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

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.

Snelson offers a persuasive explanation as to why Raoul appropriates the Phantom’s unheard theme:

Both men are trying to lure their prey, initially one ostensibly for art and one for human love, but ultimately both for emotional and physical love; both are investing Christine with their own desires and aspirations; each represents a different potential within Christine…. The Phantom and Raoul are reflections of each other—each defining himself through his opposite number—yet they share a common purpose in the seduction of Christine; and so it is appropriate that their two big vocal gestures should have common features.48

More than any other factor, it is the song “Music of the Night” that persuades Christine (and the audience) that the Phantom should be taken seriously as a romantic alternative to Raoul. In “The Point of No Return,” Raoul gains the trust and love of Christine by usurping the Phantom’s music, making it his own, and thus breaking the spell. In the end, Lloyd Webber’s Christine sings the music of the Sympathy (or Liù’s) theme, “Yet in his eyes,” and ultimately rejects the Phantom, the man who developed her potential as an artist. Instead, she chooses the soon-to-be-endangered Raoul, the man who offers a life of wealth and high society but who might not embrace Christine’s professional career. It is crucial to the Lloyd Webber-Prince vision of the story that the reason Christine decides as she does is neither the Phantom’s “haunted face” nor any lack of musical talent, but the Phantom’s vengeful, murderous, and immoral soul. It is striking that Lloyd Webber gives Christine one of her most original and expressive melodies (and a melody that does not belong to anyone else) to express her conflict about whether to regard the Phantom as an angel or a monster (“Twisted every way what answer can I give?).49

In addition to borrowing and reuse issues, some may legitimately wonder why in a non-rock score the title song should contain such a prominent rock beat or why the Meyerbeer parody, Il Muto, which sets up for the most part a reasonable facsimile of mid-nineteenth-century French grand opera style, would include a generic pop song “Think of Me” that undermines the evocation of a historical style. In the film, servants insert ear plugs when Carlotta begins to sing in an overdone operatic manner and remove them when Christine continues with her lighter and more pop manner, modeling a nihilistic boredom with the opera tradition for a presumably appreciative audience—yet this is the same tradition Lloyd Webber draws on frequently (although relatively few in the audience know it).50 Is it fair to ask “What would Sondheim do” or is popularity the final critical arbiter for these decisions?

Lloyd Webber may not be Sondheim, but his ability to reach audiences is impressive. Phantom, the show that Snelson and other authorities considers the Lloyd Webber show “most assured of a place in the canon,” is a musical that authors of surveys on Broadway should take seriously for its stagecraft, theatrical polish, and memorable melodies.51 Snelson admirably sums up the significance of this achievement: “His work has inspired a visceral response to be praised for itself, and the enjoyment in the dramatic moment or the phrase that catches the ear so effectively is not to be