Enchanted Evenings:The Broadway Musical from 'Show Boat' to Sondheim and Lloyd Webber Block, Geoffrey (large ebook reader .txt) 📖

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

Whereas the