Incidental stage music
Music that sounds as part of the plot on or behind the stage, also called incidental music.
What it means
Stage music (in German, Bühnenmusik) refers to music woven by the playwright into the action of a drama: it sounds as part of the depicted world, for example as festive, march, or funeral music that the characters themselves hear, rather than as accompaniment from outside the story. The common term for this is incidental music.
It should be distinguished from opera, in which music carries the entire work, whereas stage music accompanies a play or other spoken drama only at particular moments.
Musical use
Well-known examples of incidental music for plays include Ludwig van Beethoven's music for Goethe's Egmont (1810) and Felix Mendelssohn's music for Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream (1843, following an overture of 1826). Such works are often also performed as independent concert suites, detached from the original stage action.
Incidental stage music in this narrower sense differs from purely illustrative background music in that it is anchored as an audible event within the plot itself.