POTO and real opera

[igenlode]

"What Do We Mean by Opera, Anyway?"

A very interesting -- and readable -- article from the Journal of Popular Music Studies, bringing a positive critical approach to Lloyd Webber's work; the suggestion of "Think of Me" as being closely aligned to Balfe's I Dreamt I Dwelt in Marble Halls, for example, reminding us that 19th-century opera did indeed contain such catchy folksong-style 'lollipops' as well as the grand arias designed to show off technique, as sung by Carlotta.

As often in Lloyd Webber's economically designed musicals, the “aria,” or song, does a good deal of dramatic work, effectively introducing Christine, setting up her rivalry with Carlotta, and establishing her relationship with Raoul de Chagny, who joins in singing to the same melody from his box.

Naturally I'm also entertained by the conclusion that "the sterile modernism of [Don Juan Triumphant is] proof that Christine does not belong with the Phantom" ;-p

Comments

[erimia]

This was an insightful article. I think the imaginary operas are some of the most fascinating parts of the musical, and I love seeing fic authors do something interesting with them. I even want to check out The Stone Guest now, since the music in the Phantom's opera is my favorite in POTO, precisely because it sounded so unusual in comparison with the rest of the musical. I'm not, however, a huge fan of the “proof that Christine does not belong with the Phantom" argument as presented in this article: it gets too close to the "Christine is too drab and ordinary to appreciate Phantom's artistic talent" interpretation, to say nothing about “The resolution of the story which joins her [Christine] to Raoul is a vote not just for social convention but for artistic conservatism” (classic "Raoul as a symbol of choosing social convention" too).

[igenlode]

I have to admit that while of course I know Sir Arthur Sullivan (of Gilbert & Sullivan fame) I had never heard of Henry Bishop, who was apparently the author of "Home, Sweet Home" and, among many other questionable works, an opera by the name of The Maniac ;-p

I suspect that Sondheim fares better with the critics than Lloyd Webber because his music is a lot less 'popular'; rather than pandering to the proverbial audience desire for 'tunes you can whistle', he produces the occasional hit melody amid a lot of modernistic and fairly 'difficult' stuff of the type that is academically fashionable.
Lloyd Webber is fully capable of writing a complex vocal ensemble, and in fact he is much more adventurous in that sphere than almost any composer of musicals; see 'Prima Donna' in POTO, or the quartet before Christine's performance in "Love Never Dies". But he has the poor taste to do so with memorable melodies, which have been out of fashion in music with any pretensions to be taken seriously since before the Second World War.

(One of the results of which was the total sundering of 'popular' music from 'classical' music, since if you write music that nobody wants to listen to then they stop listening to it. Tunes moved from the domain of the opera to the 'operetta' to the 'musical comedy' to the singles chart -- and appear of late to have more or less disappeared from the latter as well, if what I hear on the radio is any guide ;-p)

As the author of the article points out, the issue was one of 'academically trained' composers trying to write 'advanced' operas without knowing anything about the theatre world; implicitly, they were writing to be admired by musicologists rather than to earn a living by entertaining the public. What he calls "critics' opera".

I think the imaginary operas are some of the most fascinating parts of the musical, and I love seeing fic authors do something interesting with them.

Yes, I always appreciate it when people explore what the rest of those operas might actually have been like, in the absence of Phantom-interruptions ;-p

But the larger public for whom The Phantom was designed are less likely to be concerned about such anachronistic stylistic discordance than delighted that something so musically “alien” as Hannibal had seemed should turn out to contain such an enjoyable, accessible “aria.”
I actually suspect that the intention is more to establish Christine as a 'good' singer versus Carlotta as an 'opera singer', and hence to enlist the audience sympathies on Christine's side by giving her more appealing music. We are shown Christine singing "Think of Me" better than Carlotta by showing her singing it in the style of a popular musical rather than in grandiose opera style.

It's an interesting suggestion that 'native' English musicals like "Half a Sixpence", "Me and My Girl", "Oliver!" or "Charlie Girl" were creating a conscious connection to English traditions of popular music, as opposed to Broadway and Tin Pan Alley.

In Leroux's novel, the Phantom—there named Erik—is described as having worked for twenty years on an opera of that name
In fact, I don't think Leroux suggests that Erik's "Don Juan Triumphant" is actually an opera at all, although fan-fiction (probably influenced by Lloyd Webber) likes to represent Christine as performing bits of it during her stay with Erik -- it appears to be a purely instrumental work along the line of "Fingal's Cave" or "Peer Gynt", unlike his Requiem Mass, which we hear him sing, or presumably the Bridal Mass which he mentions having written...

The title "The Stone Guest" sounds familiar, but I think it may just be as the title of the Pushkin poem -- I'm assuming the opera is something along the lines of "Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk", musically speaking. (My mother was a great fan and insisted we went to see it; I hated it :-p The fact that Stalin disliked a piece of music doesn't make it virtuously appealing, any more than the fact that Hitler loved "The Merry Widow" makes the operetta evil kitsch...)

My gut instinct is that Lloyd Webber probably didn't know anything about this particular obscure opera, and that the subject matter was a coincidence (whether Leroux knew anything about it is another matter, although the link between Don Juan Triumphant and the Stone Guest dragging Don Juan to his doom seems a bit tenuous). I imagine he was simply writing pastiche of modernistic whole-tone music in general: "a kind of opera that never was popular, and never will be", but which does score you intellectual points.

I think the point that the article is trying to make about the Phantom and Christine is simply that the Phantom is, musically speaking, up his own fundament; we are all too drab and ordinary to appreciate his 'modern' music, despite the fact that critics have been assuring us for a hundred years that once the public had been properly educated they would be capable of appreciating this new and advanced style. (And it's interesting that, as with "Hannibal" and "Think of Me", when Lloyd Webber wants to make a dramatic/musical effect he then writes a tune within the Phantom's opera: "Point of No Return". Atonal music wouldn't serve there.)

But note that the line about "artistic conservatism" is actually an initial citation from a different analysis; the argument which is developed by the writer of the article from that point is that with the benefit of hindsight we know that this type of operatic modernism would prove to be a sterile dead-end, just like the methods by which the Phantom misguidedly attempts to win Christine. Raoul and Christine speak the same musical language (and, as has been pointed out before, when the Phantom tries to express his own love for her he has to resport to imitating Raoul's spontaneous declaration). The Phantom does not. In fact, although he repeatedly tells everybody how clever he is and how he knows better than anyone else how to run a successful opera house, when he actually gets the chance for complete artistic control he comes up with a production that is likely to be a failure more costly and resounding than anything the management could possibly perpetrate without his 'guidance'.

(As you may have gathered, my musical tastes are pretty lowbrow... despite the fact that I've just spent the last three weeks singing Handel! I do like it better after all that effort; it sounded very alien and arbitrary as an idiom when I was first trying to learn the musical line.)