is in progress on the stage.
It’s so impressive visually (as is, indeed, the rest of the show, with its underground lakes of dry ice, its disappearing mirror walls, its tilting subterranean stairways), you can’t possibly concentrate on the fairly intricate—and modestly intelligent—musical development.
I’ve been listening to the tapes, though, and I’ve ascertained that there really is something (if not that much) going on.
I read Gaston Leroux’s novel a couple of months back, before I saw the show. John Del Gaizo was a loader and workman at the Beacon Theater, which they revamped for the opening-night cast party. John’s stories from that evening are a tale in themselves! The novel is a hopelessly clunky mess. Leroux probably wrote it for three-part serialization in some French monthly pulp—likely without reading the earlier installments when working on the latter ones.
In the book, there’re really three phantoms (one of which, the mysterious rat-catcher in the theater cellar, was clearly going to get some sort of story to himself, before he got abandoned as Leroux came closer to the end), and heaven alone knows what Leroux thought the ending was going to be when he began—clearly he didn’t want to close off any possibilities! I’m sure when he started out, the mysterious Turk who is always wandering around back stage (and who turns out, quite unexpectedly, to be a detective, who takes the callow young hero, Raoul, under his wing and proceeds to solve the mystery) was going to turn into the first Phantom. But G.L. probably decided that was too obvious. Eric (the Phantom we all know and love) must have more professions (engineer, architect, composer, singing teacher, magician, sideshow manager, assassin, oriental torturer, horse trainer …) than any other character ever to make it through a penny-dreadful. All of which professions he’s superb at—of course.
What is fascinating however: the book symbolizes beautifully the uncomfortable psychological underside of the transformation of the early 19th century, perpetually lit-up romantic theater of light into the late romantic, Wagnerian theater of darkness. The whole creaky melodrama is a black and reactionary allegory of the transformation that accompanies it, not only in the performing arts, but in all the rest as well, between early “performer-as-craftsman,” socially only a little higher than a prostitute, and “performer-as-artist” (truly concerned about the work, obsessive over study and the spiritual center of the music, possessed by the artist and his mission) that accompanied the theatrical transformation Bayreuth brought about in the general art world between 1876 and the death of Edward VII in 1910 (the year of The Phantom’s first book publication). For most of the original story, the Phantom is not real. He is only in Christine’s mind. But at the same time he is her singing teacher and the composer of the new and supremely difficult opera that all the traditional singers find nearly impossible to learn their parts in …
It really is a straight portrayal of the Wagner mythos.
The chandelier the Phantom brings crashing down mid-story on the audience, murdering one unfortunate woman in the stalls, is doubtless an old-fashioned gas or candle-lit affair, which burned under the ceiling of the theater throughout the performance. The new one that goes up to replace it (and which the new theater managers are so proud of) is certainly an electric one, which is extinguished during performances—rendering the theater dark (and modern!), à la Bayreuth, but which—problematically and allegorically—allows the Phantom an even easier time in wreaking his murderous mischief on all and sundry.
Note that more than half the Phantom’s actual energy is directed toward the two new Paris Opera managers on “how his theater is to be run” and securing his 20-thousand-francs-per-quarter salary! I mean, how Wagnerian could you get? The Webber show, incidentally, takes it out of the Paris Opera and replaces it in an imaginary theater called The Opéra Populaire.
And—with its “music of the night” theme running through—the B’way show (at any rate) makes a nice, but probably unconscious, nod to Novalis, who supplied both Wagner (Tristan, Act II) and all after him with the dark metaphors in which such tales of shadowy obsession traditionally are couched. (Hymnen an die Nacht.)
It occurs to me that the original mythologic/historic basis for The Phantom of the Opera is quite probably the death of Von Carolsfeld, Wagner’s first, twenty-five-year-old Tristan. The Munich Opera had already made Tristan und Isolde a thing of gossip, well before its first performance, by abandoning it after an untoward fifty-odd rehearsals, even after the music had already been published and various children, such as Nietzsche [fifteen at the time] and King Ludwig [Prince back then], were playing it on their pianos and waiting on pins and needles for an actual performance.
Six weeks after the actual, first, 1866, royal command performance of the legendarily “unperformable” opera, Von Carolsfeld, devoted to Wagner, died, presumably of typhus, the fever exacerbated during the opera’s brief, royal run (that young King Ludwig had finally commanded in the notoriously cold and draughty wings, where, dripping with sweat after the exertions of Act II, Von Carolsfeld had to lie in the cold (though it was June), waiting for the even more taxing demands of Act III. Von Carolsfeld (Ludwig Schnorr) died raving, believing he was Tristan and calling for Wagner to heal him. (The rather horrid symptoms of his very unpleasant death make it sound more like a case of galloping syphilis. And Wagner and Cosima were both distraught.) But theater gossip was that there’d been some sexual relationship between the rather heavy, hard-working young tenor (probably not true, since Von Carolsfeld’s wife, Malvina, who played Isolde in the same production, was equally devoted to Wagner. But that just made it stranger). One of the reasons for the sexual rumor, however, was that before general rehearsals had begun, the difficulty of the part had obliged Wagner to spend some weeks closeted alone with the young man (whose voice was wonderful and whose enthusiasm was boundless—but whose sight-reading left something to be desired), working with him on the difficult chromaticisms of the Herculeanly taxing part—a most unusual practice that only added to the mythos when, a month and a half later, he died so unexpectedly and unpleasantly.
But, displaced onto a woman, this is probably the Ur-version behind both The Phantom and its Ur-version, George du Maurier’s melodrama Trilby (1894).
But little or none of that makes it into the Broadway show.
At any rate, when the music of the night finally got over with, and the lovers were safely off together, and the Phantom had done his last and poignant disappearing act, and we were squeezing up the crowded theater aisle, over the red carpet and between the maroon seats, my daughter (from the height of her new, week-old fifteen years of maturity) told me: “You know, I think Raoul was … well, just a pain. She should have gone off with the Phantom.”
I laughed. “Well, that’s what they wanted you to feel. So I guess the show was a success …?”
“It was okay,” she allowed, as the first cool air from outside finally reached us over the crowd ahead, squeezing before us, around us, into the lobby. “It was sort of silly, though. The story, I mean … I mean, every time stupid, dumb Raoul came on, I just wanted to scream!”
Then there was only squeezing; and no more talking for a while. But as we hurried up 44th Street toward Eighth Avenue, looking for a midnight cab, I wondered how to explain to Iva that, in historical/allegorical terms, Christine really had gone off with the dangerous, obsessive Phantom, and not with shallow, reactionary Raoul after all. If you take the Phantom as a demonized symbol for the Wagnerian concept of the artist, fighting for possession of Christine’s soul, then, really, in terms of modernist history, things had worked out exactly as Iva’d wished. And the single line of show music, which, that night, was all I’d managed to retain once the curtain had come down, kept playing through my mind, with all its Oedipal edge a-glitter, as Iva and I moved past the theater posters in their glass frames along the wall of the Milford Plaza; “He’s here, the Phantom
