psychological extremity: a lone consciousness confronting madness, abandonment or death. Its defining monuments are *Schoenberg*'s "Erwartung" (1909), a half-hour stream of consciousness for soprano and vast orchestra, and *Poulenc*'s "La voix humaine" (1959), a woman's final telephone call — works that made the single voice a complete theatre.