The Phantom of the Opera
It is music that raises the curtain with a single descending chromatic line on the organ, layering 19th-century grand opera and a 1980s rock beat within the walls of one theater.
At a glance 🔭💭
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The creators ⏳🌊
- ComposerAndrew Lloyd Webber
Set the work in motion with a proposal of his own and wrote the entire score, blending operatic forms with the sound of rock.
- LyricsCharles Hart
Extensively rewrote Richard Stilgoe's early lyrics and wrote new words for songs such as "Think of Me."
- DirectorHarold Prince
Directed the London and Broadway premieres, creating the stage language of the chandelier and underground-lake scenes.
- ProducerCameron Mackintosh
Co-produced the show at Lloyd Webber's invitation, and is also the producer of "Miss Saigon."
- LeadMichael Crawford
As the original Phantom, he won the Olivier Award and the Tony Award for best actor in a musical.
- LeadSarah Brightman
As the original Christine, she recorded both the title-song single and the original cast album.
I. A stage that began with a single secondhand book
(Proposal) In 1984 Andrew Lloyd Webber went to Cameron Mackintosh, the producer with whom he had made “Cats,” and proposed a new musical. What he wanted was a romantic, tragic story, and for his material he reached for Gaston Leroux's novel “The Phantom of the Opera.” The two rewatched the 1925 film starring Lon Chaney and the 1943 version starring Claude Rains, but they could see no way to carry the screen story onto the stage. The breakthrough came from a secondhand copy of the original novel that Lloyd Webber had tracked down. He said he had set out to write a big romantic story. (Composer) Lloyd Webber had already become the West End's signature composer with “Jesus Christ Superstar,” “Evita” and “Cats.” His method was to blend the sound of rock records, the forms of opera and the melodies of popular song on a single stage. A story set in an opera house was a perfect fit for those inclinations. (Creative team) Harold Prince directed, Maria Björnson designed the sets and costumes, and Gillian Lynne choreographed. Richard Stilgoe wrote the lyrics first, and the young lyricist Charles Hart rewrote much of them. Mackintosh was also the producer of “Miss Saigon,” covered earlier in this series. Two of the 1980s megamusicals, in other words, came from the same producer's hands. (Premiere) The show opened on October 9, 1986, at Her Majesty's Theatre in London, starring Michael Crawford, Sarah Brightman and Steve Barton. That year it won the Olivier Award for best new musical, and in 1988 it transferred to Broadway's Majestic Theatre with the same leads and won the Tony Award for best musical. The Broadway run closed on April 16, 2023, after 13,981 performances, and it remains the longest-running show in Broadway history.
II. The music box at the auction
(Auction) As the curtain rises, a sale of props is under way in the ruined Paris Opera house. Raoul, now an old man, buys a worn music box topped with a monkey figure, and the music box plays a brief melody. That melody will be heard again in Act 2, so the story begins with a clue to its ending already in hand. (Overture) The next lot is a shattered chandelier. The moment its cover is pulled away and its lights flare on, the organ unleashes a violent figure descending by half steps, and the chandelier rises slowly over the audience. With that sound, the stage rewinds time to the theater's heyday. The organ is the instrument of cathedral and theater alike, and in this work it becomes the voice of a man hidden underground. (Pastiche) On the revived stage, rehearsals for the grand opera “Hannibal” are in full swing. Lloyd Webber wrote this opera within the play in the grand, ornate manner of 19th-century French grand opera. This knack for borrowing another's style and imitating it convincingly serves throughout the work as a device that vouches for the period. (Debut) When the prima donna Carlotta storms off the stage, angered by an accident, the chorus girl Christine Daaé is sent on in her place. “Think of Me” is a song that begins shyly and gradually blossoms. At the end she unfurls her virtuosity alone, unaccompanied, drawing a note out long and high, and Raoul, in the audience, recognizes her as his childhood friend. (Angel) After the performance, Christine confides to her friend Meg that an unseen teacher has been instructing her. It is, she says, the Angel of Music her late father promised to send her. The clear, mysterious melody of “Angel of Music” sounds not yet like a threat but like consolation. Yet to an audience that knows who this angel is, that very innocence sounds unsettling.
Bursting out the moment the auction-house chandelier lights up, it is the piece that returns the ruined theater to its glory days.
- The short opening figure, in which the organ slides down by half steps, is the leitmotif (a recurring melody tied to a particular character or idea) that points to the Phantom. From then on, the figure returns every time he appears.
- Beneath the organ lie synthesizers and a heavy bass, so the instruments of a 19th-century opera house and the sound of 1980s rock ring out together from the very start.
- Onstage, the chandelier rises over the audience to this music. The same chandelier falls at the end of Act 1, so the overture lays down the ending in advance.
- In the 2004 film, the black-and-white auction scene regains its color along with this music, becoming the moment the theater comes back to life.
The song in which the chorus girl Christine first takes a leading role in place of the prima donna, announcing that the story begins with her voice.
- Carlotta first sings it at rehearsal before Christine takes it over. Hearing the same song in two singers' voices lays bare the difference between them.
- At the end the accompaniment stops and the soloist launches into a display of virtuosity alone, the cadenza (an ornamental passage in which the soloist shows off). It lets us hear the very moment an unknown singer becomes a star.
- Raoul, in the audience, breaks in on the same melody and recognizes her. Within a single song, one corner of the love triangle makes its entrance.
- It is said to be the song for which Charles Hart wrote the lyrics himself from the start. Onstage it was sung by Sarah Brightman, on film by Emmy Rossum.
III. Beyond the mirror, the underground lake
(Reunion) Raoul visits Christine's dressing room and recalls fetching her scarf from the sea when they were children by the shore, and the two laugh as they call out the names of characters from an old fairy tale. The scene is brief, but this simple song places Raoul firmly in the sunlit world. (Mirror) After Raoul leaves, a voice is heard from beyond the dressing-room wall. Tinged with jealousy, it soon softens, and a masked man appears on the far side of the mirror. As if spellbound, Christine walks into the glass. (Descent) The ensuing “The Phantom of the Opera” turns the journey down into the theater's depths into music itself. The overture's chromatic descending figure returns intact, and over it drums and synthesizers rumble low. This is the moment the pulse of 1980s rock enters a 19th-century opera house. The song builds tension by modulating upward again and again, and at the end Christine sends out a wordless sound that climbs endlessly higher. The little boat crosses the underground lake and reaches the Phantom's lair. (Seduction) In his lair the Phantom sings “The Music of the Night.” It is neither threat nor command but a slow, low persuasion to journey with him into a world of darkness and sensation. He believes he was the first to recognize Christine's voice, and that her voice will complete his music. As the confession of a man who would be loved for his music instead of his hideous face, this song explains the Phantom more deeply than any other. (Mask) The next day, as he sits at the organ, Christine pulls off his mask out of curiosity. The Phantom's rage and shame erupt at once, and the rapturous melody of a moment before is violently cut off. Here it becomes clear that music was the mask that hid him.
The title song, which turns Christine's journey through the mirror and across the underground lake into music itself.
- The overture's chromatic descending figure returns intact, while beneath it drums and synthesizers drive a steady beat. It is the song in which the work's rock coloring runs deepest.
- The song builds tension through modulation, raising the key (the home pitch of a song) again and again as it sinks ever deeper. There is something uncanny in the crossing: the notes climb while the characters descend underground.
- At the end Christine rises higher and higher on pure sound, without words, reaching a high E (E6), her highest note in the entire show.
- In January 1986, nine months before the premiere, it came out first as a single by Sarah Brightman and Steve Harley, climbing to No. 7 on the UK singles chart. Mike Batt arranged and produced it.
The song the Phantom sings in his underground lair as he shows Christine his world, revealing him as a man who longs to be loved for his music.
- Unlike the preceding title song, its beat is slow and its sound low, so it comes across more as a whisper than a command. This is where the threatening voice turns into a persuading one.
- Rather than belting out high notes, it often floats them up softly. With these gentle high notes Michael Crawford won the Olivier Award and the Tony Award for best actor in a musical.
- Crawford's single reached No. 7 on the UK chart in 1987, and in 1993 a duet recording by Barbra Streisand and Crawford also appeared.
- Sarah Brightman revealed at a 1997 concert that this melody was first written as a separate song with different lyrics.
IV. A promise on the roof, a falling chandelier
(Letters) Above ground, letters from the Phantom rain down on the theater managers, Carlotta and Raoul. In “Notes” and “Prima Donna,” several characters sing their own grievances and calculations at the same time, an operatic ensemble in which many voices say different things yet lock into a single harmony. The managers end up giving Carlotta the lead again. (Il Muto) “Il Muto,” staged that night, is a play within the play that imitates Mozartean comic opera. While light, playful music flows, the Phantom's warning comes true. Carlotta's voice cracks, and backstage a stagehand loses his life. The music of comedy and real terror overlap in a single scene. (Confession) Christine and Raoul take refuge on the theater roof. “All I Ask of You” is a duet in which the two offer each other small, certain promises. At first they sing by turns, one at a time, until at the end their two voices merge into one. If the Phantom's music from below was the kind that overwhelms and draws you in, this song is the kind that reassures and holds you fast. (Eavesdropping) On the rooftop after the two have gone, the Phantom, who has heard everything from behind a statue, reveals himself. Alone, he sings again the very melody the lovers have just sung. The same tune now returns as the wound of a man betrayed. A single melody reverses its meaning depending on who sings it. (Fall) Act 1 ends as that fury pours down on the theater. The chandelier that rose during the overture now plunges toward the audience. Because the prologue's auction and the end of Act 1 are bound together by a single prop, the audience realizes where the story had been heading from the very beginning.
The love duet Raoul and Christine share on the rooftop; soon it is sung again by the Phantom, and its meaning is turned inside out.
- The two trade lines back and forth until, at the end, they overlap in harmony. Their reassuring exchange is expressed through the very form of the song.
- After the lovers leave, the Phantom sings the same melody alone. It is a fine example of a reprise (the return of a song heard earlier), in which one tune turns from a song of promise into a song of betrayal.
- The melody comes back again at the end of “The Point of No Return” in Act II and in the final scene. Whose love song this really is becomes the question of the whole story.
- In 1986 it was also released as a duet single by Cliff Richard and Sarah Brightman, climbing high in the British charts.
V. The masquerade and the graveyard
(Masquerade) Six months later, Act II opens with the opera house’s New Year’s masked ball. “Masquerade” is a chorus in which countless masks and costumes fill the grand staircase. The very melody once played by the music box at the auction swells here into a full chorus. It is a glittering scene, yet the premise of a festival where everyone laughs with a hidden face mirrors the plight of the masked protagonist. (The Phantom appears) As the dancing reaches its height, the Phantom appears at the top of the stairs in the costume of the Red Death. He holds out the score of his own opera, “Don Juan Triumphant,” and demands that Christine be cast in the lead. Now he means to rule the theater not through letters but through a work of art. (Rehearsal) In the rehearsal that follows, the tenor Piangi cannot manage the Phantom’s strange melody. Then the piano sounds by itself and sets the pitch right. Unlike the familiar styles of “Hannibal” and “Il Muto,” the Phantom’s music is woven of uneasy, dislocated sounds that even the singers within the play cannot follow. (Longing) Christine goes alone to her father’s grave. In “Wishing You Were Somehow Here Again,” she begs her father to come back even as she knows she must now let him go. A solo held aloft by long lines in the strings, it is a rare moment in the work when Christine sings only her own heart, led by no one. (Temptation returns) But from behind the gravestone the angel’s voice calls her once more. In “Wandering Child,” the Phantom speaks to her from her father’s place, until Raoul, who has followed her, breaks the spell. In this scene where three voices tangle, the struggle between the two worlds that hold Christine between them meets head-on for the first time.
The chorus of the New Year’s masked ball that opens Act II, in which the music-box melody of the prologue swells into a song for the whole theater.
- The short melody played by the music box at the auction is the central tune of this number. It is fascinating to hear the sound of a tiny box grow into a chorus of dozens.
- It is an ensemble (a number sung by many voices together) in which several groups sing different words before converging into one, so the giddy energy of the masked crowd comes through in sound.
- The premise of a festival where every face is hidden mirrors, like a looking glass, the plight of the masked protagonist. Into the very center of it walks the Phantom, costumed as the Red Death.
- The work left behind by lyricist Alan Jay Lerner, who withdrew midway, is said to have gone mostly into this number, but his name does not appear in the credits.
Sung by Christine alone at her father’s grave, it is a rare moment when she speaks her own heart, led by no one.
- A soprano solo held aloft by long lines in the strings. With the lavish machinery of other scenes stripped away, the ear gathers around a single voice.
- The song moves from the wish that he would come back to the resolve to let him go at last. As the melody gradually climbs, the feeling travels in that same direction.
- The Phantom’s “Wandering Child” follows immediately. The two songs form a pair, in that the Phantom slips into the very gap opened by Christine’s longing for her father.
- In 1987 it was released as a double A-side single with Crawford’s “The Music of the Night,” with Brightman singing this song.
VI. The stage of no return
(The trap) Raoul and the managers decide to use the premiere of “Don Juan Triumphant” as a snare to catch the Phantom, reckoning that he will surely come to see his own work performed. Christine dreads being the bait but takes the stage in the end. (The play within the play) When the curtain finally rises on the Phantom’s opera, it sounds nothing like the two operas-within-the-play heard earlier. Grating dissonances and a dark, low chorus fill the stage. Lloyd Webber portrays the Phantom as a composer ahead of his time, deliberately setting his music at odds with the tastes of the theater of his day. (No return) In “The Point of No Return,” the singer in the role of Don Juan is, before anyone notices, no longer Piangi but the Phantom himself, wrapped in a cloak. The slow, sultry rhythm sounds like a tango, and the two trade desire and resolve through the mouths of the characters they play. It is the moment when the line between performance and real confession dissolves, and Christine, mid-song, realizes who her partner is. (Quotation) At the end of the number the Phantom borrows the love melody Raoul and Christine shared on the rooftop, turning another man’s promise into his own confession. Because the audience remembers whose melody it once was, the quotation sounds as painful as it is beautiful. (Collapse) In the chaos that follows, the performance falls apart, and the Phantom carries Christine down into the depths once more. If the descent of Act I was a journey of curiosity and rapture, the descent of Act II is the flight of a hunted man. By sending them down the same path twice, the work shows how far the present has come from the beginning.
A duet sung on the stage of the Phantom’s own opera, where he himself becomes Don Juan opposite Christine, and the line between performance and real confession collapses.
- The slow, sultry beat sounds like a tango, creating a mood far more sensual and dangerous than the songs before it.
- The surrounding music of “Don Juan Triumphant” makes heavy use of dissonance (tense harmonies that seem to clash), so that it sounds like music ahead of its time that the singers in the play cannot follow.
- Mid-song, Christine realizes her partner is not Piangi but the Phantom. The gap between the audience knowing first and her knowing later is what creates the tension.
- At the end, the Phantom borrows the rooftop lovers’ melody. This moment, when a leitmotif changes owners, is one of the most discussed passages in the work.
VII. The sound the music box left behind
(The last refuge) The final scene returns to the lair on the underground lake. Raoul follows, and the three stand before a choice none can escape. Rather than offering a new melody, the music here breaks the motifs heard earlier into fragments and sets them against one another. The Phantom’s chromatic descent, the angel’s song and the love duet cut in on one another in short, broken phrases. It is as if every feeling the characters have clung to pours out in one place. (Stillness) What is chosen will not be revealed here. Only this: at the decisive moment, the music holds its breath rather than bursting forth. Where the orchestra withdraws, the singing sinks almost to speech, and that hush lingers longer than any great chord. Many in the audience remember this passage as the quietest and most powerful moment in the work. (The music box) The music-box melody first heard at the auction returns at the story’s close. The tune that had swelled into the dazzling chorus of the masquerade shrinks back to the sound of a small wind-up box, and the story comes back to where it began. The music box becomes an object that shows how long the music a person leaves behind can endure. (The film) In 2004, director Joel Schumacher co-wrote the screenplay with Lloyd Webber and brought the work to the screen. Gerard Butler played the Phantom, Emmy Rossum Christine, and Patrick Wilson Raoul. The film opens with a black-and-white auction scene that bursts back into color with the overture, and a newly written song, “Learn to Be Lonely,” plays over the end credits. The song was nominated for both the Academy Award and the Golden Globe for best original song. (Legacy) The stage version endures as a work that hangs a single chromatic descent and a single music-box melody at its beginning and end, and fills the space between with opera from three eras and rock. Together with “Miss Saigon” (1989), another mega-musical of the era, it stands for the period when British musicals of the 1980s widened their reach across the world’s stages.
Lesser-known stories
Someone had made a musical of the same novel before Lloyd Webber. Playwright Ken Hill revised a version he had first staged in 1976 and presented it in 1984 in Newcastle and at the Theatre Royal Stratford East in London. Instead of writing new songs, this version set English lyrics to real operatic arias by Gounod, Offenbach, Verdi, Mozart and others. Records show that Lloyd Webber and Mackintosh saw this production and sounded Hill out about a collaboration before dropping the idea, but the story is rarely mentioned, overshadowed by the overwhelming success that followed. Hill’s version is still performed today as a separate work. The lyrics took a long, winding road to completion. Lloyd Webber first asked Jim Steinman to write them, but he declined because of his work on a Bonnie Tyler album. Alan Jay Lerner, lyricist of “My Fair Lady,” came aboard but withdrew with a grave illness; the work he left went mostly into “Masquerade,” though his name was never credited. In the end, the lyrics were finished by Charles Hart extensively rewriting Richard Stilgoe’s first draft. When Act I was given a trial performance in 1985 at Sydmonton Court, Lloyd Webber’s country house, the Phantom was played by Colm Wilkinson. At that stage the Phantom wore a mask covering his entire face; the half mask that has since become iconic, along with the unmasking scene, was added later through Maria Björnson’s designs. Steve Harley, who sang the Phantom on the title-song single, was actually cast in the role and rehearsed for five months. But as the work drifted from rock musical toward opera, the role passed to Michael Crawford. The other numbers Harley recorded, including “The Music of the Night,” remain unreleased.
Glossary 📚🔎
Leitmotif
(The word) Leitmotif comes from the German Leitmotiv, meaning a leading (leit) motive (Motiv). The Korean term yudodonggi ('guiding motive') likewise means a short musical fragment that leads the story along. (In film·musical-theater music) A short melody that recurs whenever a particular character, object or emotion appears. After hearing it a few times, the audience knows whose story it is from the melody alone. In “The Phantom of the Opera,” a figure in which the organ descends by semitones points to the Phantom. It is the same principle as in a video game, where the same music always plays just before the boss appears, until that music alone is enough to make your palms sweat.
Chromatic scale
(The word) A semitone (半音) is the smallest distance between notes — the step between two adjacent keys on a piano. The chromatic scale is a ladder of notes that climbs through every semitone in turn, skipping none. (In film·musical-theater music) Unlike an ordinary scale, which moves in spaced steps like do-re-mi, it moves densely, as if sliding, and is often used to create an uneasy or eerie feeling. The passages in the overture and title song of “The Phantom of the Opera” where the organ descends by semitones are the classic example. If an ordinary scale is like striding down a staircase one step at a time, the chromatic scale feels closer to whooshing down a slide.
Modulation
(The word) Jeonjo (轉調) means to turn (轉) the key (調). A key is the system made up of the central reference note of a song and the notes surrounding it. (In film·musical-theater music) A technique of shifting the reference note mid-song so that the same melody is sung from a higher or lower place. Raising it one step at a time, in particular, steadily piles up the listener’s tension and excitement. The title song, “The Phantom of the Opera,” builds this way. In karaoke, when the key suddenly jumps up a notch on the last chorus and the whole room comes alive — that is modulation. (Elsewhere) In medicine and everyday speech, jeonjo (前兆) means an omen, a sign before something happens — a different word written with different Hanja.
Cadenza
(The word) The Italian cadenza comes from the Latin cadere, meaning to fall or to come to a close. The name arose because it was originally an ornament attached to the cadence just before a piece ends. (In film·musical-theater music) A passage in which the accompaniment pauses while a soloist or singer displays dazzling virtuosity alone. The moment at the end of “Think of Me” when Christine, alone, rolls her voice through runs and lifts it high is just such a passage, letting us hear an unknown singer become a star. It is much like the moment in a talent show when the backing track cuts out and someone holds a long high note alone to a burst of applause.
Pastiche
(The word) The French pastiche comes from the Italian pasticcio, a pie made by mixing many ingredients. Its meaning widened to a work made by blending the hands of several people or by imitating another’s style. (In film·musical-theater music) Newly written music that deliberately imitates the style of a particular era or composer. It is not copying but borrowing a feel to create something new. In “The Phantom of the Opera,” the operas-within-the-play “Hannibal” and “Il Muto” are pastiches of nineteenth-century French grand opera and Mozartean comic opera, respectively. It is like painting your own room in art class with Van Gogh’s brushstrokes. (Elsewhere) In literature it refers to writing that imitates a particular author’s style; in cooking, to a pie of layered ingredients.
Reprise
(Word origin) The English word reprise comes from the French reprendre, meaning "to take up again." (In film and musical theater scores) A song heard earlier is sung again at a different point in the drama. Even the same melody can take on an entirely different meaning when the singer and the situation change. When the Phantom sings "All I Ask of You" alone after the lovers have sung it together, a promise of love turns into the pain of betrayal. It is like a fight song you belted out with friends, which sounds like a completely different song when you sing it quietly after losing the game.
Dissonance
(Word origin) The Korean bulhyeophwaeum (不協和音, 'non-harmonizing sound') means a sound in which notes that do not (不) harmonize (協和) with one another ring out together. (In film and musical theater scores) A chord whose simultaneous notes seem to clash, sounding tense and uncomfortable. Used well, it creates unease, dread and strangeness. The Phantom's opera "Don Juan Triumphant" uses such chords heavily, so that it sounds like alien music the singers within the story cannot follow. Press two adjacent keys on a piano at the same time and you get a sound that makes you wince — that is the simplest dissonance. (Elsewhere) In everyday speech, it is used figuratively for conflict and friction between people or groups.