Phantom of the Opera

Now in the thirty-fifth year of its theatrical run on both sides of the Atlantic and showing no sign of stopping, Andrew Lloyd Webber’s The Phantom of the Opera has completely assimilated Gaston Leroux’s original character. Official accounts of the musical’s creation therefore downplay the cultural significance of Le Fantôme de l’Opéra (1910) as if it were a dead text waiting for the megamusical to breathe life into its corpse. In The Phantom of the Opera Companion (2007) by Lloyd Webber and Martin Knowlden, the composer describes picking up a ‘second-hand’ copy of the book, to which the corresponding Wikipedia entry adds ‘long out-of-print’. (The 1976 musical by Ken Hill, which Lloyd Webber and his producer Cameron Mackintosh knew well, is similarly reduced to a cursory reference.) In the 1991 Virgin edition of the novel – with Michael Crawford on the cover – sold at Her Majesty’s Theatre alongside the Companion, the posters, the mask, the rose, and the music box, the word Peter Haining uses repeatedly to describe Leroux’s novel in his introduction is ‘forgotten’. He also erroneously claims that the book was not particularly well received by critics or readers on publication, describing Leroux himself as ‘a somewhat shadowy figure’ known only to the ‘keenest students of supernatural fiction’. This is an odd claim given that the author was made a Chevalier de la Legion d’honneur in 1909. Leroux, in fact, was a prolific and jobbing novelist, having retired from a colourful – and sometimes dangerous – career in journalism just before he turned forty. He wrote thirty-nine novels, many of which have been forgotten, especially outside France; Le Fantôme de l’Opéra is not one of them. The novel was serialised in France, Britain, and America to considerable acclaim, and had already been filmed twice by the time Leroux died in 1927, with a steady run of cinematic and TV adaptations continuing ever since. It has never been out of print either in French or English. Leroux’s ‘Phantom’ was a gothic icon long before the West End and Broadway got hold of him...

Work of Fiction/poetry

“The Opera Ghost really existed,” Gaston Leroux declared, introducing the world to his most famous literary character, the Phantom of the Opera. The legendary Opera Ghost continues to live in the hearts of Phans dedicated to Leroux's tale of mystery, passion and unrequited love. “Phantom Phantasia” is a poetical celebration of the enigmatic masked genius haunting the depths of the Paris Opéra house. A collection of twenty poems varying in style from the serious to the comic, each poem is richly illustrated with vintage images in addition to artwork, photographs and original colour plates designed by the author evoking the elegant Belle Époque days of Paris.

This essay explores how the Broadway musical of The Phantom of the Opera blurs the traditional distinction between cognition and emotion with the use of operatic music and librettos. Over the years, the musical has outshone the novel in its immediacy to exert a direct influence on the audience. The overall popularity of the musical points to the successful use of music supported by visual feast and narration. The general effect of Phantom over the audience also contributes to the problematization of mind-body dualism in affect theory and literary criticism, which also surfaces in cognitive psychology as emotion–cognition interaction. It is self-evident that music constitutes the fundamental unit of musical theatres. Thus, the main analysis dwells on the intertwined relationship between music and affect studies in order to explain the underlying reason why Leroux’s literary work has taken a back seat to Webber’s musical theatre, though the former provides an undeniably rich source for the latter and originally frames the debate on consciousness and the mind-body problem.

El Fantasma de la Ópera, a pesar de tener un origen literario, es una historia donde la música juega un papel muy importante. Sin embargo, de todas las adaptaciones cinematográficas que se han hecho, la única que ha dado un verdadero valor a la banda sonora ha sido la versión musical de 2004.

Andrew Lloyd Webber’s The Phantom of the Opera (London, 1986) presents an interesting case of metareference. A so-called megamusical, it is a popular musical theatre piece in which opera itself is a kind of character, and which refers on many levels to opera, operatic conventions, and specific operatic musical styles. Departing from Gaston Leroux’s 1909–1910 novel, in which actual operas (notably Gounod’s Faust) function as important plot devices, Lloyd Webber and his librettists created three pastiche ‘operas’, parts of which are heard and seen in the course of the musical.

These fragments themselves play important intracompositional roles in the plot. However, outside of the diegetic context of the musical’s story, they also possess extracompositional qualities which reference musical, historical, and dramatic events, as well as musical styles, repertoires, and even specific works. These metareferential aspects are amplified in the 2004 film version,  where the cinema audience is able to observe not only the ‘operas’, but also the opera ‘audience’ within the production.

Whatever one may think of Lloyd Webber’s music, these are provocative exemplars of what has been called ‘intermusical system reference’. Here, in this case study, I propose a new category for evaluation, which I call ‘uncritical musical metareference’, or even ‘destructive homage’.

A late nineteenth-century renaissance in French organ building partitioned organist, organ, and audience while expanding the instrument’s size and adding "swell" boxes shuttering pipes from public view. In theater, concert, and church organs, the organist is hidden behind the console or is seated in an adjoining chamber, under the floor, or high in a loft. Cary Howie’s book, "Claustrophilia" (2007), examines how hermetic cloisters might be understood as erotic spaces in medieval literature and practice. In this paper, I argue that the enclosure of the organ, along with its promise of campy power, made it attractive to gay men in the 20th century, inscribing it as an extension of the closet. According to Cameron Carpenter, "most American organists are gay or at least […] questioning," while Virgil Fox complained that organists have historically been "hiding behind the woodwork." Popular French literary depictions of the organ, notably Leroux’s "Le Fantôme de l’Opéra" (1910) and Verne’s "Vingt mille lieues sous les mers" (1870), portray it as an expressive mode of repressed, reclusive villains. Rops’s etching, "L’Organiste du Diable" (1886), shows a nude woman playing an organ bedecked with penises propped against each other in a homoerotic configuration, while the film adaptation of Jean-Claude Forest’s "Barberella" (1964), introduces the "Excessive Machine," an organ-like musical orgasmatron that houses victims in its bellows, dousing them with lethal sexual energy. These texts and images indicate toward a French-influenced rendering of the organ in the 20th century that registered it as an enclosure for queer mechanisms and episodes.

The use of music in melodrama to underscore the drama and heighten the emotional response of audience members was a brilliant theatrical innovation, but when good melodrama is interrupted by some horribly contrived musical interjection, the magic of suspended disbelief is completely lost for me.  My efforts to appreciate ‘The Musical’ aesthetically have resulted in mere tolerance at best, gag reflex at worst.  I humbly admit that I was so bored with West-Side Story that I fell asleep watching it.  As a theatre historian, therefore, I am a perfect heretic.  How then, was I so mesmerized by Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Phantom of the Opera?  What characteristics set it apart that appealed to me so much that I was nothing less than riveted?  Considering its effect on me, it is no surprise that theatre-going populations who are not quite as openly blasphemous as I am, have made it the number one financial theatrical musical success of all time, bar none.  Phantom participates with a number of contemporary musicals that redefined Broadway and set new standards for revenue maximums, as well as for production expenditures.  Nevertheless, Phantom stands alone as the number one theatrical success of all time.  The success of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Phantom of the Opera owes to an innovative integration of opera, rock, narrative and melodramatic conventions, the most important of which is the psychological appeal of an iconic gothic anti-hero in a mask.

This is a kind of ghost story, tracing the spectre of a familiar – perhaps too familiar – modern myth through the echoing architecture of an idea. The story begins in 1910, a year in which three things happened that might be seen as establishing the critical coordinates for this paper. Irving Babbitt published The New Laokoön: An Essay on the Confusion of the Arts, Gaston Leroux published Le Fantôme de l'Opéra, and – according to Virginia Woolf's famous analysis – 'human character changed'. In other words, the earliest of several important and influential 20 th century polemics against the concept of the gesamtkunstwerk or 'total work of art' coincided with one possible start date ('since we must be arbitrary') for European cultural Modernism and the appearance of one of the most powerful gothic mythologies of the last century. Babbitt's book was written in reaction to the particular kind of romanticism embodied, not unambiguously, in the ideal of...

Dario Argento is the best-known living Italian horror director, but despite this his career is perceived to be at an all-time low. I propose that the nadir of Argento’s filmography coincides, in part, with his embrace of the gothic adaptation and that at least two of his late films, The Phantom of the Opera (1998) and Dracula 3D (2012), are born out of the tensions between his desire to achieve auteur status by choosing respectable and literary sources as his primary material and the bloody and excessive nature of the product that he has come to be known for. My contention is that to understand the role that these films play within the director’s oeuvre, as well as their negative reception among critics, it is crucial to consider how they negotiate the dichotomy between the positive critical discourse currently surrounding gothic cinema and the negative one applied to visceral horror.

This paper weaves together Edgar Degas's images of women and social class with "The Phantom of the Opera," another contemporaneous cultural text.  It analyzes the ease of mobility within the class structure and tensions between aristocracy and working class, and urban and rural, and their respective impact on both types of works.

This publication features several essays spanning the gamut of musical styles and eras, from the Baroque, Classical, Romantic and Impressionist periods to the modern musicals of the West End and Broadway.  Each essay concentrates on a famous composer and a landmark composition or an important topic particular to each era.

Dr. Christine Morton raises an interesting question in
her book, Birth Ambassadors (Morton & Clift, 2014).
Based on the work of Penny Simkin, she asks doula
trainees to think about what kind of advocate they are:
baby, woman, or birth. The question is more challenging
than it might at first appear. As Simkin and Morton
note, the kind of advocate you are can influence the kind
of care you provide.

Commissioned by the Opéra de Paris and the Centre Pompidou-Metz, this work by Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, "Marienbad électrique", conceived for the exhibition “Opera Monde. La quête d’un art total” (World Opera. The quest for a total art form), can be seen until 31st December 2019 in the auditorium of the Palais Garnier. Through a holographic apparition taking the form of the celebrated actor and militant feminist Delphine Seyrig, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster explores the boundaries between fiction and reality. Tristan Bera now looks back over the career of Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster and scrutinises this atypical work. The text in French is followed by its translation into English.
see https://www.operadeparis.fr/en/magazine/marienbad-electrique-1