Whereas the stage version sustains much of the mystery until the end about the connections between Madame Giry and the Phantom, the film soon lets us know by silent visual clues that Madame understands what is happening. Later in the film, when Madame Giry explains to Raoul about the Phantom’s early history, Schumacher assists her tale with vivid cinematic flashbacks. Film viewers learn from Giry and see the documentation, not only that the Phantom was deformed from birth but that he was abused and battered before lashing back by garroting his father with the Punjab lasso. Finally, film viewers see Giry smuggling the future Phantom safely into the opera house where he would establish a refuge for the rest of his life.
The film takes advantage of other opportunities to add clarity and remove mystery. Raoul is now identified in the first scene as a Count during the rehearsal instead of as a mysterious aristocrat who recognizes Christine from his box at a performance. Raoul does not notice Christine at the rehearsal, but she notices him and informs Meg (and film viewers) that he was a childhood sweetheart. When Christine travels by coach to the cemetery to visit her father’s tomb, stage audiences might rightfully wonder how the Phantom found her there. Film viewers watch the Phantom as he overhears Christine tell a drunken stable hand she is going to the cemetery, easily knocks out the intended driver, and takes her there himself.
Madame Giry’s explanation about the Phantom’s origins gives film viewers a more sympathetic understanding of the childhood abuse that eventually created a pathetic murderer, albeit a genius. Not only does the Phantom’s life acquire a context, he is also less loathsome physically than earlier Phantoms. Thus, when Christine unmasks the Phantom during the performance of his opera, viewers see a man with burn-like scars on the upper portion of one side of his face, but nowhere near the disfigurement that shocked film audiences in 1925 when Lon Chaney was revealed for the first time in the Phantom’s lair. Even more than the stage Phantom, the film Phantom of 2004 was a dashing and credible romantic alternative. As Christine observes in the climactic scene, it is the Phantom’s soul, not his face, where “the true distortion lies.”
Lloyd Webber and Schumacher also found an imaginative way to add a new song. Since, as previously noted, musical film adaptations are encouraged to include at least one new song in order to become eligible for an academy award, an early plan was to give the Phantom a new solo song called “No One Would Listen.” When the film’s length became prohibitive and the song was viewed unnecessary (other than perhaps to secure an award nomination), Schumacher and Lloyd Webber took the song away from the Phantom and inserted its melody as underscoring when Raoul places the monkey on his wife’s tomb at the end of the film. Immediately thereafter the song can be heard as the credits roll. The title has been changed to “Learn to Be Lonely” and the lyrics are also new. Since Raoul’s “All I Ask of You” usurped portions of “The Music of the Night” and transformed other parts of this song into something new, it is fitting that the Phantom’s song in its final context and associations with Raoul would retain the melody of a Phantom tune, another example of a contrafactum.40
The film takes various liberties in scene order, such as the placement of the cemetery scene (act II, scene 5) directly after Madame Giry’s story about the Phantom’s origins in scene 2, returning after the cemetery scene to portions of scenes 3 and 4. Another revealing example of Schumacher’s desire to avoid continuity occurs between what was act I, scene 5 (the scene in the Phantom’s lair where he sings “Music of the Night”), and the next morning when Christine unmasks the Phantom while he is playing the organ. After “Music of the Night” in the film, instead of the continuation of the scene between the Phantom and Christine that stage audiences experience, film viewers are shown some leisurely new footage of Meg Giry looking for Christine, her discovery of the mirror (“the mechanics of what seemed at first magic”) and the passageway to the Phantom. The music of “I Have Brought You” grows louder as the shadow lurking ominously behind Meg turns out to be her mother reaching out in the darkness to place a hand on her inquisitive daughter’s shoulder and lead her back to the safety of the dressing room. Only then does the film return to the Phantom’s lair.
The next scene in the film corresponds to scene 7. Joseph Buquet, described at first meeting in the screenplay as a leering “sinister scene shifter in overalls” (a description that helps viewers adjust to his violent death later in the film), is explaining to the ballet girls about the Phantom and his magical lasso to their “horror and delight.” Madame Giry appears and chastises him for this sacrilege. Both Buquet and Giry sing what I am calling the “I remember” motive, the music that becomes Don Juan B, previously unheard on stage since the Prologue. The next morning the monkey music box gently awakens Christine. The first music she sings is the “I remember” motive, which viewers have just heard Buquet and Madame Giry sing several times.41 The next image is the Phantom at his organ, but unlike the stage version, film viewers do not hear him. Is he composing an important theme from his opera (e.g., “Tangled in the Winding Sheets!” or Don Juan C)? Film viewers will never know.
The film adaptations of both My Fair Lady and West Side Story included intermissions during their opening runs in movie theaters (although in neither case did the intermission in the film correspond precisely to the conclusion of act I in its stage counterparts). Had it been the 1950s or 1960s, it would have easily been possible in a musical film adaptation of Phantom to present an intermission break at the end of what was act I of Phantom on the stage. Forty years later, however, when single features had long been the rule, it was no longer necessary, or even a realistic option, to make a film with an intermission. This posed a problem for Phantom (only ten minutes shorter than the West Side Story film), since the first act contained such a dramatic and scenically dazzling climax: the freefall of the chandelier. Instead of the falling chandelier, the musical film thus fades forward to 1919 to reveal a shot of Raoul observing a young couple admiring the sumptuous jewels in the windows of a jewelry store. Finally, much closer to the end of the film, the Phantom launches the chandelier at the climax of his opera. Its fall creates a fire and in the chaos the Phantom is able to move Christine to the opera underground as the film moves to its dramatic conclusion.
The film, which cost somewhere between $60 and $70 million to produce, did well during its first month, but less well financially in the United States than either The Incredibles or The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie. It also failed to garner the critical acclaim lavished on the film versions of Chicago (2002) or later, Sweeney Todd (2007). Nevertheless, the $100 million it earned in world markets provided its makers with popular and financial vindication. Although lacking the transformative qualities of the Chicago and Sweeney Todd films, Schumacher’s Phantom offers a scenically beautiful and admirably sung souvenir of Broadway’s great stage hit.
Music and Meaning in The Phantom of the Opera
In earlier chapters, when comparing the relative dramatic meanings between the second act reprises of “If I Loved You” from Carousel and “So in Love” from Kiss Me, Kate, I suggested that the former was based on something Billy and Julie Jordan shared while the latter seemed more for the purpose of bringing back a great song.42 While one might argue whether Fred’s reprise of Lilli’s song demonstrates a bond that transcends what audiences have experienced in the play, and it is certainly a priceless romantic song that audiences enjoy rehearing for its own sake, I concluded that an opportunity for dramatic meaning was lost. I also noted that even Puccini advocate Roger Parker acknowledged the lack of dramatic meaning when “E lucevan le stelle” returns in act III of Tosca, the opera that prompted Joseph Kerman’s famously derogatory description of the popular work as a “shabby little shocker.”43
Several scholars offer dramatic explanations for the reuse of Lloyd Webber’s recurring themes in Phantom, and in some cases the explanations are plausible. As with Puccini’s Tosca, however, other explanations are less persuasive. The problem lies not with the dramatic
uses served by the seven big tunes in the show (“Think of Me,” “Angel of Music,” “The Phantom of the Opera,” “The Music of the Night,” “All I Ask of You,” “Wishing You Were Somehow Here Again,” and “The Point of No Return”), but with the dozen or more motives, many of which I argue are used indiscriminately. Ironically, the problem is too much integration.
A comparison between two complementary sections from The Phantom of the Opera reveals the extent to which Lloyd Webber has taken advantage of or thwarted the opportunities for musical meaning and dramatic effectiveness. The sections in question are the first scenes between the Phantom and Christine in his lair in act I, scenes 5 and 6, and the performance of the Phantom’s opera in act II, scene 7 (the online website offers a detailed thematic outline of these scenes). The scenes share a considerable amount of musical material, and it is this sharing that can potentially lead either to increased or decreased meaning.
Some themes are used with consistency and effectiveness. The descending chromatic scale that figures so prominently in the title song, for example, first heard throughout the overture, firmly establishes a connection between the musical figure and the Phantom that will follow him wherever he goes. The fact that it may be derived from Vaughan Williams (Example 16.1) does not diminish its dramatic effectiveness in Phantom. The orchestra announces the Phantom’s chromatic presence at the conclusion of “Prima Donna”; they play it when audiences see Buquet’s dead body hanging from the stage, when the Phantom makes the chandelier fall at the end of act I, and finally when Christine publicly removes the Phantom’s mask during the performance of Don Juan Triumphant. Another important motive that is effectively associated with the Phantom is first heard fittingly on the words “He’s here, the Phantom of the opera.” This occurs early in the work where it interrupts Carlotta’s rendition of “Think of Me.” Like the chromatic figure, the motive first associated with “He’s here, the Phantom of the opera,” will appear numerous times (at least eight), always in proximity with the Phantom—or the idea of the Phantom—and always serving a persuasive dramatic effect.
On several occasions Lloyd Webber also goes beyond thematic recurrence and creatively transforms his musical material. For example, the phrase often repeated by the lead tenor Piangi—who futilely attempts to sing the ascending whole-tone scale on the words, “Those who tang-”[without the “le”], in the rehearsal of Don Juan Triumphant in act II, scene 4— was foreshadowed as violent orchestral underscoring when the Phantom curses Christine in act I, scene 6, for removing his mask. The “I remember” phrase that Christine sings at the beginning of this scene also returns in a loud and dissonant version in the orchestral introduction of Don Juan Triumphant and in a comparably dissonant choral version when the chorus begins the sung portion of the work on the words “Here the sire may serve the dam” (shown in the outlines of the online website).
All together, the first part of the “I remember” phrase appears no less than fourteen times in the opera, more than any other motive; the second part by itself appears on two other occasions.44 It is the first music sung in the Prologue, the auction flashback which occurs forty-four years after the story’s main action, and it is indeed possible that the aged Raoul remembers a major phrase he himself heard his beloved Christine sing at the climactic moment when she kisses the Phantom in his lair. But why do Buquet, Raoul, Madame Giry, and the Phantom sing this theme? Its transformation in Don Juan Triumphant offers the possibility that the theme belongs to Christine and that she has served as a muse and inspiration for the Phantom’s great and forward-looking operatic work. Unfortunately, this possibility goes unrealized.
In the film, but not the original London cast album, the “I remember” motive can be heard earlier, albeit softly, in the orchestra under the dialogue that followed the moment when the backdrop fell in front of Carlotta, interrupting her inappropriately operatic rendition of “Think of Me.” It reappears in the film soon thereafter when viewers observe the Phantom stealthily lock the door to Christine’s dressing room (an action not shown in the stage version). Placing the short scene with Buquet and Madame Giry before the continuation of the lair scene (the morning after) not only interrupts the continuity of the scene between Christine and the Phantom, but it also deprives Christine of the opportunity to be the first to sing this motive in the main part of the story. If Christine was the first to sing the motive, it would be possible to imagine a scenario in which her music serves as the inspiration behind the Phantom’s opera. It is not dramatically clear how Buquet and Madame Giry would have heard a theme from this as-yet-unwritten work. By placing this motive in the mouths of these characters, one must conclude that anyone involved with the Phantom would know the “I remember” theme and are free to use it in normal conversation. In this case, enhanced integration results in a reduction of dramatic meaning. The theme no longer belongs to Raoul and Christine. It belongs to anyone who knows the Phantom.
When audiences eventually hear Don Juan Triumphant they might realize (perhaps on a second or third hearing) that the music the Phantom played at his organ before Christine awoke to sing “I remember” functions in retrospect as the starting point of this work. Here too audiences can imagine the Phantom, inspired by Christine’s presence, formulating the seeds of his masterpiece. Unfortunately, this possibility is removed when the orchestra inexplicably returns to this theme as Raoul and Christine escape to the roof toward the end of act I. It was noted previously that at the end of the Balcony Scene in West Side Story an omniscient and clairvoyant orchestra explained what the characters do not know (see Example 13.5). It is not clear in this case what dramatic purpose is served by using the Phantom’s Don Triumphant theme to accompany the flight of Raoul and Christine. Instead, the indiscriminate recycling of a theme becomes a lost opportunity to achieve a meaningful dramatic association between theme and character.
The lair scene in act I contains other reminiscences of music previously heard and new music that will be reheard in act II. In the former category, the “I remember” motive and “Masquerade” appeared in the Prologue and “Angel of Music” had set up associations between Christine and the Phantom in Christine’s duet with Meg “After the Gala” (scene 2) and in Christine’s duet with the Phantom between the mirrors in “Christine’s Dressing Room” (scene 3). The verse of “Music of the Night” (“I have brought you”), which was anticipated in the “Little Lotte” music, returns in the performance of Don Juan Triumphant as the verse for “The Point of No Return.”45 This latter return constitutes another meaningful and powerful connection between the Phantom and Christine that retains these associations when Christine employs its bridge and relates her visit to the Phantom’s lair with Raoul in the final scene of act I, “The Roof of the Opera House” (scene 10). The Phantom himself recalls the music of “Stranger Than You Dreamt It” in the reprise of “Notes” in act II, scene 3, when he instructs the house to “Let my opera begin!” to launch the performance of Don Juan Triumphant (at the end of scene 6), and in the final confrontation with Raoul (scene 9).
The last important music introduced in the lair scene (“The Next Morning,” act I, scene 6) is the instrumental music that followed Christine’s unmasking and the Phantom’s violent response. This is the theme that so closely resembles Liù’s theme in Turandot (Example 16.3). On this first appearance it is heard and not sung. Snelson describes this melody as the “Sympathy” theme and Sternfeld labels it the “Yet in his eyes” phrase (I am tempted to call it Liù’s theme). After the first unmasking in the lair, this theme will return four times, the last three of which are sung in three different pairs of conversations: Christine to Raoul on the roof (“Yet in his eyes”), Raoul to Christine shortly before Don Juan Triumphant (“You said yourself he was nothing but a man”), and Christine to Phantom in his lair during the final scene (“This haunted face holds no horror for me now”). It makes sense why Christine, in describing the Phantom, would sing this music to Raoul and why she would return to this p
hrase in the final scene. On the other hand, the appropriation of the phrase by Raoul seems gratuitous. Although audiences might understand how he would know this theme, it remains unpersuasive why he would choose to sing it.
The next appropriation by Raoul of the Phantom’s music is fully appropriate. It also demonstrates what is arguably the most ingenious transformation from one theme into another in the work and a transformation that also makes a strong dramatic point. The appropriation occurs in the opening phrase of “All I Ask of You,” the love duet between Raoul and Christine in the final scene of act I, scene 10.46 Raoul’s tune, later sung by Christine as well, bears three subtle but collectively meaningful connections with Phantom’s serenade to Christine in his lair in scene 5. Sung by the Phantom as a solo, “The Music of the Night” possessed serenity and a seductiveness that is never fully recaptured again when it is reprised. Nevertheless, its initial power is sufficient to persuade audiences, and Christine, that the Phantom, indeed for the first time in many adaptations, offers a viable romantic alternative to Raoul. After a gentle sustained D-flat major harmony for four measures, the harmony moves for the first time to a second harmony on the words “Silently the senses” (this is the phrase that borrows directly from Puccini’s Il Fanciulla shown in Example 16.2). The harmony selected, the subdominant (G-flat major) creates a hymn-like quality that returns on the note of the song (on the word “night”), which can be identified as an enhanced plagal IV-I (or Amen) cadence from G to D. Similarly, Raoul’s “All I Ask of You” opens with a tonic pedal, also on D for more than two full measures before it moves to its second chord, which not coincidentally is also a IV chord on G (on the words “harm you”).
The connections between “The Music of the Night” and “All I Ask of You” are even more striking and recognizable, as both songs share an identical final phrase. Just as the verse of “Music of the Night” (“I have brought you”) returns to introduce the verse of “The Point of No Return” (“You have come here”), the final phrase of “All I Ask of You” shares the same music as the end of “The Music of the Night” (in each case incorporating the words of the song’s title, another fleeting contrafactum). But the openings of each song are also remarkably intertwined, albeit subtly so. Snelson offers a musical example in which he juxtaposes these openings and explains perceptively that “the opening phrase of one is pretty much a musical anagram of the other, for both melodies encompass the same pitches, A-D-E-F, and both are bounded by their dominant at lower and upper octaves.”47 Both openings also reach these lower and upper dominants the same way, by a two-note descent from F to A-flat (ironically on the syllable “sharpens” in “Music of the Night” and “darkness” in “All I Ask of You”) and an eighth-note ascent, D-E-F, that arrives on A at the end of the phrase in the second measure of each song. In singing this “duet” between the Phantom and Raoul, one could follow the first phrase of either song with the first phrase of the other without any loss of coherence.
Enchanted Evenings:The Broadway Musical from 'Show Boat' to Sondheim and Lloyd Webber Page 51