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

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 phrase 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