Enchanted Evenings:The Broadway Musical from 'Show Boat' to Sondheim and Lloyd Webber (82 page)

The lair scene in act I contains other reminiscences of music previously heard and new music that will be reheard in act II. In the former category, the “I remember” motive and “Masquerade” appeared in the Prologue and “Angel of Music” had set up associations between Christine and the Phantom in Christine’s duet with Meg “After the Gala” (scene 2) and in Christine’s duet with the Phantom between the mirrors in “Christine’s Dressing Room” (scene 3). The verse of “Music of the Night” (“I have brought you”), which was anticipated in the “Little Lotte” music, returns in the performance of
Don Juan Triumphant
as the verse for “The Point of No Return.”
⁴⁵
This latter return constitutes another meaningful and powerful connection between the Phantom and Christine that retains these associations when Christine employs its bridge and relates her visit to the Phantom’s lair with Raoul in the final scene of act I, “The Roof of the Opera House” (scene 10). The Phantom himself recalls the music of “Stranger Than You Dreamt It” in the reprise of “Notes” in act II, scene 3, when he instructs the house to “Let my opera begin!” to launch the performance of
Don Juan Triumphant
(at the end of scene 6), and in the final confrontation with Raoul (scene 9).

The last important music introduced in the lair scene (“The Next Morning,” act I, scene 6) is the instrumental music that followed Christine’s unmasking and the Phantom’s violent response. This is the theme that so closely resembles Liù’s theme in
Turandot
(
Example 16.3
). On this first appearance it is heard and not sung. Snelson describes this melody as the “Sympathy” theme and Sternfeld labels it the “Yet in his eyes” phrase (I am tempted to call it Liù’s theme). After the first unmasking in the lair, this
theme will return four times, the last three of which are sung in three different pairs of conversations: Christine to Raoul on the roof (“Yet in his eyes”), Raoul to Christine shortly before
Don Juan Triumphant
(“You said yourself he was nothing but a man”), and Christine to Phantom in his lair during the final scene (“This haunted face holds no horror for me now”). It makes sense why Christine, in describing the Phantom, would sing this music to Raoul and why she would return to this phrase in the final scene. On the other hand, the appropriation of the phrase by Raoul seems gratuitous. Although audiences might understand how he would know this theme, it remains unpersuasive why he would choose to sing it.

The next appropriation by Raoul of the Phantom’s music is fully appropriate. It also demonstrates what is arguably the most ingenious transformation from one theme into another in the work and a transformation that also makes a strong dramatic point. The appropriation occurs in the opening phrase of “All I Ask of You,” the love duet between Raoul and Christine in the final scene of act I, scene 10.
⁴⁶
Raoul’s tune, later sung by Christine as well, bears three subtle but collectively meaningful connections with Phantom’s serenade to Christine in his lair in scene 5. Sung by the Phantom as a solo, “The Music of the Night” possessed serenity and a seductiveness that is never fully recaptured again when it is reprised. Nevertheless, its initial power is sufficient to persuade audiences, and Christine, that the Phantom, indeed for the first time in many adaptations, offers a viable romantic alternative to Raoul. After a gentle sustained D-flat major harmony for four measures, the harmony moves for the first time to a second harmony on the words “Silently the senses” (this is the phrase that borrows directly from Puccini’s
Il Fanciulla
shown in
Example 16.2
). The harmony selected, the subdominant (G-flat major) creates a hymn-like quality that returns on the note of the song (on the word “night”), which can be identified as an enhanced plagal IV-I (or Amen) cadence from G
to D
. Similarly, Raoul’s “All I Ask of You” opens with a tonic pedal, also on D
for more than two full measures before it moves to its second chord, which not coincidentally is also a IV chord on G
(on the words “harm you”).

The connections between “The Music of the Night” and “All I Ask of You” are even more striking and recognizable, as both songs share an
identical
final phrase. Just as the verse of “Music of the Night” (“I have brought you”) returns to introduce the verse of “The Point of No Return” (“You have come here”), the final phrase of “All I Ask of You” shares the same music as the end of “The Music of the Night” (in each case incorporating the words of the song’s title, another fleeting contrafactum). But the openings of each song are also remarkably intertwined, albeit subtly so. Snelson offers
a musical example in which he juxtaposes these openings and explains perceptively that “the opening phrase of one is pretty much a musical anagram of the other, for both melodies encompass the same pitches, A
-D
-E
-F, and both are bounded by their dominant at lower and upper octaves.”
⁴⁷
Both openings also reach these lower and upper dominants the same way, by a two-note descent from F to A-flat (ironically on the syllable “sharpens” in “Music of the Night” and “darkness” in “All I Ask of You”) and an eighth-note ascent, D
-E
-F, that arrives on A
at the end of the phrase in the second measure of each song. In singing this “duet” between the Phantom and Raoul, one could follow the first phrase of either song with the first phrase of the other without any loss of coherence.