Enchanted Evenings:The Broadway Musical from 'Show Boat' to Sondheim and Lloyd Webber

by Block, Geoffrey

  Example 16.1. Descending chromatic motive in Vaughan Williams’s Second (“London”) Symphony

  The second phrase of the Phantom’s serenade shares eight consecutive notes and the same rhythmic contour with another melody, this time by Puccini (see Example 16.2). Snelson acknowledges that this phrase in “Music of the Night” “is identical to the climactic section of Dick Johnson’s declaration of love to Minnie at the conclusion of act I of La fanciulla del West.” Although he does not claim a dramatic purpose in the borrowing, in Lloyd Webber’s defense Snelson finds an “emotional [italics mine] link from one musical theater work to the other.”23

  Example 16.2. Dick Johnson’s “Una gioia” from Puccini’s La fanciulla del West

  Walsh notes that the melody first sung by Christine when she describes the Phantom to Raoul on the rooftop of the opera house with the words “Yet in his eyes, all the sadness of the world,” “is closely related to Liù’s suicide music in the last act of Puccini’s Turandot” (see Example 16.3).24

  This is not the first time audiences heard this famous theme, however. It appeared earlier in the orchestra after the Phantom had cursed Christine for unmasking him in his lair and again in the orchestra when Raoul and Christine first arrive on the roof. The theme then reappears at two significant moments in the second act, once when Raoul asks Christine to sing the Phantom’s opera and later when Christine tells the Phantom in the final scene that “This haunted face holds no horror for me now.” The melody is one of the most important in Phantom, as Liù’s melody is in Turandot.

  Example 16.3. Liù’s motive in Puccini’s Turandot

  Surprisingly, neither Citron, Snelson, nor Sternfeld mentions the extraordinary melodic and rhythmic correspondence between this Phantom theme and Liù’s comparably significant melody, heard relentlessly for nearly eight minutes in Turandot’s second act. Snelson, who alone among this trio acknowledges that scholars need to seriously consider the issue of Lloyd Webber’s borrowing, provides numerous examples that he tries to explain or justify, but not this one. For the most part, Sternfeld’s response to Lloyd Webber’s accusers seems unwarrantedly dismissive: “When critics or historians do go hunting for actual stolen tunes, they rarely find any, and when they do, the results do not amount to much.”25

  Unless one is wearing a mask that covers the ears, however, I would argue that borrowings come to some of us unbidden and that they do add up to something significant. The amount Lloyd Webber borrows from Fanciulla in “The Music of the Night” and the Turandot borrowing in “Yet in his eyes” and “This haunted face” is approximately the same as Bernstein’s appropriation of Wagner’s “Redemption through love” motive in “I Have a Love” and the death processional in West Side Story. The issue is not the fact of borrowing or even how much is borrowed. The problem lies in the gratuitousness and apparent arbitrariness of the borrowings. In another famous, more recent Puccini borrowing that occurs in Rent, Roger, the character doing the borrowing, informs the audience that he is trying to compose a love song that does not sound like “Musetta’s Waltz” from Puccini’s La bohème. Eventually Puccini’s melody returns, but not before Roger has finished his own original love song, “Your Eyes,” inspired, but not composed, by Puccini.

  To a remarkable extent perhaps not seen since his British predecessor Handel, who is nonetheless generally credited for borrowing with interest, Lloyd Webber reuses music by other composers and does not acknowledge his sources. A typical Lloyd Webber show also contains more reprises and contrafacta than most previous and current successful Broadway shows. More significant than the number of reprises is the frequent absence of dramatic meaning. Lloyd Webber continues to receive criticism from many quarters for these practices and habits and audience approbation in spite of them. Either way, friends and foes alike perhaps might concede that the works he created for London and Broadway from Joseph to Sunset Boulevard amply support Lloyd Webber’s claim as the reigning champion of Broadway.26

  Musical Organicism

  If Rodgers and Hammerstein did not invent what soon would become known as the “integrated” musical, their success with Oklahoma! and Carousel popularized this approach, gave it cachet, and arguably made it desirable, if not imperative, for others to follow in their path. The fundamental principles of the integrated musical, in contrast to the allegedly more frivolous fare of the 1920s and 1930s, are that the songs advance a plot, flow directly from the dialogue, and express the thoughts of the characters who sing them. In addition, the presence of dance serves to advance the plot and enhance the dramatic meaning of the songs that precede them, and the orchestra, through accompaniment and underscoring, parallels, complements, or advances the action.27

  Despite increased attention to these basic principles of integration, which also involved greater attention to the integrity, coherence, and depth of the book, the principle of the integrated musical is to some extent undermined by the separation of dialogue and song.28 The megamusicals of Lloyd Webber and Boublil-Schönberg from the late 1970s through the mid-1990s increased the possibility of integration by making their works through-sung. Even such a harsh detractor of the megamusical as Scott McMillin, who finds Phantom “pretentious and overblown,” concedes that the through-sung musical, often composed in a rock style, surpasses the Rodgers and Hammerstein integrative model: “I can see the logic of claiming that the drive for integration has finally been achieved in Lloyd Webber. Perhaps Phantom should be celebrated for being a musical on the verge of becoming an opera.”29

  One of the problematic side effects of the integrated, through-sung mega-musical is the potential for integration that lacks dramatic meaning. Evita, Les Misérables, and Phantom are musically integrated in the sense that they use a relatively small repertoire of motives and themes and recycle these melodies continuously, usually with new lyrics (i.e., contrafacta, a term used extensively in Joseph Swain’s chapters on Lloyd Webber and BoublilSchönberg).30 When characters in musicals use each other’s music and when the underscored passages appear without seeming regard for the appropriateness of the appropriation, the increased integration leads to decreased dramatic meaning. The reuse, or overuse, of contrafacta in the work of the composer at hand, according to Swain, “has become a rather careless infatuation with [Lloyd] Webber’s not inconsiderable powers of melody.”31

  The reliance on contrafactum also frequently results in mismatched texts. Raymond Knapp discusses the implications of the problem: “Especially in its seemingly wanton recycling of music and inadequate attention to text setting, Evita is seen as lacking two perceived strengths of the more traditional Broadway stage: musical variety and an oft-demonstrated capacity for marrying words and music so intimately that neither seems sufficient without the other. According to this ideal, Lloyd Webber’s use of the same music for quite different songs seems fundamentally inadequate.”32 The problem is not the reuse, or even the ubiquitous reuse of the material. The problem is the lack of discrimination in the recycling of melodic material. When used indiscriminately, the opportunities for increased dramatic meanings are squandered. Music can become just an attractive but subsidiary adjunct to the show rather than a conveyor of idiomatic meanings and moods. I will return to the use and reuse of themes in the section “Music and Meaning in The Phantom of the Opera.”

  The Phantom of the Opera: The Novel and the Silent Film

  The story line of Andrew Lloyd Webber and Hal Prince’s The Phantom of the Opera can be traced to two sources, the classic fairy tale about the Beauty and the Beast and George du Maurier’s novel Trilby from 1894. The novel, in which the musical magician Svengali places the nonmusical ingénue Trilby in a trance during which she attains great operatic success, was a popular novel in both England and America in its day and was soon adapted into a popular play. Between September 1909 and January 1910, Gaston Leroux’s new twist on this story, Le Fantöme de l’Opéra, appeared in serial form (in French); the English translation The Phantom of the Opera followed in 1911. Mo
re than seventy years later, three years after the phenomenon of Cats had begun its long-lived London run, Lloyd Webber found a copy of Leroux’s gothic novel in a used book shop. The novel inspired the modern-day musical theater Svengali (Lloyd Webber), inspired by his Trilby and wife at the time (Sarah Brightman), to create a musical version that proved to be a greater phenomenon even than Cats, at least on Broadway, when The Phantom of the Opera opened in London (1986) and New York (1988).

  The genesis of Phantom has been told often, and authoritative summaries of the novel and film and television adaptations can be found in George Perry’s The Complete “Phantom of the Opera.” Less explored are the creative choices Lloyd Webber and Prince—in collaboration with the Midas-touched producer of Les Misérables the previous year, Cameron Macintosh (b. 1946)—made in their conversion of Leroux’s novel and the comparably influential 1925 classic silent film directed by Rupert Julian and starring Lon Chaney as the Phantom, Marie Philbin as Christine, and Norman Kerry as Raoul.33 Although the novel provided a broad structure and the film a more focused structure (in addition to providing a visual model for the opera house stage and majestic staircase), the Lloyd Webber-Prince version departed in significant ways from each.

  The film had already accomplished some of Prince’s work. Foster Hirsch credits Prince for removing the gruesome details of the Phantom’s medical afflictions and early biography, the back story to Christine’s relationship to her father (it was the father’s prophecy of an angel-to-come that worked on Christine’s susceptibility to the magical charms of the Angel of Music), and the childhood romance between Christine and Raoul.34 All of this material, plus Leroux’s detailed explanation of how the Phantom accomplished his supernatural tricks, had already vanished in the 1925 film. The character of the Persian, the man who knew the true story about Erik, the future Phantom, was retained from the novel but transformed in the film into a suspicious character often seen lurking about the same time film viewers witnessed actions attributed to the Phantom. In the early portions of the film it seemed possible that the Persian and the Phantom were the same. Deeper into the story, viewers learn that the Persian is working on behalf of the police to apprehend the Phantom.

  As in the novel, the Persian, who sports an astrakhan hat, is the detective Ledoux (a name that sounds similar and is spelled suspiciously close to the novel’s author Leroux) who tries to help Raoul escape harm in the vast and literally torturous underground of the Paris Opera as they pursue Christine and her abductor, the Phantom. To achieve what is often referred to as the “Abbott shorthand,” in deference to the ability of director George Abbott, Prince’s mentor, to capture the essence of a plot, both forms of the Persian, the Phantom’s former acquaintance in the novel and the private investigator Ledoux from the silent film, entirely disappeared from the musical. To fill in for the absence of the Persian, another mysterious character, Madame Giry, served as a secret liaison between the Phantom and the other principals. No one felt the need to provide an alternative character to replace detective Ledoux.

  The Lloyd Webber-Prince scenario added much to the novel and film to enhance the plot and alter its effect. By making the Phantom physically less deformed and musically more brilliant and seductive, he becomes for the first time a serious “romantic alternative” to Raoul.35 Raoul, too, has become a more endearing figure, especially when compared to his depiction in the novel and film as a condescending, controlling character who possesses neither sympathy nor understanding for Christine’s plight nor the heroism to withstand the Phantom’s threats. In the novel and the 1925 silent film, the Phantom’s spell inhibits Christine’s judgment, and her fear of the Phantom causes her to put Raoul at arm’s length. In a significant discrepancy, throughout much of the musical the Phantom is portrayed as a relatively benevolent figure who has entranced Christine into believing he is the Angel of Music as prophesied by Christine’s father. Until “The Point of No Return” toward the end of the evening, audiences would probably not be too shocked if Christine decided to join her Phantom in the depths of the Paris Opera and leave Raoul behind.

  Although film viewers see the Phantom at his organ and know that he is composing Don Juan Triumphant, inspired by his love for Christine, it is only in the stage musical that audiences witness and actually hear his triumphant work. As a modernist decades ahead of his time compositionally, the Phantom, when he isn’t serenading Christine with a lyrical lullaby (“Music of the Night”), composes music that tends to be dissonant and even violent. It is filled with whole-tone scales and whole-tone harmonies, sounds that before long would be associated with the real-life French modernist Claude Debussy (with a touch of Vaughan Williams as the basis for a vamp in the title song in a rock style, see Example 16.1). Not only does the whole-tone scale pervade the phrase “Those who tangle with Don Juan” (which the traditionally trained and musically limited Piangi cannot master in the rehearsal [act II, scene 4]), but it also appropriately melodically and harmonically underlies the “I have brought you” verse to “Music of the Night” and, less explicably, when the same verse returns at the outset of “All I Ask of You.”36

  In the novel and the silent film, all the opera scenes—prior to the time when the opera scenes were granted the gift of sound in 1930—are taken from Charles Gounod’s opera Faust, probably the most popular French opera between its premiere in 1859 and the appearance of the novel and silent film of Phantom. After the largely spoken Prologue told as a flashback, a framing device absent in both the novel and film, the story of Phantom in the musical begins with a rehearsal of Hannibal, clearly a parody of the once towering mid-nineteenth-century French composer Giacomo Meyerbeer. Later in the first act, Lloyd Webber offers a second operatic pastiche, Il Muto, this time in the late-eighteenth-century Italian style of Antonio Salieri, another largely forgotten composer. At the center of the second act, musical themes of the first act come together in the Phantom’s creation, Don Juan Triumphant, which offers the dissonant sound of modernism, including whole-tone scales and harmonies, an appropriate musical language for a precociously avant-garde and vengeful composer.

  The Musical Film

  It took nearly twenty years from its London premiere before the musical film adaptation of The Phantom of the Opera arrived in 2004. The film was directed by Joel Schumacher, an American director who came on the scene in the 1980s with St. Elmo’s Fire and The Lost Boys. In the 1990s he directed two films based on John Grisham novels, The Client and A Time to Kill, and replaced Tim Burton as the director of choice in the ongoing series of Batman films, Batman Forever and Batman and Robin. The film version of Phantom, which the composer had discussed with Schumacher in the late 1980s, was for the most part faithful in spirit and letter to the stage original. In contrast to Burton’s Sweeney Todd, Schumacher’s Phantom is also “a movie based on a stage show.”37 At a leisurely 143 minutes it is able to accommodate most of the original stage version, with a few minor (but not inconsequential cuts) and a few moments of cinematic and non-verbal leisure.38

  The film, shot in a faded black and white tint, ranges backward in time from 1919 to 1870, the auction omits the Meyerbeer memorabilia auctioned in the stage version, and film viewers are introduced not only to the Vicomte de Chagny, or Raoul (Patrick Wilson), but also to Madame Giry (Miranda Richardson), whom he outbids for the monkey. The original stage version begins in 1905 with a Prologue that takes place at an auction in which items from a distant time are being auctioned off, a poster from the opera Hannibal, “a wooden pistol and three human skulls from the 1831 production of Robert le Diable by Meyerbeer” (an opera actually composed for the Paris Opéra by the composer, unlike the fictitious Meyerbeer Hannibal parody), a papiermáché music box of a monkey in Persian robes clanging cymbals, and a chandelier from the Opéra restored from a shattered state. The auctioneer switches on the chandelier and the scene miraculously shifts to a rehearsal of Hannibal at the Opéra Populaire in Paris 1861.

  The Phantom of the Opera, 2004 film. Close-up
of Christine Daaé (Emmy Rossum) and The Phantom (Gerard Butler).

  The Phantom of the Opera, 2004 film. Christine Daaé (Rossum) and The Phantom (Butler) performing in The Phantom’s opera Don Juan Triumphant.

  Prince never returns to the older Vicomte in the stage version to remind audiences that they are watching a flashback, but Schumacher makes several strategic returns to Raoul and the events of 1919 in the film, starting with the scene in act I between Christine Daaé (Emmy Rossum) and the Phantom (Gerard Butler) in the Phantom’s lair (about 47 minutes into the film). The last of these flash-forwards occur at the film’s conclusion when Raoul is wheeled to the cemetery to place the papier-máché monkey on a tomb. The tomb inscription informs us that Raoul and Christine, the future Countess de Chagny (1854–1917), were married after the events of the story, that she was only sixteen at the time the story takes place—Rossum herself was only seventeen at the time of filming—and died two years before the film begins. Film viewers also learn that history remembers her as a “Beloved Wife and Mother” and not as an opera star. Christine did not have it all. The final image of the film is a withered rose, just like the rose the Phantom gave to Christine after her first performance nearly fifty years earlier. In the stage version the Phantom disappeared at the end and stage audiences never learn whether he was alive or dead in 1905. In contrast, the film lets viewers know that the Phantom still lives (thus preparing for the possibility of a sequel) and that he has by no means forgotten the only woman who was able to love him.39