My trouble is that I can't see Raoul's parents going for a pragmatic marital alliance into a German family in the aftermath of the war -- there would be far too much ill-feeling. And they can't very well have been married *before* the war, because the young couple aren't old enough; I'm guessing that they're probably still in their first year of marriage at this point. (A lot of movie-fic seems to like to have Raoul six or seven years older than Christine, presumably because Emmy Rossum is so much younger than the rest of the cast... but I really don't see a fourteen-year-old boy having any kind of meaningful friendship with a seven-year-old child. And I'm assuming the reason *why* Lloyd Webber aged them up to fourteen for the scarf incident was in order to succinctly combine the tensions of adolescence with the inseparable childhood summer of the book canon.)
I wanted to have Raoul and Hertha as having known each other in an unromantic context since they were sixteen or seventeen -- i.e. long enough after the Christine incident for it never to have come up in casual conversation -- simply because their families became acquainted. So he has never been in love with her, but he knows and is comfortable with her as a background part of the social scene, and they have a friendly relationship beyond simply having a foreign bride imported for him as breeding-stock. But that really doesn't work with international tensions simmering in between (and they provide a quite unnecessary complication that I don't want to have to work around).
I'm tempted just to say that it's movie-verse, and thanks to the explicit caption dates in the film we know that the Siege of Paris (and probably the rest of the war) never happened in that universe :-P The original stage show was apparently set in the 1860s (unless that's just the reviewer's take on the costumes/musical style rather than explicit dating from the original programme notes)...
She could of course be Austrian -- and/or implicitly Jewish (like the financier Levancourt of In Regret, Always, whom a contemporary readership would have instantly pigeonholed by name and profession as a Jew). Hmm, Jewish ancestry might account for a German-sounding name and make her simultaneously eligible as a pragmatic match but also regarded as 'not one of us'.
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2020-09-27 03:45 pm (UTC)I wanted to have Raoul and Hertha as having known each other in an unromantic context since they were sixteen or seventeen -- i.e. long enough after the Christine incident for it never to have come up in casual conversation -- simply because their families became acquainted. So he has never been in love with her, but he knows and is comfortable with her as a background part of the social scene, and they have a friendly relationship beyond simply having a foreign bride imported for him as breeding-stock. But that really doesn't work with international tensions simmering in between (and they provide a quite unnecessary complication that I don't want to have to work around).
I'm tempted just to say that it's movie-verse, and thanks to the explicit caption dates in the film we know that the Siege of Paris (and probably the rest of the war) never happened in that universe :-P
The original stage show was apparently set in the 1860s (unless that's just the reviewer's take on the costumes/musical style rather than explicit dating from the original programme notes)...
She could of course be Austrian -- and/or implicitly Jewish (like the financier Levancourt of In Regret, Always, whom a contemporary readership would have instantly pigeonholed by name and profession as a Jew). Hmm, Jewish ancestry might account for a German-sounding name and make her simultaneously eligible as a pragmatic match but also regarded as 'not one of us'.