Les Misérables

The prologue in the Toulon prison camp, where Valjean and Javert first face off. Here the sound world of the work is set.

• The prisoners' chorus and the Javert·Valjean dialogue run on without pause. The sung-through approach, which carries the whole scene by song alone, is plain from the very first moment.
• An accompaniment figure of surging low brass and strings repeats, painting endless labor in sound. The more the figure recurs, the more a stifling sense of time standing still builds up.
• This choral melody returns in Act 2 as the song of the Paris poor. It is foreshadowing, the music telling us in advance that the prison and the street are no different.
• The 2012 film turns this scene into a spectacle of prisoners hauling a ship into a vast dry dock, enlarging the scale of the labor.

The song in which Valjean, just after receiving the bishop's mercy, breaks down alone and rises again. The melody that becomes the axis of the whole show is heard here for the first time.

• It begins with a wavering recitative (a way of singing as if speaking). Then the melody climbs higher and higher, bursting out at the moment of decision. The change of heart is drawn as a rise in pitch.
• This melody returns almost unchanged later, in Javert's decisive scene. The same tune comes to carry opposite meanings for two characters, the most intricate device in the work.
• Colm Wilkinson, the original Valjean, is credited with defining the song, hurling out rage in a rough chest voice (sound resonated from the chest) before opening into a ringing tone on the high notes.
• In the film, Hugh Jackman sang this number live on set while pacing inside the church. Every breath and sob was kept.

The solo in which Fantine, thrown out of the factory, looks back on shattered dreams. It became the best-known song beyond the show itself.

• The opening flows quietly in the low register, as if in recollection; later the range widens toward a climax mixing resignation and anger. Between a happy past and a present plight, the voice grows steadily rougher.
• In the London premiere it was sung by Patti LuPone. In the 2012 film Anne Hathaway sang it live within a single close-up shot, a performance that won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress.
• On stage the song comes just before Fantine's fall, but the film moves it to after Fantine has been driven onto the streets. The same song shifts its weight, from a recollection to the cry of someone who has hit bottom.
• In 2009 Susan Boyle sang it on a British talent show, bringing it worldwide fame once again.

Beneath the night sky, Javert confesses the order he believes in. The song turns him from a mere villain into a man of conviction.

• A steady, evenly striding beat and a hymnlike, upright melody sound like the very order Javert believes in. That the melody seldom strays far also chimes with the character's nature.
• The song did not exist at the Paris premiere. It was newly written after Roger Allam, the original Javert, pointed out during preparations for the London version that the character needed a song to explain the character's motives.
• The ending was changed for the move to Broadway. Each version closes on its final note in a slightly different way.
• In the film, Russell Crowe sang it while walking along a parapet on the Paris rooftops. Some read Crowe's stance on that height as foreshadowing of a later scene.

The march Enjolras and the students sing as they resolve to rise up. It carries the work's public voice.

• Over the tread of a march, one voice calls out and the crowd takes up the song. The way the song spreads mimics the way a revolution spreads.
• It is built on the Paris version's “À la volonté du peuple,” with lyrics written afresh for the English version.
• This melody returns at the very end of the show. It is worth comparing how the same tune sounds like resolve at first and carries an entirely different weight at the close.
• Beyond the theater, the song has been reported sung at protests in many countries, a rare case of a song from the stage becoming a song of the real public square.

The Act I finale, in which, on the eve of the uprising, every character sings of the same tomorrow from where they stand.

• Valjean, Marius and Cosette, Éponine, Javert, the Thénardiers, and the students all sing their earlier melodies at once. This technique of stacking different songs on top of one another is called a quodlibet (singing songs over one another).
• Each character's melody works like a marker pointing to that person. Tune your ear to one of them and you can follow that character's story alone.
• Voices scattered in many directions gather onto a single note at the end as the curtain falls. It is the moment that binds together everything Act I has scattered.
• It is counted among the work's signature numbers, so much so that it is often lifted out and sung on its own at anniversary concerts and awards shows.

On a rainy night, Éponine confides, alone, her unrequited love for Marius.

• It starts in a low register and soars in the refrain. The rise and fall of pitch traces a heart swinging between imagined happiness and reality.
• According to Mackintosh's recollection, the song was originally Fantine's before it passed to Éponine. The same melody, given to another character, took on another story.
• A fragment of this melody is first heard in Éponine's voice in the Act I finale, “One Day More.” What was slipped in early is unfolded into a full song in Act II.
• Frances Ruffelle sang it at the London premiere, and Samantha Barks in the film. Barks had played the same role on stage before being cast in the film.

On the night of the barricade, Valjean prays for the sleeping Marius's life to be spared.

• In a work full of grand solos, this is a rare song that lowers its voice. Many passages are sung in falsetto, floating the high notes lightly, so it is a song heard for its restraint rather than its power.
• It was newly written for the London version, and the rendition by Colm Wilkinson, the original Valjean, is regarded as definitive. His falsetto became the benchmark for the song.
• According to Kretzmer's recollection, he was struggling with a hymnlike melody that didn't fit the scene when John Caird remarked that it sounded like a prayer, and that became the key. He finished the lyrics only in the small hours, 17 days before opening.
• In the film it was sung by Hugh Jackman. The many Valjeans who have passed through this song on stage are often compared by how they handle the final high note.