In addition, Lloyd Webber provides a pastiche of various grand opera styles, canvasing Meyerbeer through Mozart and Gilbert and Sullivan. Its lyric melodies and musical sentimentality, its leitmotifs, the lush orchestrations that emphasise strings and woodwinds are essentially borrowed Puccini traits. He is a misunderstood visionary, a modern composer, a stand-in for every neglected, embittered artist accused of alienating the public.Īlthough the music is primarily rock-oriented, Lloyd Webber’s score is explicitly derived from the operatic conventions of Puccini. They provide the content for the fictional operas that are part of the show, including the Phantom’s masterwork, “Don Juan Triumphant.” The musical extracts from “Don Juan Triumphant” use modern harmonies and time signatures, suggesting that the Phantom isn’t just a misfit or a Hunchback that symbolizes every individual unjustly spurned by society. These operatic passages are primarily reserved for subsidiary characters like André and Firmin, Carlotta, and Piangi. While maintaining the form and structure of a musical throughout, Lloyd Webber infuses an operatic style into the score.

Then with the Phantom, it was there!” Andrew Lloyd Webber: The Phantom of the Opera, “Wishing You Were Somehow Here Again” As he recalled, “I was actually writing something else at the time, and I realised that the reason I was hung up was because I was trying to write a major romantic story, and I had been trying to do that ever since I started my career. However, when he found a copy of the original novel he quickly found the necessary inspiration. He screened both the 19 motion pictures but was unsure if the leap from film to stage could be achieved. Ward also composed the original theme song titled “Lullaby of the Bells,” and this classic Universal horror film won an Oscar for Art Direction and Cinematography.įast forward to 1984, when Andrew Lloyd Webber was proposing a new musical based on Leroux’s book. 4 and themes from Chopin for the opera sequences. The film was eventually released in 1943, and the musical score was composed by Edward Ward, who adopted music from Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. This version, directed by Arthur Lubin, was to be set in modern-day Paris and featured the Phantom as a psychologically wounded World War I veteran who was physically unharmed but imagined that he was disfigured. Universal Studios announced a remake of The Phantom of the Opera in 1935. Andrew Lloyd Webber: The Phantom of the Opera, “Twisted every Way” Joseph Carl Brail prepared the musical score using a 60-piece orchestra, but the music did not survive. “There is too much spook melodrama,” a critic wrote, as the studio had decided on an ending where the Phantom is not redeemed by a woman’s kiss. Featuring Lon Chaney and Mary Philbin in this story of murder and mayhem, initial reception was extremely negative. In 1925, the New Zealand cinema actor, director, and producer Rupert Julian took on the story and he directed the silent American horror film titled The Phantom of the Opera for Universal Pictures. The novel was particularly unpopular in France when it was first published, with a review expressing disappointment “in the way the phantom was portrayed, and that the feeling of suspense and horror is lost once it is found out that the phantom is just a man.” However, a serialized version was widely read and initially adapted into a 1916 German silent movie, a film that has not survived.

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